Intensify Guerrilla Warfare According to Capabilities

Armando Liwanag
Chairman
Central Committee
Communist Party of the Philippines
March 29, 1997

As we celebrate the 28th anniversary of the establishment of the New People�s Army, we congratulate the Red commanders and fighters for their heroic revolutionary struggle against the enemy and for all their victories in carrying out the rectification movement and in serving and forging closer links with the people. Our victories are the fruit of hard work, struggle and sacrifices.

The New People�s Army as the main organization under the absolute leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines is a military, political, productive and cultural force. Distinguished from other mass organizations, it is a politico-military force. In accordance with the Party�s call for raising the armed revolution to a new and higher level, the New People�s Army is directed to intensify guerrilla warfare on a wide scale, on the basis of an ever expanding and deepening mass base.

Five years have passed since the launching of the rectification movement in 1992. The two-line struggle between the proletarian revolutionaries and the counterrevolutionary opportunists has served to weed out the incorrigibles and renegades and to strengthen all the revolutionary forces in an all-round way. On a nationwide scale, the mass base has been expanded and deepened in comparison to the dismal situation in the 1988 to 1991 period during which the gross damage caused by long-running �Left� opportunist errors became conspicuous and the Right opportunists wished to take advantage of this in order to liquidate the Party, the people�s army and the armed revolution.

The general advance has been made despite the vile attempts of a handful of counterrevolutionary renegades to frustrate the rectification movement and wreck the revolutionary movement from 1992 to 1994. As a matter of course, the advance is uneven in various regions and guerrilla fronts due to varying objective conditions and subjective factors. At any rate, the intensification of guerrilla warfare must always be made according to the capabilities of the revolutionary forces and the particular situation obtaining.

Waging the people�s war is absolutely necessary in carrying out the new-democratic revolution. Armed struggle is the principal form of revolutionary struggle. It carries out the central task of the revolution, which is the seizure of political power. The strategic line of encircling the cities from the countryside and accumulating strength through tactical offensives until it is possible to seize power on a nationwide scale allows the Party and the people�s army to build Red political power in the countryside even while the counterrevolutionary state is still entrenched in the cities.

As soon as it was established on March 29, 1969, the New People�s Army could do mass work and launch tactical offensives in the small radius of the second district of Tarlac. There is no reason why guerrilla warfare cannot be intensified on the basis of the current all-round strength of the revolutionary movement, which is greater than that either in 1969 or 1992. As before, advances in the revolution can be made only with victories in tactical offensives within the current stage of the strategic defensive.

The people demand armed revolution

Since the armed revolution started in 1969 under the leadership of the reestablished Party, the broad masses of the people have advanced from one level to a higher level of revolutionary resistance and have achieved great revolutionary feats. Their revolutionary determination has risen upon the intensification of oppression and exploitation. The ever worsening chronic crisis of the semicolonial and semifeudal system exacts a heavy toll on them. The broad masses of the people demand armed revolution in order to achieve national liberation and democracy against foreign monopoly capitalism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism -- now chiefly represented by the US-Ramos regime.

The agrarian and semifeudal character of the economy has aggravated and deepened. The lack of industrial development has resulted in a huge accumulation of unemployment. Wage and living conditions are cut down by chronic inflation and by direct and indirect taxation. The regime has a deliberate policy to deprive the workers of their trade union rights and cheapen labor for the purpose of attracting foreign investments.

The peasant masses suffer the most oppression and exploitation. There is no genuine and thoroughgoing land reform to relieve them of their suffering from rising land rent and soaring costs of production and subsistence. Land is rapidly being accumulated in the hands of foreign and domestic corporations and the traditional landlords. Military and police campaigns of suppression are carried out to grab the land from the poor peasants and ethnic minorities for the benefit of old and new types of landlords and the mining and logging interests.

The middle social strata also suffer from the crisis of the ruling system. Their incomes are eroded by the ever rising level of inflation and taxation. The rural bourgeoisie, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the middle bourgeoisie are adversely affected by the policy of trade and investment liberalization dictated by the imperialists and their multilateral agencies to the puppet regime. Certain sections of the exploiting classes are aggrieved by the drive of the Ramos ruling clique and its favored big compradors and landlords in seeking to monopolize the spoils of office and perpetuate themselves in power.

