3. Continuing armed revolution for national liberation and democracy
It is possible for the legal mass movement and the broad united front to overthrow a president like Marcos or Estrada, together with the entire ruling clique, for tyranny or corruption or both. But it is impossible to overthrow the entire ruling system of big compradors and landlords without armed revolution.
The domestic ruling system has its own brute force with which to suppress the people and the revolutionary forces. But aside from having its own coercive apparatuses for carrying out armed counterrevolution, it is propped up by the US as its imperialist master which supplies it with weapons of destruction and engages in armed intervention and aggression.
It is therefore necessary to build the New People�s Army and carry out the people�s war in order to destroy the ruling system and achieve the national and social liberation of the people. Under the concrete conditions of the Philippines, where the peasantry is still the majority class, the NPA can pursue the strategic line of protracted people�s war. It can accumulate strength and develop in stages over a long period of time in order to encircle the cities until the conditions are ripe for seizing political power in the cities.
We can carry forward the people�s cause for national liberation and democracy only by carrying out revolutionary armed struggle as the principal form of struggle. At the same time, it is necessary to carry out the legal struggle as the secondary form of struggle to complement the armed struggle. The high potency of this form of struggle has been demonstrated in the overthrow of Marcos and Estrada.
The most important among the legal forms of struggle is the mass movement. This daily takes up important issues and makes demands. At certain times, it can mobilize people to such an extent as to be able to overthrow a ruling clique. In the future, it can directly combine with the NPA in a strategic offensive to topple whoever is the president and the entire ruling system.
The reactionaries are now involved in an electoral contest. They are divided between the ruling coalition called People Power Coalition and the opposition coalition calling itself Puwersa ng Masa. They seem to agree that the overthrow of Estrada will be smoothened over by the elections. But in fact, the contradictions among the reactionaries will sharpen because of the present conditions of worsening crisis and rising revolutionary mass movement.
The domestic ruling system has its own brute force with which to suppress the people and the revolutionary forces. But aside from having its own coercive apparatuses for carrying out armed counterrevolution, it is propped up by the US as its imperialist master which supplies it with weapons of destruction and engages in armed intervention and aggression.
It is therefore necessary to build the New People�s Army and carry out the people�s war in order to destroy the ruling system and achieve the national and social liberation of the people. Under the concrete conditions of the Philippines, where the peasantry is still the majority class, the NPA can pursue the strategic line of protracted people�s war. It can accumulate strength and develop in stages over a long period of time in order to encircle the cities until the conditions are ripe for seizing political power in the cities.
We can carry forward the people�s cause for national liberation and democracy only by carrying out revolutionary armed struggle as the principal form of struggle. At the same time, it is necessary to carry out the legal struggle as the secondary form of struggle to complement the armed struggle. The high potency of this form of struggle has been demonstrated in the overthrow of Marcos and Estrada.
The most important among the legal forms of struggle is the mass movement. This daily takes up important issues and makes demands. At certain times, it can mobilize people to such an extent as to be able to overthrow a ruling clique. In the future, it can directly combine with the NPA in a strategic offensive to topple whoever is the president and the entire ruling system.
The reactionaries are now involved in an electoral contest. They are divided between the ruling coalition called People Power Coalition and the opposition coalition calling itself Puwersa ng Masa. They seem to agree that the overthrow of Estrada will be smoothened over by the elections. But in fact, the contradictions among the reactionaries will sharpen because of the present conditions of worsening crisis and rising revolutionary mass movement.
panels face each other across the negotiating table and try to address the roots of the armed confl ict and arrive at agreements. The NDFP negotiating panel can seriously negotiate and try to draw benefi ts for the people only as it is fi rm on revolutionary principles and fl exible in policy and the revolutionary armed struggle is growing in strength and advancing. At any rate, there should be no illusion whatsoever that peace negotiations are the sole or main way of arriving at a just and lasting peace.
The human rights organizations, churches and the people at large seek the release of political prisoners. But the militarists in the new regime are blocking or delaying the release of political prisoners and are in fact intensifying the military campaigns of suppression nationwide.
Fouling the atmosphere for peace negotiations, they continue to perpetrate human rights violations on a wide scale by undertaking a policy of murder, torture, looting, arson, forced mass evacuations and seizing suspected revolutionaries and noncombatants as political prisoners. They release a few political prisoners and then take more.
