CPP-NPA-NDF derail PH progress: PCOO exec

From the Philippine News Agency (Mar 14, 2019): CPP-NPA-NDF derail PH progress: PCOO exec

Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) Undersecretary Lorraine Marie Badoy on Wednesday said the Communist Party of the Philippines, New People's Army, and National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF) derail progress in the Philippines.

“For over 50 years, we were held hostage and we had no idea that we were in such dire straits. For every one step we took forward, we were held back three steps; and how ever hard we tried, we couldn’t seem to make any progress," Badoy said in a press briefing.

Badoy commended President Rodrigo R. Duterte for issuing Executive Order No. 70 creating the National Task Force to End the Communist Insurgency.

"The only Philippine President who has taken on the country’s real problems has taken on this huge problem at a level no other president has – whole of nation and by going to the very roots of the problem and hacking those roots off," she said.

She said one of the roots is the funding the CPP-NPA-NDF has been getting through their legal fronts like the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines, Kaparatan and the IBON Foundation.

"To be able to get such funds, it was necessary that they paint such a dire picture of the country and to pull numbers and statistics out of thin air to for instance make the war on drugs seem like a bloodbath with their latest made up number, 30,000 killed; and to make a wildly popular, highly trusted President seem like a butcher, a dictator, a misogynist," Badoy said.

"In order to perpetrate this scam, the Joma Sison-led terrorist group, the CPP-NPA-NDF had to keep the poor so poor and to create havoc and obstruct progress," she added.

Badoy said the Philippine government delegation who went to the European Union (EU) explained this scheme by the communist rebels.

"The money that they thought was going to the poorest of the poor was in fact being funneled into the pockets of Joma Sison and his cohorts; and that in effect, they were funding terrorism and poverty in our country. Money they had given out of the generosity of their hearts had been used to sow and perpetuate grief and hardship," she said.

"We therefore went there to ask that they stop funding terrorism in our country," she added.

Badoy said the military have seen the abuses committed by the CPP-NPA-NDF such as extortion and arson for failure to pay revolutionary taxes, rape, pillage, violation of indigenous people's rights, mass murders, and torture and "then to put the blame on government, to paint faithful public servants as traitors".

"They (military) have also seen how the political opportunists in our midst took advantage and formed unholy alliances to further their political agenda no matter if it doomed our country further," she said.

The US State Department and the European Union have both tagged the CPP-NPA as a terrorist organization.

http://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1064479