THE New People’s Army (NPA) formally announced the end of its unilateral cease-fire last Saturday, saying it waited for 10 days for President Duterte to rein in his troops and release detained activists.
NPA Spokesman Jorge “Ka Oris” Madlos said, “Starting today [Saturday], the NPA Unilateral Declaration of Interim Cease-fire is completely terminated. All NPA commands and territorial units, as well as people’s militia and self-defense units, can now take the full initiative to defend the people and advance their interests, especially in the face of the declaration of all-out war of the Duterte regime.”
“Over the past 10 days, responding to orders to carry out active defense, NPA units carried out almost 30 military actions to defend the rights and welfare of the people primarily against troops occupying barangays and conducting strike operations,” he revealed.
“In its active defense posture, NPA operations were launched exclusively against paramilitary groups and uniformed personnel conducting combat, intelligence and psywar operations within the territories of the revolutionary government. A case in point is the February 1 encounter between the NPA and troops of the 8th Infantry Battalion, which had been occupying barangays Kibalabag and Manalog, 36 kilometers from the center of Malaybalay City, Bukidnon,” Madlos said.
He said the NPA, under the direction of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), waited from February 1 for the government to make good on its promise to abide by the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law and release 392 detained activists through a general amnesty.
By doing so, “the government could have preempted the termination of the CPP and the NPA’s unilateral cease-fire,” he added.
Madlos said, “Contrary to the hopes of the people, however, President Duterte displayed intransigence and arbitrarily canceled all peace negotiations, playing to the Armed Forces’s line of an ‘all-out war’ against the CPP and the NPA.”
“No longer restricted by the active defense policy, the NPA, from hereon, must frustrate the all-out war of suppression of the Armed Forces by launching tactical offensives against any legitimate military target, including active troops of the military and National Police, as well as paramilitary armed vigilante groups, intelligence operatives and warlord private armies in detachments, camps or operations within and beyond the NPA guerrilla zones,” the NPA leader said.