After resumption in a neutral foreign venue, the peace negotiations will certainly go through twists and turns. That is because the GRP will always try to win across the table what it cannot in the battlefi eld. Off and on, the GRP will accuse the NDFP of using the peace negotiations to seek the status of belligerency. In fact the GRP uses the peace negotiations in a vile and vain attempt to push the NDFP into a position of capitulation and self-criminalization and attain the pacification of the revolutionary people and forces.
The most rabid among the reactionaries try vainly to demean us by claiming that we are insurgents rather than belligerents under the laws of war. They claim that we are merely a domestic police problem and that we must submit ourselves to surrender negotiations in a Philippine venue under the control and surveillance of the reactionary government, instead of peace negotiations in a neutral foreign venue.
We must tell these rabid reactionaries that they cannot dictate to us the framework and terms of peace negotiations. The revolutionary forces and the people have grown in strength by delivering lethal blows not just to police forces but to regular armed forces of the reactionary government.
We have acquired the status of belligerency under international law by waging revolutionary armed struggle, building organs of political power, organizing the people and defending our own territory. It is by doing all these and achieving greater victories in people�s war that we shall gain wide international recognition of our status of belligerency and ultimately the recognition of the people�s democratic government.
There are ways other than peace negotiations by which the people�s democratic government can gain diplomatic recognition. The NDFP continuously carries out proto-diplomatic and diplomatic work and establishes and develops relations of mutual benefi t and cooperation with other governments. It can make agreements with foreign governments for the protection and benefit of their citizens who visit or stay in the territory of the people�s democratic government.
Our revolutionary government proves its status of belligerency whenever the people�s army captures and detains prisoners of war for various lengths of time and accords them humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions and Protocol I. Thus, we comply with the NDFP�s Declaration of Undertaking to Apply the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Protocol I of 1977. This document has been deposited with the Swiss Federal Council since July 15, 1996.
We fight in the battlefield while our negotiators talk across the table. Otherwise, the enemy will find no need for peace negotiations if the revolutionary armed struggle weakens or ceases. The achievements of our people�s war and the desperate situation of the enemy have compelled the latter to discuss the roots of the armed conflict and negotiate possible basic reforms.
As the NDFP and GRP resume their negotiations, all previous agreements are revived. The most important of these agreements are: The Hague Joint Declaration, the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG), the Formation, Sequence and Operationalization of the Reciprocal Working Committees and the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL).
The CARHRIHL is the first substantive agreement in accordance with the 4-point agenda of the peace negotiations. At the resumption of the peace negotiations, the negotiations on social and economic reforms shall be opened. We shall present the economic, social and cultural rights and demands of the people.
All Red commanders and fighters should understand the principled position of the NDFP in the peace negotiations and should prevent the spread of any false illusion, which undermines our revolutionary consciousness and fi ghting morale. They should continue their revolutionary work among the masses and carry out their fi ghting tasks.
We must maintain vigilance against the counterrevolutionary dual tactics of the Macapagal-Arroyo regime. This consists of talking about peace and intensifying military campaigns of suppression. Let us not forget that in less than one month after coming to power, the new puppet president called on the military and police to eliminate or reduce the revolutionary forces.
The military and police officers who have pushed and carried out the national campaigns of suppression under the puppet regimes of Marcos, (Oplan Mamamayan), Aquino (Lambat Bitag), Ramos (Lambat Bitag) and Estrada (Oplan Makabayan) are still ferociously assaulting the people and the revolutionary forces.
We must counteract the enemy�s nationwide and localized campaigns of suppression, its use of �civic action� pretenses, large-, medium- and small-unit operations and such new gadgets as night vision goggles, miniature communications equipment and global positioning system. We should not simply react to these but take the initiative by launching tactical offensives against weak points of the enemy.
We can increase our armed strength and raise the level of our military tactics and technique self-reliantly by seizing weapons and other instruments from the hands of the enemy forces. Some of our commando and special units have already acquired high-tech equipment to make operations more effi cient than before. We must follow strictly the security guidelines on the use of computers, cellphones and other traceable equipment.