Contrary to claims of economic growth, the economy is bankrupt. It is bloated by spending for counterproductive activities and overconsumption by a few. This is financed by an ever growing foreign debt and domestic public debt, speculative foreign capital in the stock and bond market, foreign funds in the real estate bubble, proceeds from sale of state assets, income from export of cheap labor and increasing taxation at the expense of the mass of consumers.

The foreign trade deficit is ever widening. Food production and manufacturing for domestic consumption as well as traditional exports are stifled by rising costs of imported inputs and by the dumping of cheaper surplus products from abroad. The favored low value-added manufacturing-for-export entails a huge amount of payments for imported components; and the profits are kept abroad by the multinational corporations and big compradors. Luxury goods (cars and computer equipment) for the exploiting classes and the high bureaucrats are a big drain and are misrepresented as producer goods.

The natural resources continue to be plundered with impunity. Logging for export and overfishing in inland and marine fishing grounds are unabated. Open pit mining combined with high-tech methods accelerates the extraction of mineral resources and causes permanent damage to and pollution of the environment. The regime and its monopoly capitalist masters are utterly unconcerned about the destruction of the lives and livelihood of the people and the pollution and erosion of extensive tracts of agricultural land and make no compensation or indemnification whatsoever for such destruction.

The sale of state assets and the rising tax burden at the expense of the common people have increased the revenues of the reactionary government. But these in turn are being spent for the most counterproductive purposes. Most glaring are the expenditures for the military and police forces, the so-called modernization of the equipment of such forces, ghost projects in the congressional pork barrel under various names and guises and acquisition of motor vehicles and office equipment. Corruption has reached the most scandalous proportions in the use of public funds, privatization of state assets and sale of national patrimony to the multinational corporations. In the last three years, the illusion of budgetary surplus has been conjured by the delay in the payment of obligations of the reactionary government.

The so-called exit of the Philippines from the restrictive policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in June does not mean financial independence but means sinking deeper into the quagmire of foreign trade deficits, foreign indebtedness, dependence on foreign speculative capital and intolerable tax burden imposed on the people. All these have been caused by such IMF policy dictates as deregulation, trade and investment liberalization and privatization. More than ever, the Philippines remains in the clutches of the imperialists and their multilateral agencies like the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, Asian Development Bank and the like.

In real terms of domestic production, there is a ceaseless deterioration of the economy. And there is the availability of mostly borrowed funds and the shameless culture of corruption among the bureaucrat capitalists. There is consequently more intense rivalry among political factions of the exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords. The economic crisis whips up the political crisis of the ruling system.

There are manifestations that General Ramos wishes to extend his stay in power beyond 1998 or to put in his place his military clone, in the person of his long-time sidekick General de Villa. This is generating public outrage. There is the glaring propensity of the ruling clique to monopolize the spoils of political power.

However, regardless of who shall become the new president in 1998 within the existing ruling system, the oppression and exploitation of the people will not cease but will aggravate. By then, the accumulated and aggravated problems of the system will fall on the head of whoever becomes the chief political representative of the local exploiting classes.

The exploiting classes are united against the people but are factionalized against each other. The factionalization extends to the reactionary armed forces, many of whose officers are themselves politically ambitious and are divided among themselves in running and favoring their own political factions and criminal syndicates. So long as the revolutionary movement is growing and advancing, the reactionary elections expose the bitter rivalries of the reactionaries and are a process of destabilizing rather than stabilizing the system.

The reactionary military and police forces are rotten to the core. The huge amount of money that goes to them is used mainly for the acquisition of equipment and corruption of civil officials and military officers. Thus, the ordinary troops and policemen as well as some officers are disgusted. The truce among the contending factions of the military and police officers under the US-Ramos regime is temporary.

The capitulation of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) to the Manila government has not ended the Moro people�s struggle for self-determination. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is carrying on the armed struggle which the MNLF had in fact given up since the Tripoli Agreement of 1976. Nevertheless, the MNLF is taking advantage of its accommodation with the Manila government to maintain and increase its armed strength.

