The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) denounces the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) for maliciously misrepresenting the Oslo Joint Statement as a declaration seeking to end the revolutionary armed struggle being waged by the New People’s Army in the vain hope of using it as a tool for pacification and suppression.

The Party and the NPA firmly reject this AFP psywar ploy to induce the people and their Red fighters to give up their armed resistance that will pave the way for even worse fascist suppression, oppression and dispossession of land by big multinational corporations and their local big business partners.

In the face of unbounded acts of state terrorism daily being committed by the AFP especially in the countryside, waging armed struggle has become all the more just and necessary. The Filipino people’s resolve to bear arms heightens with every act of tyranny being perpetrated by the US-Marcos regime through its armed forces and police.

Acting on instructions of his US military advisers, Gen. Romeo Brawner is misdirecting the public’s attention to the phrase “ending the armed struggle shall pave the way for the transformation of the CPP-NPA-NDFP” in the Oslo Joint Statement while deliberately omitting the key phrase “resolving the roots of the armed conflict” that come before it. This means putting an end first to all forms of oppression and exploitation of workers, peasants and other toiling and working people that compel them to take up arms.

Along with the sham amnesty proclamation issued by Marcos, the Oslo Joint Statement is being dangled by General Brawner as if it were a peace agreement when actual negotiations have not even started. These worn-out psywar deception and pacification tactics will not prosper. These will be rejected and opposed by the people and revolutionary forces.

For more than thirty years, the CPP, the NPA and the NDFP with all the revolutionary forces it represents, have been committed to the cause of attaining a just and lasting peace either through peace negotiations or revolutionary armed struggle. Waging armed struggle and carrying out peace negotiations serve the same purpose of attaining the Filipino people’s aspirations for national and social liberation.

Peace–more specifically a just and lasting peace–is not merely the absence of war. War arises from the contradiction between demands for social justice and national freedom of the majority of the Filipino people, and policies of the reactionary system which serve the interests of a very small minority of big bourgeois compradors, big landlords and foreign monopoly companies, and perpetuated through brutal counterrevolutionary violence.

The people’s war is being waged to carry out genuine land reform to liberate the peasant masses from feudal and semifeudal bondage and national industrialization to end the economic fetters imposed by foreign banks and monopolies, to advance the Filipino people’s centuries long aspiration for genuine national freedom, to end the reign of tyrants and oppressors, and to establish a genuine democratic people’s government.

There are the same objectives of the NDFP in facing the GRP in peace negotiations to achieve the goal of a just and lasting peace.