Leaders and members of various left-leaning groups in the country, especially progressive student organizations, are being subjected to intelligence monitoring by the Philippine National Police (PNP) on suspicion of being “legal fronts” by the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (CPP-NPA), a police spokesperson confirmed Tuesday.
Philippine National Police Spokesperson Chief Supt. Benigno Durana Jr.
(Kevin Tristan Espiritu / MANILA BULLETIN)
Chief Superintendent Benigno Durana Jr., PNP spokesperson, revealed this after a former rebel leader operating in Laguna and other provinces in Calabarzon (Region 4A) surrendered to the police and bared they used to recruit college students to become communist rebels.
On Monday, PNP chief, Director General Oscar Albayalde presented in Camp Crame, Quezon City a certain Ka Ruben, a rebel-returnee who claimed to be a former leader of a communist group based in Laguna.
Ka Ruben said students from the University of the Philippines (UP) and Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) would often visit them in far-flung communities or climb mountains to conduct a research.
“But some of them would no longer go back and would choose to stay,” Ka Ruben said.
This was the reason why Durana said intelligence monitoring of left-leaning organizations is important since they need to implement security measures to prevent the recruitment of students into communist groups.
“It [intelligence monitoring] is an on-going mandate of the security sector including the PNP because it is the duty of the state to protect its citizens and the state itself against communist terrorist groups such as the CPP-NPA and its allied front organizations,” Durana said.
“We would be remiss in our job if we are not carrying out our role of conducting regularly intelligence and counter-intelligence operations against elements of organizations that are allied with the enemies of the state,” he added.
Durana did not reveal the organizations that they are monitoring.
However, he said that among the groups specified by top communist leader Jose Maria “Joma” Sison as legal fronts of the CPP-NPA are Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), League of Filipino Students (LFS), Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT), Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), Gabriela Women’s Party, and Kadena — a militant youth group, among others.
Durana said Sison himself tagged the said organizations as the communist group’s legal fronts during one of his lectures in Europe years back when he was released by the Corazon Aquino administration.
“[I]t didn’t come from the PNP, it came itself from their leader Jose Maria Sison and that’s a living proof that indeed there are infiltrations of these legal sectoral organizations,” he said.
For its part, the League of Filipino Students (LFS) slammed the PNP’s statement that students from UP and PUP were immersing with communist groups, saying the police force “has gone hysterical with [its] crackdown against youth dissenters.”
“This is nothing but a frantic attempt to threaten the ever-growing youth movement, and pacify their resistance against Duterte’s tyrannical rule,” Kara Taggaoa, LFS national spokesperson said.
Last week, the PNP was also placed in hot water after a police memorandum order was leaked on the conduct of an inventory of the members of Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT).
The ACT called out the PNP for allegedly “spying” on their members and this prompted Albayalde to relieve three intelligence operatives linked to the operation.
Another progressive group, National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW), has been tagged by the PNP as a legal front of the CPP-NPA late last year.
This, after the death of nine sugar workers known as the Sagay Massacre in Sagay, Negros Occidental on October 20, 2018 which was blamed by the Calabarzon police on the NPAs.
But militancy, according to Durana, is “an important component of a vibrant democracy” since it holds the government accountable to the interest of the people.
“The only problem is if these legal organizations, this militancy, this student activism, are being exploited by the enemies of the state to pursue their overall goal of violent overthrow of the government,” Durana explained.
https://news.mb.com.ph/2019/01/16/pnp-monitoring-activist-groups-other-legal-fronts-of-cpp-npa/
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