Christian chauvinist groups are also feverishly arming themselves. As in other parts of the country, reactionary politicians in Mindanao are using the paramilitary forces and their private security agencies as their own private army in collusion with military officers. With the spread of firearms, the stage is set for more intense and wider armed conflicts in Mindanao and elsewhere.

A great number of enemy troops are tied down in the Moro provinces and in many areas in the country where they are being used in order to push out the poor peasants and ethnic minorities from their land and to serve the landgrabbing operations of mining, logging, real estate and plantation corporations.

Relative to the more than 70 million people in the Philippines and the scale of some 300,000 square kilometers, the existing military and police forces cannot use sheer armed force to quell the revolutionary movement so long as the latter employs the strategic line of protracted people�s war and in this period takes initiative and launches tactical offensives within the strategic defensive.

Notwithstanding �Left� opportunist as well as Right opportunist errors pushed previously by the renegades, the proletarian revolutionaries have prevailed in the Party, the NPA and the NDF and the enemy has failed to suppress the revolutionary forces through the US-instigated �low-intensity conflict� strategy. This uses a great deal of psychological warfare to complement military tactics of gradual constriction and forward troop deployment against the guerrilla bases. Exactly when the enemy tried to use renegades to decapitate and liquidate the revolutionary movement, the Party launched the rectification movement to weed out the renegades, rectify errors and revitalize the revolutionary movement.

The clamor of the broad masses of the people for revolutionary change is manifested in the ever growing strength of mass organizations in the urban and rural areas and in militant mass actions against the imperialists and their local lackeys. Among the outstanding protest mass actions in the previous year were those against the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference leaders� summit and imperialist globalization, the repeated oil price increases, the moves to amend the reactionary constitution in order to make it more repressive and exploitative provisions and extend the term of Ramos, the alienation of the national patrimony, and the violations of the rights of the people, especially the workers, peasants, fishermen, urban poor, women, ethnic minorities, student youth, teachers and others.

The New People�s Army and the people in the guerrilla fronts have carried out armed resistance at a level conditioned by the focus of rectification, redeployment and mass work. There have been major actions against military and police forces and antipeople projects of the reactionary state, local tyrants, despotic landlords, all sorts of landgrabbers, logging, mining, real estate and other companies and criminal syndicates.

An outstanding achievement of the revolutionary movement of the Filipino people is that the United States, the strongest imperialist power, and the local exploiting classes have failed in nearly three decades to destroy the revolutionary forces. The prolonged Marcos fascist dictatorship failed. So have the post-Marcos regimes despite pretenses at being civil and democratic.

No further amount of foreign intervention and assistance of whatever kind can enable the counterrevolutionary state to quell the revolutionary movement. Driven by their rapacity and cupidity, the imperialists are doing everything to extract superprofits from the Philippines under the slogan of trade and investment liberalization, increase the foreign trade deficits, increase the debt burden, aggravate the underdevelopment of the country and make the ground more fertile for armed revolution.

The new world disorder, which is the making of the imperialists themselves, will ultimately undermine and weaken them as they intensify the oppression and exploitation of the proletariat and the people and make the crushing debt burden more intolerable for all their neocolonial client-states. The new world disorder is increasingly reducing the ability of the imperialists to intervene in so many areas of armed conflict in the world. They are themselves becoming increasingly preoccupied with domestic social contradictions and with their own inter-imperialist contradictions.

Although the special partnership of the United States and Japan in the Asia-Pacific region is for oppressing and exploiting the people, these two imperialist powers have serious contradictions between them. The much touted growing economies of East Asia, like the �tigers� and China are subordinated to the imperialists. But their export-oriented sweatshop manufacturing is now faced with recessive economies of the imperialists and their drive to dump their own surplus manufactures. The flames of the people�s war in the Philippines helps to light up the world in transition from the period of imperialist success in the cold war, revisionist betrayal and neocolonialism to a period of resurgence of anti-imperialist resistance and struggle for socialism. We are still in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. The new world disorder caused by imperialism is the eve of social revolution on an unprecedented scale.

