FIGHT
THE ENEMY UNTIL COMPLETE VICTORY
IN
THE NEW-DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION
By Armando Liwanag
Chairman, Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines
March 29, 1999
On behalf of the Central Committee and the entire
membership of the Communist Party of the Philippines, I salute all the
Red commanders and fighters and convey to them warmest comradely greetings
and congratulations on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the New
People's Army.
The New People's Army has won great victories
in fighting heroically for the national and democratic rights, interests
and aspirations of the Filipino people. It is the principal weapon
of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Filipino people in waging
the principal form of revolutionary struggle and inspiring other forms
of struggle. Its place in Philippine history is assured.
The armed revolution waged by the New People's
Army under the leadership of the Party continues the Filipino people's
unfinished struggle for national independence and democracy and has surpassed
all previous armed struggles waged against US imperialism and the local
reactionaries in the last hundred years.
First of all, the NPA is waging a protracted people's
war along the line of the new-democratic revolution, with a socialist perspective.
Secondly, the NPA has gained all-round strength nationwide, surpassing
in this regard the achievements of the revolutionary army of the old democratic
revolution, the People's Army against Japan (Hukbalahap) and the People's
Army for Liberation.
Following the absolute leadership of the revolutionary
party of the proletariat, the NPA has accumulated significant strength
since starting from scratch on March 29, 1969. It has surmounted
tremendous odds and has advanced from victory to victory. Our revolutionary
armed struggle will continue until complete victory is won.
Brilliant Victories of the New People's Army
Upon its reestablishment, the Party proved itself
a true and serious revolutionary party of the proletariat by conceiving
of the New People's Army in the Party Constitution and establishing it
in three months' time. The NPA was born out of the First Great Rectification
Movement against the Lava dynasty and the Taruc-Sumulong gangster clique
and inherited the good remnants of the old people's army and their revolutionary
experience and mass base.
The people's army came under the test of severe
attacks by the enemy from 1969 onward and went through the prolonged unbridled
terror of the Marcos fascist dictatorship to build its nationwide foundation
and strengthen itself by fighting the enemy. The Red commanders and fighters
have won astounding political and military victories by adhering to the
line of new-democratic revolution through protracted people's war and by
waging guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and deepening
mass base.
But in the late '70s, "Left" and Right opportunist
lines started to overlap with and subvert the correct line and the continuing
successes of the armed revolution. The opportunists superimposed such erroneous
lines as the "strategic counteroffensive" and "Red Area-White Area recombinations"
on the correct line and wrought havoc in different regions at various times
from the early '80s up to the early years of the current decade.
Since 1992, the Central Committee of the Party
has led and carried out the Second Great Rectification Movement to reaffirm
the basic revolutionary principles, sum up experience and set forth the
tasks. The Party and the people's army have identified, criticized and
repudiated the errors that have harmed the revolutionary cause and have
proceeded to score great achievements in carrying out the constructive
tasks of the revolution.
The victories of the New People's Army shine brilliantly
on the pages of Philippine history. But we must never forget that
these victories as well as the lessons learned from experience are paid
for by sacrifice, hard work and fierce struggle. Let us therefore
take a pause to pay the highest tribute to our martyrs and heroes.
Let us not become complacent with our achievements.
Let us remain ever vigilant and militant. No matter how far we have
gone forward in the revolutionary struggle, the counterrevolutionary state
of big compradors and landlords still stands and needs to be overthrown
and smashed completely. We must fight until the enemy is defeated
and the new-democratic revolution triumphs.
We have a sound basis for raising the revolutionary
struggle to a new and higher level until complete victory is won. The rectification
movement has revitalized and further strengthened the entire Party and
the Party organization within the NPA and has raised the level of revolutionary
consciousness and militancy among the Red commanders and fighters.
The NPA has grown far stronger than in 1992 when
the rectification movement started. Total NPA strength amounts to several
regiments. By having been reoriented, reorganized and redeployed
for mass work, the NPA has been able to increase the number of guerrilla
fronts to eighty-one (81) nationwide.
The typical guerrilla front has a total force
of a company, with a platoon as the center of gravity and the other units
spread over a wider radius. In certain regions, main guerrilla units
sew up various guerrilla fronts and are capable of regionwide maneuvers.
The thousands of men and women serving full-time
in the NPA are augmented by tens of thousands of those in militia and self-defense
units. All of them draw support from the organs of political power,
the mass organizations and the broad masses of the people.
There is an ample mass base for further expansion
and further consolidation of mass work and for carrying out extensive and
intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of ever widening and deepening
mass base. Every increase of tactical offensives is related to an
increase in mass base within a guerrilla zone, within a guerrilla front,
within a region and on a nationwide scale.
