The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) vehemently condemns the declaration for cooperation issued by the UP administration together with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). We stand in solidarity with the students and academic community of the University of the Philippines (UP) in expressing outrage at this blatant act of collaboration with violators of human rights and international humanitarian law.

The UP administration has made a mockery of academic freedom, which it has long declared itself to be a fountainhead, by issuing a joint declaration with the principal instrument of state tyranny and terrorism.

It entered into a disgraceful alliance with the AFP, ostensibly for the purpose of cooperation in academic research, publication, sharing of technical expertise, personnel exchange and visits, among other things. In doing so, it effectively whitewashed the crimes perpetrated by the AFP in the name of anti-terrorism and anti-communism. Many of those victimized were students and alumni of the university who have dedicated their lives to the patriotic and democratic aspirations of the Filipino people.

The UP and AFP declared their cooperation just a few days after Sen. Bato dela Rosa, a former police general, conducted Red-tagging hearings against progressive student organizations. The hearing were an attempt to justify the repression of students’ rights to organize and freely express themselves. Dela Rosa made groundless accusations that these organizations form part of the revolutionary armed struggle.

The declaration also comes almost two years after the scrapping of the UP-DND (Department of National Defense) accord, an agreement which prohibited the entry of military agents and personnel from entering the university. The agreement was first forged in 1982 in the face of massive student protests against the martial law regime demanding it to stop deploying military agents to conduct surveillance in campus to identify students who were critical of the tyrannical regime. Since the agreement was unilaterally abrogated by the DND, there have been reports of militarization involving the presence of state security agents in university campuses.