Fighting tasks of the New People�s Army

The central task of the new-democratic revolution is to overthrow the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system. The principal instrument of the Filipino people and the Communist Party of the Philippines for seizing political power is the New People�s Army. The strategic line of protracted people�s war enables the revolutionary forces and the people to gain political power in the countryside and to maintain and expand their influence nationwide even before the nationwide seizure of political power and even as the enemy is still entrenched in the cities. Since 1969, there has been dual political power in the Philippines. One is Red political power in portions of the countryside and the other is White political power elsewhere.

1. Uphold the absolute leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines!

The Filipino people must be led by the proletariat in order to complete the national-democratic revolution and then advance to the socialist revolution. Otherwise, the imperialists and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords will continue to oppress and exploit the people in a systematic and all-round way. Neither the urban petty bourgeoisie nor the middle bourgeoisie can lead the democratic revolution to victory. And certainly, neither one is interested in proceeding to the socialist revolution.

The proletariat can accomplish its historic mission of building socialism only through its advanced detachment, its revolutionary party. Otherwise, the proletariat and the people cannot fight in a united and effective way towards the goal of socialist revolution. The Party sets forth the current general line of new-democratic revolution and the aim of socialist revolution. It defines the strategy and tactics of people�s war. It ensures that revolutionary politics is in command of the NPA and is in command of the gun and not the other way around. It is at the head and at the core of the people�s army.

Having won victory in the rectification movement and defeated the counterrevolutionary revisionists, opportunists and liquidationists, the Party is more than ever qualified to serve as the vanguard of the proletariat and lead the entire people and its army in the armed revolution.

The Central Committee is in charge of the centralized leadership in an all-round way, ideological, political and organizational. But it cannot know all the specific details that are crucial in the timely operations of the people�s army. Thus, there is the policy of decentralized operations under the guidance of centralized leadership and allowing lower Party organs and army commands to take decisions within their respective jurisdiction and according to the concrete circumstances and capabilities of the revolutionary forces.

Since the early �70s when the enemy could blockade the forces of the people�s army for extended periods, there has been a fundamental change in the political and technical capabilities of higher and lower organs of the Party and command levels of the people�s army to communicate with each other in order to achieve unity of will and coordination. The Party takes the responsibility for availing of the political and technical means to harmonize centralized leadership and decentralized operations and achieve all-round development of the New People�s Army.

2. Carry out politico-military training vigorously!

There is the general principle of learning to fight through fighting. But it is also an undeniably correct principle to sharpen ourselves and our weapons by carrying our politico-military training. Although political education and military training are distinguishable, the people�s army should never separate but must always integrate the two. It is an army not only for combat but also for making revolution and serving the people.

Basic politico-military training can be done within the squad and in the convergence of several squads. Higher levels of training can be conducted by the guerrilla front and regional commands for the purpose of exchanging experience, raising the level of revolutionary consciousness and the level of tactics and technique and preparing for bigger-size tactical offensives. The units of the people�s army must be rotated in functions of politico-military training, mass work, production and participating in tactical offensives.

There must also be politico-military training of the reserves. These are the militia units for the locality as well as the self-defense units within the mass organizations. These units cannot become defined and cannot be conscious of their role unless they undergo politico-military training appropriate to their character and level.

A mobile politico-military training school or certain ranking cadres can make the rounds to undertake politico-military training. The regional Party committees must define the appropriate content of the politico-military training for the people�s army at various levels and for the militia in communities and self-defense units in mass organizations. Generally, the content is a combination of subjects in Party and mass education and military training.

The politico-military training school takes into consideration the capabilities, talent and interest of those who volunteer to serve in the people�s army. Those who are not yet ready or qualified for combat duty may be trained and assigned to other lines of work in support of the armed struggle in the countryside. This flexible policy serves to maximize forces, instead of losing them.

3. Deploy the units of the people�s army correctly!

In every guerrilla front, there must be a center of gravity. This consists of squads that are most immediately under the guerrilla front command and are relatively concentrated within a certain radius. They do mass work and can be subdivided into armed propaganda teams within the radius.

