Fight Back News Service is circulating the following April 5 statement from Prof. Jose Maria Sison, Chairperson, International League of Peoples’ Struggle.

The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), which I represent as Chairperson of the International Coordinating Committee (ICC), hereby condemns in the strongest terms the attempt of the notorious Duterte regime to slander the ILPS and misrepresent it as the international network and International Department of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) for the purpose of intimidating the legal and patriotic and progressive organizations of Filipinos in the Philippines and abroad.

Contrary to the false claim of the Duterte regime, the ILPS is a broad alliance of hundreds of anti-imperialist and democratic mass organizations in scores of countries from all continents. The ICC, its supreme leading organ, is elected by the International Assembly and is restricted by the ILPS Charter from having more than three members from the same country, thus preempting control of the ILPS by any single country or organization.

The Duterte regime’s attack on the ILPS is an extension of the anticommunist witch hunt, state terrorism and fascisation being carried out by the regime in the Philippines. It is meant to attain certain malicious objectives, such as the following:

1) To red-tag and intimidate the ILPS and also to vainly reinforce its previous red tagging of legal patriotic and even religious organizations that are critical of the gross and systematic violations of human rights being perpetrated by Duterte.

2) To mislead world public opinion and deflect attention from the complaints on human rights violations already submitted to the International Criminal Court by aggrieved victims and survivors of human rights violations, who cannot obtain justice from Philippine courts which are now under the draconian control of the tyrant Duterte.

3) To blame the legal patriotic and progressive organizations and even religious organizations for supposedly causing the self-generated notoriety of the tyrannical, murderous and corrupt Duterte regime.

In the first place, the Duterte regime must be aware of its own crimes. Since he became president, Duterte no less has been publicly inciting and ordering the police to frame up and kill suspected drug users and peddlers in the thousands and assuring his armed minions of presidential protection and rewards in cash and promotions. Thus, more than 30,000 people have been extrajudicially killed in the fake war on illegal drugs undertaken by Duterte to monopolize the illegal drug trade.

The international and human rights agencies and organizations have been factual and truthful in their reporting of the mass murders and other human rights violations. Thus, Duterte is the subject of complaints to the International Criminal Court in The Hague by aggrieved Filipinos who cannot seek justice from the Philippines state because of Duterte’s unbridled brutality and tight grip on the judicial system.

Those being red-tagged by the Duterte regime include highly and widely respected Philippine organizations, like the IBON Research Foundation, GABRIELA, Alliance of Concerned Teachers, KARAPATAN, and the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL), and religious formations like the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines and the Iglesia Independiente Filipina (Philippine Independent Church).

The Duterte regime is maliciously spreading the big lie that its criminal ill repute or notoriety is because of the advocacy and social activism of the aforesaid organizations in support of the poor, exploited, and oppressed people and that these are merely CPP “front” or dummy organizations, which are used for raising funds abroad.

On their own account, the CPP and New People’s Army have time and again asserted and manifested their political, organizational and financial self-reliance because they enjoy the vigorous participation and abundant support of the people in the revolutionary struggle for national liberation, democracy, social justice, and all-round development.

Acting as the psywar agent of the Duterte regime, AFP Major General Parlade has gone to several countries in Europe and Southeast Asia to red-tag and slander the ILPS as a conduit of foreign funds for the CPP and revolutionary movement. He has done so at a time that the AFP is applying the brutal methods of Oplan Tokhang in Oplan Kapayapaan and escalating the selective and mass murders of people suspected of being linked to the New People’s Army.

Previously, it was another Duterte running dog, PNP General Albayalde who red-tagged the patriotic and progressive organizations on the outright lie that I identified them as CPP “front” organizations by maliciously misrepresenting a 1987 video, in which I sharply differentiated the forces of the armed revolutionary movement from the legal patriotic and progressive forces that had directly brought down the Marcos fascist dictatorship in 1986.

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