On today’s event of the 51st NPA Anniversary, we, Christians for National Liberation (CNL) here in Northern Luzon, render this open statement as our means to congratulate heartily and salute to the utmost extent all the revolutionary commanders and Red Fighters of the people’s revolutionary army!

Like other counter-insurgency operation plans by past fascist regimes, “End Local Communist Armed Conflict” (ELCAC), the pipe dream of the satanic US-Duterte Regime (USDR), will certainly fail again because it does not at all and will never address the root causes of the intensifying armed conflict. It outrightly conceals the fact that US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism are the continuing three (3) root causes of the people’s war being launched nationwide by the NPA, the revolutionary army of the exploited and oppressed Filipino people.

Through Executive Order 70, signed by tyrant Duterte on Dec. 4, 2018, the pro-US imperialist AFP-PNP have been directed to implement the “Whole-of-Nation Approach” and the “12 Pillars”, which fully serve the economic and political interests of the US imperialists, the big landlords and big comprador bourgeoisie who are themselves the big bureaucrat capitalists, who solely control the reactionary government and the fascist armed forces. Thus, to hide the dictate of their US imperialist masters, and to maintain and further consolidate their control, autocrat Duterte and his pro-US imperialist AFP-PNP top commanders are just using the issue of “communism” to justify their ruling class dictatorship, impose a de facto martial law, and commit countless human rights violations against the Filipino people. Using ELCAC as the smokescreen of their class repression, despotic Duterte and his blood-thirsty armed forces continually coerce all national government agencies (NGAs) and local government units (LGUs) from the provincial down to the barangay level in order to declare maliciously the CPP-NPA as “persona non grata”, push forward the “localized peace talks”, assist the anti-Filipino AFP-PNP in their “Oplan Kapanatagan” military campaigns, as well as in their corruption-laden “Enhanced-Comprehensive Local Integration Program” (E-CLIP) which only produces fake NPA surrenderees, and malignly support the fascist state’s red-tagging campaigns against activists, human rights defenders, justice and peace advocates, people’s progressive organizations and pro-Filipino Party Lists as “communist supporters and fronts”.

Duterte’s fascist acts of intimidations, harassments, slanderous propaganda, vilifications, red-tagging, illegal arrests and detentions, trumped-up charges and extra-judicial killings by state forces must be ended. Such monstrous atrocities of the reactionary military and police forces against the Filipino people in order to impose Duterte’s tyranny and the regime’s further subservience to US imperialism, while selling the country’s sovereignty to China, must totally be stopped.

As we commemorate today the NPA’s 51st anniversary, let us strengthen our resolve that only through the people’s war and the militant resistance of the Filipino mass movement for national liberation and democracy that the 3 root causes – which have led the country to mass poverty, human rights violations, social injustice and economic underdevelopment, and have fuelled the armed conflict for decades now – will be brought to an end. Tyrant Duterte’s “Whole-of-Nation Approach”, that safeguards and administers the 3 root causes of the armed conflict, is certainly enflaming the Filipino masses to arm themselves and join the NPA in the armed struggle for national liberation and people’s democracy. More and more people realize that armed revolutionary resistance is necessary, just and legitimate for the Filipino masses to liberate themselves from Duterte’s rampant fascism, corruption, plunder, repression and abuses in order to achieve a just and lasting peace. They more and more recognize that just and lasting peace can only be attained by firming up the people’s democratic power to overthrow the landlord-comprador bourgeoisie dominated state, and establish a truly democratic government that genuinely represents and serves the Filipino people’s interests, and that advances the agrarian revolution and national industrialization in order to lay the foundations of a Philippine socialist society.

On the occasion of the NPA’s 51st anniversary today, CNL is calling the Church people and Christians to prepare themselves, support and join the people’s war. And may the majority of Christ’s disciples all over the Philippines learn lessons from the experiences of the struggling masses during the ouster of dictator Marcos in 1986 and corrupt Estrada in 2001; so that they would courageously join the Filipino people to topple down the USDR at the earliest possible time through a powerful convergence of democratic forces.

Broaden and strengthen the people’s resistance against tyranny!

Join the NPA and advance the armed struggle!

Oust the tyrant US-Duterte regime!