The center of gravity is responsible for securing the guerrilla front command, doing consolidation work within its radius, dispatching cadres who lead politico-military training in the entire guerrilla front, undertaking some production work, enforcing the tax policy and rotating its squads to serve as core of the strike force and carry out tactical offensives in combination with the guerrilla squads that know best the target in their spheres of operation.

Depending on the circumstances, the other squads of the guerrilla front can be subdivided into armed propaganda teams and dispersed for mass work in a much wider radius than that of the center of gravity. It is necessary to disperse most of the guerrilla squads (subdividing into armed propaganda teams whenever possible) in order to expand and consolidate the mass base. Without their mass work, it is impossible to carry out intensive and extensive guerrilla warfare.

On the scale of a guerrilla district (be it a guerrilla base or zone) or even the squad as a basic guerrilla unit, there must be a correlation of relative concentration and relative dispersal. In terms of function, there must be a dialectical correlation of consolidation and expansion work. The guerrilla district commander must also be able to rotate the Red fighters in various functions, including tactical offensives.

It is not only the armed personnel of the people�s army that do mass work in connection with the armed revolution. Correct tactics include the use of semilegal teams as well as fully legal teams of cadres and advanced activists in mass organizations to do mass work in coordination with the people�s army. They can widen the scale of NPA operations and can help to create, expand and consolidate guerrilla fronts.

4. Rely on the masses!

The antifeudal line must be pursued in order to fulfill the main content of the democratic revolution. The revolutionary armed struggle must be integrated with land reform and the building of the mass base.

The minimum land reform program of rent reduction, elimination of usury, raising of farm wages, improving farm-gate prices of the peasants� produce and promoting agricultural production and sideline occupation must be carried out. The power of the despotic landlords and landgrabbers must be isolated and destroyed.

Development of contacts and liaison groups, social investigation, formation of people�s organizing groups and the barrio organizing committees must be used for rapid expansion. Consolidation of the mass base must be achieved through the full formation of mass organizations, election of barrio revolutionary committees and building local Party branches.

There must be a coordination of the rural-based and urban-based mass organizations. Such coordination under the leadership of the Party allows them to help strengthen each other. Right now, it is possible for rifle-carrying units of the people�s army to march in the countryside but not yet in urban areas. From the countryside, it is possible for the armed revolutionary movement over an extended period of time to advance wave-upon-wave towards the urban strongholds of the enemy. It has also been possible for armed city partisans to operate underground.

Only with an ever expanding and deepening mass base in the rural areas can the New People�s Army carry out intensive and extensive guerrilla warfare and develop the people�s war from one strategic stage to another. Such mass base allows the NPA to use the basic tactics of guerrilla warfare in the most advantageous way possible in the Philippines and have the widest area for maneuver, using flexible tactics of concentration, dispersal and shifting according to circumstances.

5. Launch tactical offensives to accumulate strength!

In every region where there are guerrilla fronts, there is a certain capacity to launch tactical offensives. These must be launched in order to arouse the people to wage revolutionary resistance, increase the armed strength of the people�s army, defend the democratic power of the people and weaken and destroy the political power of the enemy.

While doing mass work, we can observe the enemy and know his strength and weaknesses. We can therefore easily discover or create the opportunities for launching tactical offensives. These can take the form of ambuscades, raids, sniping at enemy units, sparrow warfare and arrests and other punitive actions on specific enemy elements.

To assure ourselves of victory, we must have accurate information, use the element of surprise and the superiority of our strength on the weak points or weak parts of the enemy. Rather than go into action against any hard point or superior force of the enemy and be uncertain of victory, we can bide our time and resort to evasion until the enemy exposes his weak points and weak parts. In the aftermath of any tactical offensive, we must be ready to withdraw safely from the battle site and render ineffective any enemy counteraction.

In our tactical offensives, we must target the most notorious perpetrators of human rights violations (especially the principal political and financial beneficiaries of the late fascist dictator), units of the regular armed forces, the national police, diehard elements in the paramilitary forces, vigilante groups, security units of hostile companies, criminal syndicates, and elements with blood debts to the people, including local tyrants, renegades with grave criminal responsibilities, informers and other bad elements.

