NDFP Mindanao to NPA fighters: Redouble offensive efforts

From GMA News Online (Mar 29): NDFP Mindanao to NPA fighters: Redouble offensive efforts

On the 49th anniversary of the New People’s Army (NPA), a regional chapter of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) urged on Thursday fighters of the armed group to redouble offensive efforts against the government.

In a statement, NDFP Mindanao spokesperson Joaquin Jacinto also encouraged rebels to learn from past mistakes and aim higher to propel the “people’s war” to its desired phase.

“... [T]he NDFP–Mindanao resoundingly applauds the accumulated victories in the past year, and calls upon all Red fighter units to redouble efforts in launching more and more tactical offensives against operating enemy troops, utilizing a wide array of tactics and techniques in order to achieve our strategic revolutionary goals,” he said.

“We must take this opportunity to sum up, learn from past mistakes, and aim ever higher to fulfill the requirements to help usher the people’s war towards the strategic stalemate phase and bring the nation ever closer to its glorious socialist future,” Jacinto noted.

He urged NPA fighters to take heed of intensified agrarian revolutionary campaigns and mass mobilization.

The NPA, the armed front of the Communist Party of the Philippines, was founded on March 29, 1969, and has been waging one of Asia’s longest-running insurgencies.

President Rodrigo Duterte has proclaimed the CPP-NPA as a rebel group, and the  Department of Justice has petitioned a Manila regional trial court to formally outlaw the organization in accordance with law.

Psywar tactics

Jacinto claimed psychological warfare tacticians of the Armed Forces of the Philippines have resorted to “subterfuge, perfidy and black propaganda” in orchestrating civilian murders and “make it appear like it was executed by ‘terrorists’, and impute the crime on the NPA.”
"Then, through their trolls they poison both social and mainstream media with such fake news,” he said, citing the alleged killing of a Civilian Active Auxiliary member and a Mamanwa chieftain in separate incidents by state or state-sponsored agents.

This was also true with “fake surrenders,” which the AFP allegedly uses in vain to portray a “weakening NPA,” Jacinto claimed.

Amid allegations of dwindling numbers by no less than Defense chief  Delfin Lorenzana, the NPA is making headway in 46 guerrilla fronts in Mindanao, according to the NDF-Mindanao official.

He claimed that "NPA units operate in more than 2,500 barrios in over 200 municipalities in 20 provinces in the island. In these areas, hundreds of thousands are directly organized, while tens of thousands are covered by the people’s revolutionary government at the barrio level, and a few at municipal levels.”

“In the first quarter of the year alone, the combined strength of all NPA units in the five regions of Mindanao have launched a relatively significant number of tactical offensives against enemy troops, which have been inflicted with more casualties,” he further claimed.

In a separate statement, Lorenzana said the NPA is the reason for the country’s  lack of growth.

http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/news/regions/648280/ndfp-mindanao-to-npa-fighters-redouble-offensive-efforts/story/