The NPA has been able to carry out tactical offensives,
like raids and ambuscades, as well as various types of actions to enforce
the laws and policies of the people's democratic government. In seeking
targets for tactical offensives, it constantly looks for the weak points
of the enemy or tries to force him to make mistakes and expose his weak
points.
The tactical offensives of the NPA have increased
gradually and have forced the enemy to acknowledge its growing strength.
The enemy's officialdom and the bourgeois media have given much attention
to the capture of high-ranking military and police officers by the NPA
from 1997 to the present, as in the current case of one general and several
other officers. Thus, the enemy propaganda that the revolutionary movement
is disintegrating or disappearing has been repeatedly disproved.
The principal function of the NPA is to fight
and defeat the enemy. It carries out only those battles it can win.
Over a protracted period of time, it launches battles of quick decision
to seize weapons from the enemy, accumulate strength in the countryside
and goes through stages and phases of development, until it becomes capable
of seizing power in cities on a nationwide scale.
But the fighting function cannot be successfully
carried out if it were not based on the widespread and deep support of
the people. The NPA is the main organization of the Party not only
for destroying the enemy but also for organizing, arousing and mobilizing
the masses. Through mass work, it draws support from the people as the
inexhaustible source of strength.
The NPA has persevered in conducting revolutionary
mass education, building various types of mass organizations for workers,
peasants and farm workers, fishermen, women, youth, children and cultural
activists and in promoting mass campaigns. The most important of
these campaigns is the one for land reform because it responds to the main
demand of the peasantry and seeks to realize the main content of the democratic
revolution.
In the countryside, the Party and the people's
army rely mainly on the poor peasants and farm workers, win over the middle
peasants, neutralize the rich peasants and take advantage of the split
between the enlightened and evil gentry (while the minimum land reform
is still being carried out) in order to isolate and destroy the power of
the evil gentry. The class line that runs through the antifeudal
united front is in consonance with the general line of the new-democratic
revolution.
In waging the people's war, the NPA follows the
principle of self-reliance. It recruits the fighters from the people, organizes
production for the army and families of the fighters, receives contributions
from the people, seizes weapons from the enemy and collects taxes from
the enlightened gentry and from enterprises that follow the laws of the
people's democratic government. Resources raised by the New People's Army
are for the maintenance and growth of the Party and the NPA as well as
for the social needs of the people.
Exceedingly Favorable Conditions for People's
War
The objective conditions for waging people's war
are exceedingly favorable in the Philippines. The semicolonial and
semifeudal ruling system is in grave crisis. Factions and cliques
of the big compradors and landlords and even within the ruling circle of
the US-Estrada regime are seriously contending with each other over the
diminished economic ground for mutual accommodation.
The broad masses of the people are undergoing
intolerable suffering from the economic and social crisis. They are
outraged by the return to power of the Marcos family and the worst political
descendants of the Marcos fascist dictatorship, headed by the former movie
actor Joseph Estrada. These scoundrels have recovered their ill-gotten
wealth and are again plundering the country.
For some years to come, there is no way for the
US-Estrada regime to override the longrunning global crisis of overproduction
of raw materials and the current crisis of overproduction of low-value
added semimanufactures. The drying up of international credit for
financing consumption-driven trade deficits makes conspicuous the crushing
foreign and local public debt burden and the backward agrarian and semifeudal
character of the economy.
The regime aggravates the economic and social
crisis by auctioning off the national patrimony and economic sovereignty
to the foreign monopolies. It opposes national industrialization
and land reform and offers to the foreign monopolies 100 percent ownership
of land, banks, manufacturing, public utilities, social services, telecommunications,
mass media, retail trade and all kinds of enterprises.
The people are victimized by rapidly mounting
mass unemployment, abrupt peso depreciation, inflated prices of food and
other basic commodities, heavier tax burden and rising fees for deteriorated
social services. Not satisfied with these, the regime is pushing
legislation to abolish the right to strike and the minimum wage law and
encouraging the foreign monopolies and domestic landgrabbers to amass land
under various pretexts.
In charge of an economy laid prostrate by the
imperialists and their local running dogs, the regime is ready to give
away everything to the imperialists, not only economic privileges but also
the privilege of bringing in military forces that enjoy extraterritoriality
and are immune to prosecution for crimes that they commit on Philippine
soil. Preparations are underway for the amendment of the reactionary
constitution to further violate the national and democratic rights of the
people.
Vainly trying to stop the rise of the people's
resistance, the regime is carrying out a policy of repression without formally
declaring martial law, especially against the working people and ethnic
communities. It is encouraging the military, police and paramilitary forces
to perpetrate extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, torture and the most
brutal acts to force people to abandon their homes and farms.