In areas where the enemy forces are concentrated and move in big formations and we cannot immediately undertake annihilative tactical offensives or are still preparing to undertake them, the people�s army can wage such small unit harassment operations of an attritive character at the expense of the enemy as sniping, grenade throwing, mine laying and other sparrow operations with the objective of undermining enemy morale and exacerbating conflicts and differences within and among enemy units.

While the current call is to intensify guerrilla warfare and launch annihilative tactical offensives, all units of the people�s army must be mindful of defense at both the strategic and the tactical level. The enemy has been fielding aggressive small-unit operations and taking advantage of night vision equipment. We can counter these with mass work, correct tactics and acquisition of our own night vision and other necessary equipment for defense and offense.

When the enemy is armed and dangerous and, if given the slightest chance, will use his weapons, the people�s army is justified to take the initiative in giving battle and using every possible means to render such an enemy incapable of fighting. But it can take captives and arrest suspects and treat them according to the law of the revolutionary movement. Whenever circumstances permit, the people�s army prefers to disarm enemy units without firing a single shot or accept the surrender of enemy personnel, with no further punitive action, except through due process.

On behalf of the revolutionary forces, including the Party and the New People�s Army, the National Democratic Front has issued the Declaration of Undertaking to Apply the Geneva Conventions and Protocols I and II and has deposited this document with the Federal Council of the Swiss Government in order to express good intention and gain a high moral and legal ground by adhering to Protocol I ahead of the GRP. It demands that the GRP, including all its armed personnel, comply with the obligations under international humanitarian law.

In accordance with existing united front policy, there is a classification of the exploiters. There are those who are relatively enlightened and those who are not. Enlightenment is demonstrated by certain exploiters by following the policy of the people�s democratic government on the defense of national patrimony, land reform, wages, environmental protection, taxation and so on.

Those who are not yet enlightened are given the opportunity to become enlightened and perform their responsibilities. Those who refuse to become enlightened and are found guilty of hostile acts against the people and the revolutionary forces are subject to punitive action commensurate to the seriousness of the criminal offense. Punishment includes fines, banishment from the locality for a certain period of time, confiscation of assets and other penalties for criminal liability.

In the overriding interest of the entire people, there are existing bans on logging for export, open pit mining by foreign companies and on various schemes to grab the land from the peasants and ethnic minorities and destroy the environment. The people�s army is duty-bound to take the appropriate action, from warnings to military action against any armed reaction.

In accordance with revolutionary principle, the revolutionary forces take a stand against the entire counterrevolutionary state and its electoral system which in general is decided by the exploiting classes and its reactionary political agents and not by the people. But it is also a function of the united front to take advantage of the contradictions among the reactionaries. Under the united front policy, it is possible and necessary to distinguish among the reactionaries who are our allies and who are our enemies, even as we are conscious that said allies are temporary and unstable.

We are inevitably confronted with the process and outcome of the reactionary elections and must act accordingly, especially in areas where we have a mass base and influence. We can employ tactics of the united front policy even as we adhere to revolutionary principle. We have employed similar tactics in the legal democratic mass movement.

Tactical alliances, even if informal, in periodic reactionary elections have the objective of winning over progressive and friendly candidates, opposing and isolating the diehard counterrevolutionary ones, exacerbating the contradictions within the ruling class, contacting and developing new allies and friends, creating conditions for utilizing the local reactionary governments for the benefit of the revolutionary government and movement and gathering support for the revolution.

It has long been our policy and practice to classify barangay councils, mayors, governors and members of congress as allies, neutrals or enemies. We develop allies among elective and appointive officials of the reactionary government and we are always ready to fight the hostile ones. And certainly, we do mass work among the ordinary employees of the reactionary state.

There is the Breukelen Joint Agreement on March 18, 1997 between the GRP and the NDF negotiating panels to accelerate the peace negotiations and to strive to complete these before the end of June. This agreement is premised on best efforts and, therefore, is not really over-optimistic. There is also the requirement that the first two headings of the substantive agenda must be approved first by the principals before negotiations on the third heading can be started.

