On this historic day of women’s collective actions becoming a worldwide force to be reckoned with, Filipino revolutionary women under the banner of Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (MAKIBAKA) continue the fierce tradition of strong women resisting and fighting along the line and program of the national democratic revolution against the semi-colonial and semi-feudal system. As we celebrate the International Women’s Day, we recognize and vow to overthrow the primary enemy of Filipino women and the entire Filipino people today: the US-Duterte regime.

At the helm of this regime is Rodrigo Duterte, who is misogyny personified. He is a chauvinist who claims to cherish the memory of his late activist mother but reduces our worth to our sexual organs and orders his rabid dogs in the AFP to mutilate women who dare defy his tyranny and dictatorship. He is a barefaced liar who has long taken credit for the hard work of activist women in Davao City in realizing pro-women programs and legislations in order to deodorize the stench of his deeply-entrenched sexism.

Duterte is a rabid patriarchal tyrant who preys on hapless poor women and children with his disastrous policies and persecutes activist women and vocal women figures from the opposition and the media. Protected by his equally macho fascist military generals and avaricious cronies from the ruling bourgeois-comprador, landlords and his imperialist masters, he basks in utter impunity, perpetuating abuses against Filipino women and their children while pillaging and destroying their homes and livelihood.

The US-Duterte regime exacerbates the inherently miserable state of women in the country. In the rural areas, already deprived of land to till, peasant women will suffer greatly as a result of Duterte’s enactment into law of the rice tariffication measure which will flood the country with initially cheap imported rice. With rice cartels controlling supply and price of rice in the country and the criminal neglect that the reactionary government has long perpetrated against peasants, rice farmers, women comprising almost half of them, fear the loss not only of their incomes but their land as well.

Lumad mothers, especially in Mindanao, grieve as their Lumad schools, which they painstakingly built themselves amid long decades of government neglect, are being systematically closed down by AFP troops and their paramilitary forces Bagani and Alamara. The AFP’s heightened militarization and the attendant fascism under martial law and Oplan Kapayapaan force Lumad and peasant women, along with their families, to flee their communities and livelihood. While women and their families are being driven away, the corrupt Duterte regime affectionately welcomes large foreign plantations and mining companies that rape and exploit the peasants and Lumad’s resources and ancestral land.

In the towns and cities, the torment endured by mothers and wives of the thousands of victims of Duterte’s genocide against poor people, activists, mass movement leaders, peace advocates, the religious and even hapless children via Oplan Kapayapaan, his martial law and Oplan Tokhang are being aggravated by the fascist regime’s impunity. The sentence of death has already been meted against the urban poor who find no work because of absent national industrialization, while Chinese workers are being given work and allowed to stay in the country. Those who do find employment are beset with depressed wages that barely sustain decent family living and permanent contractualization. In the midst of all these, more and more women are forced to find work abroad, an alarming number of whom fall prey to human trafficking, sexual harassment or rape.

However, these very forms of oppression—under the auspices of neoliberal policies being implemented through stark fascism—enflame further the hatred of the fighting Filipina and arouse more and more women to rally to the cause of the revolutionary struggle against US imperialism, landlords, bourgeois-compradors and bureaucrat capitalists. Despite the desperate red-tagging of the US-Duterte regime against all forms of dissent in vain attempt to suppress and discredit legitimate demands, coupled with forced surrenders of civilians in the countryside, women in their millions continue to resist in order to realize genuine agrarian reform, higher wages, the end to contractualization and other democratic rights.

More importantly, more and more women are choosing to join the highest form of struggle—advancing the revolutionary armed struggle being waged by the New People’s Army. Women Red fighters, majority of them from the youth sector, are undertaking varied military and political tasks in the NPA. They are military commanders, political officers, intelligence operatives, medical officers, cadres for instruction, propagandists or production planners in various units and formations of the Red army. They are tempered in the people’s protracted war, proving their revolutionary mettle in the face of fierce hardship and sacrifice, especially in Duterte’s martial law in Mindanao. Their increasing number and all-round participation in the revolutionary armed resistance is a big slap on the face of Duterte’s misogyny and macho-fascist rule.

While the ruling class is in mayhem with the upcoming midterm elections, Filipino women will reject Duterte’s favored candidates as more and more of them realize the futility and circus that is the reactionary elections. They understand clearly that only through the national democratic struggle will there be any significant and worthwhile change in the lives of the Filipino people.

In the face of intensifying oppression and fascism as in the time of the Marcos dictatorship, Filipino revolutionary women learn the lessons of history and continue to stand by their class interests as workers, peasants, petty-bourgeoisie, urban poor and national minorities in order to end the brutal rule of the US-Duterte regime, attain revolutionary justice for the Filipino people and realize genuine social change though the national democratic revolution.

Women unite, struggle to oust the fascist US-Duterte regime! Forward the national democratic revolution to greater heights!

(sgd.) KA TERESA

Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan

Southern Mindanao

#Philippines #PeoplesStruggles #makibaka #RodrigoDuterte #Asia

Fight Back News Service is circulating the following Feb. 19 statement from Ka Teresa, Spokesperson, Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan – Southern Mindanao.

MAKIBAKA, the underground revolutionary organization of women, in Southern Mindanao condemns in the highest terms Rodrigo Duterte’s marching order for AFP soldiers to shoot women members of the NPA in the vagina since taking up arms renders their reproductive organs “useless.” In playing on the AFP’s (Armed Forces of the Philippines) fascist tradition of rape and male chauvinism, Duterte ignorantly assumes that he can rally his troops to commit the most heinous war crimes with impunity in his anti-people Oplan Kapayapaan.