All of these violate the Comprehensive Agreement
on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL)
mutually approved by the Government of the Republic of the Philippines
and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines. The regime
has been violating all other bilateral agreements in the GRP-NDFP peace
negotiations. It has in fact terminated these negotiations.
We have no problem with ending the peace negotiations
as a form of legal struggle. We have conducted these along the clear
line that a just and lasting peace can be attained only by pursuing the
new-democratic revolution through the protracted people's war. Having
strengthened the revolutionary forces and the mass base, we are in a position
to intensify the people's war from year to year.
We cannot tolerate the brazen attempts of the
enemy to junk The Hague Joint Declaration and impose on the NDFP a framework
of capitulation and self-criminalization. The GRP has violated so
many provisions of the CARHRIHL, such as those pertaining to the release
of political prisoners, the indemnification of the victims of human rights
violations under the Marcos regime, the repeal of repressive decrees, the
end of policies and campaigns that brutally victimize entire communities
and take away their homes and land and the formation of the Joint Monitoring
Committee.
In violation of the framework of the GRP-NDFP
peace negotiations and the CARHRIHL, the GRP has refused to negotiate the
issue of prisoners of war, has viciously misrepresented the acts of revolution
as common crimes and has arbitrarily "suspended" the safety and immunity
guarantees for NDFP negotiating personnel and consultants, also in brazen
violation of the JASIG.
The treacherous Estrada regime demands that the
peace negotiations be held and put under its mercy in Manila as in 1986
and 1987 and arbitrarily rejects the stipulation of the Joint Agreement
on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) for a neutral venue abroad.
And yet, it refuses the peace negotiations to be held in the territory
of the people's democratic government or within a neutralized zone between
the territories of the GRP and the revolutionary government.
It is just fine that an already isolated regime,
which is daily buffeted by a severe economic and political crisis, challenges
the revolutionary forces to intensify the people's war. Instead of
trying to explore the possibility of truce and alliance with the current
enemy through peace negotiations, the revolutionary forces must develop
alliances with all possible forces at various levels in order to isolate
and destroy the enemy. It is within the realm of probability that
a broad united front can put the Estrada regime to an end before its term
runs out.
Among the recent alliances that we can publicly
announce and consider as highly significant is the formal alliance between
the NDFP and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. This is an alliance
for armed struggle and its significance is not only regional but national
because it can effectively deliver lethal blows against the enemy.
If there were no revolutionary armed struggle,
a ruling system or regime can muddle through an economic and social crisis.
But the revolutionary armed struggle exists and can intensify. The
ensuing aggravation of the political and socioeconomic crisis can be fatal
to the Estrada regime.
To complement the revolutionary armed struggle,
the Party is vigorously building the united front. This involves
an echelon of alliances, such as the basic worker-peasant alliance, the
alliance of the progressive forces (including the urban petty-bourgeoisie),
the alliance of patriotic forces (including the middle bourgeoisie) and
the temporary alliances with the reactionaries opposed to the enemy.
Worsening Crisis of the World Capitalist System
The current crisis of the world capitalist system
does not allow the imperialist countries to let foreign loans and direct
investments flow to the Philippines up to any level comparable to that
during most years (1972-79) of the Marcos fascist dictatorship and during
four years (1993-97) of the Ramos regime.
We can therefore be sure that the socioeconomic
and political crisis of the ruling system will worsen and the entire ruling
system will weaken in the face of a rising broad mass movement and the
tactical offensives of the New People's Army.
There is a chronic crisis of overproduction in
all types of goods in the world. There is a contraction of the world
market. The so-called emerging markets have sunk and are still sinking
further in the direction of the raw-material producing countries depressed
since the late '70s. Under the "laissez faire" or "free trade" policy rationale
of "neoliberal globalization", the monopoly bourgeoisie has accelerated
the concentration and centralization of capital, the destruction of productive
forces and shrinkage of the global market.
The worsening crisis of the world capitalist system
is intensifying all the basic contradictions in the world, such as that
between the imperialist countries and oppressed peoples, between the monopoly
bourgeoisie and the proletariat and among the imperialist countries. The
whole world is in turmoil.
The social turbulence is most acute and widespread
in Asia, Africa, Latin America and most of the former Soviet bloc countries.
Using the slogans of bourgeois nationalism, fascism, racism, ethnocentrism
and religion, reactionary forces are generating widespread disorder in
their factional strife. This disorder is conducive to the rise of
revolutionary forces among the people, if there were a resolute and courageous
Marxist-Leninist party to lead them.
The imperialist countries are wracked by the contradiction
of inflated productive and financial assets and the reduced incomes of
the proletariat and the rest of the people. There is chronic mass
unemployment, most conspicuously in Japan and in Europe. In the United
States, touted to have a high employment rate, regular jobs are being lost
and replaced by part-time jobs. Thus, the class struggle of the proletariat
is breaking out into the open even in the imperialist countries.