The current course of the peace negotiations does not adversely affect the conduct of the armed revolution. All revolutionary forces are determined to fight for a just and lasting peace along the general line of national-democratic revolution through protracted people�s war. The GRP�s unilateral �suspension of offensive military operations� has been proven false and hypocritical by the intensification of brutal enemy campaigns. In the course of the peace negotiations, the NDFP has been exposing and condemning the brutalities of the enemy.

In line with the US-inspired �low-intensity conflict strategy�, the counterrevolutionary state uses psychological warfare to sow intrigue and cause a split within the revolutionary movement and to isolate the revolutionary forces by separating the urban petty bourgeoisie from them and using anticommunist petty-bourgeois grouplets (�popular democrats�, �social-democrats�, Trotskyites and �people�s socialists�) to pose as Left, �third force� or democrats, to spread anticommunist propaganda and to operate paper coalitions, sham mass organizations and �NGO� projects, which are financed by the imperialists and the local reactionaries.

The principal counterrevolutionary opportunists and revisionists have completely and openly gone over to the enemy and deserve total condemnation. Romulo Kintanar has publicly taken the oath of membership in the Ramos ruling party, Lakas. Ricardo Reyes, Arturo Tabara and Filemon Lagman are paid agents of the Strategic Studies Unit of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP) and are notorious for their criminal activities. They are wrangling among themselves, as manifested by the split between Sanlakas and Siglaya and by the repudiation of Lagman by his own gangmates. Centrism, which sought to unite what is correct and wrong and blur the two-line struggle between the proletarian revolutionaries and counterrevolutionary opportunists, continues to be proven completely bankrupt. At any rate, the people�s army must interdict the personnel and activities of anticommunist petty-bourgeois grouplets. Whatever fancy lingo they echo from abroad, they are opposed to the revolutionary movement led by the proletariat and are ideological and political special agents of the imperialists and local reactionaries. Although they use propaganda and money to counter the revolution, they are fundamentally of the same counterrevolutionary character as the paramilitary forces, the armed fanatical cults and the �special operations teams� of the reactionary armed forces.

The Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM) and Institute of Popular Democracy are blatantly CIA-directed instruments of anticommunist propaganda, intrigue and intelligence gathering. The PRRM has a long history of being a direct instrument of the US in �counterinsurgency� in the countryside, together with the �community development� officially undertaken by the reactionary government and the �social action� and �free farmers� organizing of the clerico-fascists. In fact, the original anticommunist NGOs were organized upon the instigation of US CIA agents and their Filipino assets.

The revolutionary movement must distinguish the NGOs that are malignant instruments of the �low-intensity conflict strategy� from those that are benign and deserve the trust and confidence of the NDFP and the people. The policy towards NGOs is based on the history and current circumstances. We can consider the good and bad aspects of the NGOs and identify, isolate and render ineffective the counterrevolutionary NGOs and the NGO racketeers.

The objective of the enemy in trying to whip up anticommunism among the urban petty bourgeoisie, is to disable them from acting as a basic revolutionary force and deprive the revolutionary mass movement of the educated youth who can become revolutionary activists and be remolded into proletarian revolutionary cadres. The urban petty bourgeoisie has been the favorite target of the imperialist ideological and political offensive, using both barefaced bourgeois liberalism and pseudo-Left phrasemongering to spread anticommunism.

But the imperialist propaganda has been rendered less effective by the ever worsening crisis of the ruling system and by the vigorous advance of the armed revolutionary movement and the legal democratic movement. The most telling way for the revolutionary movement to assert that the struggle between the armed revolution and armed counterrevolution is still at the center of the political stage is for the New People�s Army to intensify its tactical offensives. It is the way for the revolutionary forces and the people to fight the ever worsening conditions of oppression and exploitation, gain strength and defeat the enemy.

It is the internationalist duty of the Communist Party of the Philippines, the New People�s Army and the National Democratic Front to pursue the people�s war along the general line of the new-democratic revolution. Amidst the new world disorder generated by the crisis of monopoly capitalism, the people�s war in the Philippines inspires and contributes to the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement on a global scale.

Long live the New People�s Army!

Long live the Filipino people!

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