We commend all women, organizations, civil libertarians, even women members of the AFP, who have taken offense at Duterte’s primitive and misogynistic views on human rights, especially of women, which stand on the wrong side of history and make a mockery of centuries of hard-won struggle by women not only in the country but around the world.

Malacañang can no longer sweep Duterte’s comments under the rug like it did in the past. Duterte’s recent order is yet another attack against all women, much like his promise to his fascist soldiers for the latter’s choice of bedding starlets as prize or immunity lest they rape women in their anti-terror rampage. It can never be downplayed “in context” like his detestable joke of wanting to be the first to rape an Australian religious missionary. His downright sexist treatment of women media practitioners will no longer be lumped up with his general distaste for the Philippine media who struggle to exercise freedom of speech against his tyrannical rule.

Duterte is a misogynistic tyrant not only in words but in deed. Every single day, his newly-minted TRAIN Law beats down mothers of the working class who carry the burden of making ends meet in the face of rising prices of commodities and dwindling value of already barely livable wages. In farms, corporate plantations and haciendas nationwide, women alongside men work like slaves because Duterte favors foreign investments over the institution of genuine land reform. In factories and semi-processing plants in urban centers, women alongside men continue to be victimized by corporate greed with Duterte’s adamant neoliberal policies on job contractualization.

Like any dictator, Duterte detests women and wants them to kowtow to the patriarchal authorities of the semi-feudal and semi-colonial society that condemn women as docile, unthinking secondary citizens. He wants women to never question, raise doubt or protest the inequalities that he himself is perpetrating against the masses of peasants, workers and Lumad. He demands subservience, and where there is none, he either unravels his dirty mouth to ridicule women or raises his iron-clad fist to stifle dissent, be it against the legal democratic movement or the underground movement.

But in truth, Duterte is deathly afraid of women, especially strong-willed women who see him for the mysogynistic tyrant that he is. He is most afraid of women who choose the hard road of arm struggle against the exploitative reactionary government which he now desperately endeavors to keep together with fascism and dictatorship. He knows that when the masses rise up to topple him, more than half of those will be mothers, daughters and women of all sectors.

We likewise challenge presidential daughter and Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte, as a woman and a human being, to make a stand against her father’s egregious anti-women tirades. For the sake of the sector she belongs to and human rights in general, she must denounce this retrograde order that objectifies women and uses our reproductive organ as an instrument of subordination and derision.

MAKIBAKA calls on all women to wage all forms of resistance in the national democratic struggle to bring down the US-Duterte regime, the number one enemy of all Filipino women today. We call on more women to join the ranks of men and march with the New People’s Army which imbibes the long and heroic tradition of revolutionary women who fight against the roots of our patriarchal bondage—imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.

#Mindanao #Philippines #WomensMovement #PeoplesStruggles #makibaka #NationalDemocraticFrontMindanao #Antifascism #RodrigoDuterte #Asia

Take the Road to Revolution

8 March 2008

No other woman in the nation’s history has earned the ire of the Filipino people than Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. No, this has nothing to do with gender. But yes, it has everything to do with her corruption, her cheating, her lies, her killings that have marked her years in power.

Arroyo has surpassed the sins of past administrations. For all of these, not even Imelda Romualdez-Marcos has earned the distinction of being called “evil” during her time. The evil one is one hell of a kind.

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, March 8, Filipino women from all walks of life and from all parts of the world have vowed to turn out in great numbers to join tens of thousands who want Arroyo out of Malacanang Palace. The controversial ZTE-NBN deal is just the last straw. Scams, kickbacks and payoffs have piled up pointing not just to the President’s men but to her husband and herself as well. Daily, doubts about the morality and legitimacy of the regime are rousing the nation’s anger. Nothing that Arroyo can do can stem the tide of protests leading to her ouster, except perhaps the use of extreme military force.

But make no mistake about this. Every day that this regime stays in power brings the women of the Philippines closer to the path of armed revolution. Increasingly, women have seen through the guiles, the scams and the fascism of the regimes’ and Arroyo’s. Inevitably the ranks of the New People’s Army have increased with the participation of women.

The revolutionary movement in the cities has swelled with more women, overtly and covertly, forming organizations, launching protest actions, educating and mobilizing, supporting armed partisans, doing intelligence work, comforting sick or wounded comrades in battle, and sending material support to the red guerillas in the countryside. The more Arroyo holds on to power, the more it stokes the fire of revolution.

Bringing down Arroyo’s regime is a matter of survival for women and their families. Under this regime all talks about women’s empowerment or advancement is a sham. One look at the country’s poverty, unemployment, mass migration and violence against women belies all claims by the regime to women’s liberation.

On this day, March 8, 2008, MAKIBAKA calls on the women of the Philippines: take the road to revolution! Women can be free when the nation is free. The overthrow of the Arroyo regime is one important step in that direction. Stand shoulder-to-shoulder with men, and free this nation from the shackle of corruption, tyranny, repression. In the heroic tradition of Gabriela Silang, Tandang Sora and Lorena Barros, help bring forth a people’s democratic government committed to public welfare, peace and prosperity.

The road to revolution is long and winding. But every step taken in the struggle against a corrupt and tyrannical regime weakens the reactionary system. The force of change gains ground and the people ultimately, will triumph in the end. And the women, with a voice and strength more forceful than before, shall push for their liberation with even more vigor.

The future looks brighter for women but dimmer and dimmest for this regime.

Overthrow the Arroyo Regime!

Advance the National Democratic Revolution!

Onward to Women’s Liberation!

MAKIBAKA – NDFP

#Philippines #NationalDemocraticFrontOfThePhilippines #Statement #GloriaArroyo #makibaka #Asia