Cutthroat competition and protectionism under
various guises are arising among imperialist countries. Interimperialist
contradictions appear to be restrained only because the imperialist countries
are united in further oppressing and exploiting the proletariat and the
oppressed peoples and in carrying out wars of aggression and "police actions"
under the guise of "peacekeeping" and "humanitarian missions" in various
parts of the world, especially in the Balkans, Middle East, the Caucasus,
Central Asia and Africa.
The imperialist countries are competing for markets,
fields of investment, sources of raw materials and positions of strength.
However, still under the chieftainship of the US, the Western imperialists
have enlarged the NATO up to the borders of Russia. The US-Japan
security partnership is geared for aggression in East Asia. The imperialist
countries are stirring up trouble everywhere and are generating conditions
of war.
The Communist Party of the Philippines is actively
propagating the Marxist-Leninist theory of state and revolution and the
applicability of protracted people's war in many agrarian countries where
the peasant masses can be the main force of the new-democratic revolution
under the leadership of the proletariat. Together with other Marxist-Leninist
parties waging or supporting people's war, the CPP has recently undertaken
the International Seminar on Mao and People's War.
The Party maintains bilateral relations with parties
in all types of countries and is active in various multilateral gatherings
to promote at the least the global anti-imperialist struggle and at the
most the world proletarian revolution. In all cases, the Party respects
the independent and equal rights of parties to conduct revolutionary struggle
according to the concrete conditions and judgment of such parties.
Fighting Tasks of the New People's Army
The central task of the New People's Army is to
destroy the counterrevolutionary state of the comprador big bourgeoisie
and landlord class and enable the working class and the peasantry to establish
the people's democratic state. Such task can be accomplished over
a protracted period of time along the general line of the new democratic
revolution.
Right now, thanks to the people's army, there
are local organs of political power, now comprising the people's democratic
government, even as the reactionary government is still entrenched in the
cities. Two kinds of government now exist in the Philippines.
The revolutionary government aims to replace the reactionary government
in due course.
Without the people's army, the people have nothing.
They would only be subjected to oppression and exploitation, without any
hope of creating their own political power and achieving national and social
liberation from the imperialists and the local reactionaries.
It is clear that the New People's Army is mainly
a fighting force for defeating the enemy. But it cannot perform its
fighting tasks without performing the tasks of arousing, organizing and
mobilizing the broad masses of the people to defend, promote and advance
their national and democratic rights and interests.
The NPA must ceaselessly carry out mass work in
order to further develop a strong foundation for carrying out the central
task, to have an inexhaustible source of strength and to be able to recruit
the best sons and daughters of the people. The broad masses of the
people cherish and nourish the people's army only because it serves them
and fights for their rights and interests.
Revolutionary politics must be in command of the
New People's Army. This army must follow the absolute leadership of the
Communist Party of the Philippines, serve as the main organization for
carrying out the Program for a People's Democratic Revolution set forth
by the Party and pursue the mass line of learning from the masses and trusting
and relying on them.
The Party acts as the revolutionary vanguard of
the proletariat and the Filipino people and determines the general line
and direction of the revolution. It wields both the people's army
to destroy the counterrevolutionary state and the united front to rally
the people in their millions to the revolutionary cause.
Even while the NPA is based in the countryside
in pursuing the strategic line of protracted people's war, it is of utmost
importance for the Party to coordinate all forms of mass struggle that
arise and develop in both urban and rural areas.
To strengthen the bonds between the revolutionary
forces in the rural and urban areas, workers and educated youth must be
encouraged to join the people's army and serve the masses in the rural
areas. The Party must deploy them accordingly. They bring with
them much-needed knowledge and skills even as they must first learn from
the masses that they seek to serve in the localities.
The deployment of cadres and mass activists from
the cities to the countryside facilitates the coordination of the struggles
in the urban and rural areas and prepares the day when the New People's
Army shall be able to seize the cities on a nationwide scale.
The new-democratic revolution has a socialist
perspective. We seek to overthrow the existing counterrevolutionary
state and bring to an end the semicolonial and semifeudal conditions in
order to proceed to the socialist revolution as the next stage of the Philippine
revolution.
At this moment, the new-democratic revolution
being carried out in the Philippines is one of the outstanding revolutions
in the world. That is because we have a people's army successfully
following the strategic line of protracted people's war.
Now and in the future, the Philippine revolution
serves not only to realize the national and social liberation of the Filipino
people but also to make its contributions to the advance of the world proletarian
revolution and the broad anti-imperialist struggle of the people of the
world.
Long live the New People's Army!
Carry forward the new-democratic revolution through
protracted people's war!
Fight until complete victory!
Long live the Communist Party of the Philippines!
Long live the Filipino people! #