In the main, let us carry out basic tactical offensives of varying sizes in order to increase our armed strength. We should wage only those battles that we are sure of winning by mustering superior strength and using the element of surprise against the relatively weak points of the enemy forces.
Any series of small victories in our more than 100 guerrilla fronts amounts to a great victory nationwide. We can gain at least 1200 rifl es per month or 14,400 rifl es per year if on the average every guerrilla front command succeeds in seizing even only ten rifl es from the enemy forces every month. Moreover, the rate of increasing our weaponry is cumulative as we base ourselves on the increased number of weapons at a given time.
The NPA can be flexible in the use of various sizes of units, like teams, squads, platoons, half companies or companies, in order to carry out tactical offensives, like ambushes, raids and arrest operations. The enemy forces always have weak points, which we can either discover or create by inducing them to commit mistakes.
Stationary or mobile small units of the reactionary armed forces, police, CAFGU, hostile private security agencies and criminal gangs are vulnerable. Even when we are confronted by hard points, like large military encampments or well-entrenched detachments, we can effectively act against these by waiting for a small part of the enemy force to come out of its camp and annihilating it at a distance from the camp. We can also harass the camp with weapons and tactics that do not strain our resources.
We can employ sniper fi re, gasoline spray apparatuses, improvised bazookas, rocket propelled grenades, land mines and cheaply made explosives against vital enemy military installations. We can undertake night operations to give the enemy forces sleepless nights. We can capture from the enemy forces night vision goggles and other high-tech gadgets, including the trackers for detecting use of these, in order to turn the use of these gadgets against them.
We can reduce the capability of the enemy forces to make forward deployment against us or send out scout ranger teams or commandoes against us by seizing the initiative against their weak points and by inducing them to make mistakes. The enemy�s offensive capabilities against us have certain limitations. These are due to the bankruptcy of the reactionary government, the overextension and limitedness of troop strength relative to our mass base, the ceaseless dilemma between concentration and dispersal, the growing factionalism among military and police offi cers and the constant need to secure the urban centers of power.
In the cities, the military and police forces of the reactionary government wrangle over political alignments and over connections with criminal syndicates. They are at each other�s throat. They would be in a more complicated situation after we revive the armed city partisan units. However, these must undertake punitive actions at a well-calculated rate in order to let the military and police factions run ahead in their internal struggles and to avoid prejudicing the development of the legal democratic mass movement.
We must carry out highly selective special tactical offensives by armed city partisans and special commando units in order to punish the worst of plunderers and human rights violators and traitors who have blood debts. If we can arrest these enemies of the people, we should do so in order to investigate, prosecute and try them. But when these are armed and dangerous or these resist arrest, we must be ready to give battle and use the necessary amount of force.
We must seize every moment to strengthen the New People�s Army and advance the people�s war. We must exert greater efforts to further strengthen the Party, the people�s army, the united front formations, the organs of political power and the mass organizations. We must win ever greater victories in expanding and consolidating the mass base and all revolutionary forces. The people are our inexhaustible source of strength.
We can increase the number and frequency of our tactical guerrilla offensives and raise the level of our revolutionary armed struggle only by continuously widening and deepening our mass base. We must have the mass base to facilitate our tactical offensives, to cover our retreat after every tactical offensive, to lure the enemy forces in deep to their rural graveyard and keep them blind and deaf for all intents and purposes.
We must continuously build our mass base in order to prevent the development of a purely military situation between our small armed units and the larger enemy forces. As in the past, before the Second Great Rectifi cation Movement, we would be in a diffi cult and losing position if we allowed the purely military viewpoint to ride high. We must maintain a good balance of carrying out guerrilla tactical offensives and doing our revolutionary mass work.
The local organs of political power must be built steadily in eer expanding areas of our country. So must the mass organizations of workers, peasants, fishermen, women, youth, cultural activists and children that are the base for these organs of democratic political power. The working committees for mass organizing, education, land reform, production, defense, health, culture and arbitration must be formed to assist the organs of political power directly.
In consolidation work, it is absolutely necessary to build the mass organizations and form the working committees in order to let the masses solve their problems, empower themselves and lift themselves up socially. Thus, the NPA has a growing source of Red fi ghters, a powerful network of information and resources for the people�s war. From the ranks of the most advanced activists, Party members must be recruited and local Party branches must be built promptly.
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