Communist party reveals plan for revolution

Baguio City: Ahead of celebrations to mark the 40th year of the underground movement, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has revealed a five-year plan to "fast-track" the overthrow of the government.

The Central Committee of the CPP, in a statement issued ahead of the 40th anniversary of the movement to be observed tomorrow, said: "Our Party considers of crucial importance how to bring the new democratic revolution to a new and higher level of development on account of the rich accumulated revolutionary experience, strength and great victories of the CPP, New People's Army, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines."

Campaign

The CPP's five-year plan contains an intensified campaign "to arouse, organise and mobilise the people along the general line of the new democratic revolution". The task of arousing the people must be well carried out through mass actions and publications and in various forms of agitation and propaganda, it said.

The communist plan calls for the usual intensification of attacks against government forces as well as direct action against "despotic" landlords by raising land reform to a "new and higher level wherever possible".

"In striving for maximum land reform, the main blow must be directed at the big despotic landlords and the land-grabbing corporations that have armed personnel or use the reactionary military and police to oppress the peasant masses and fight the revolutionary movement.

The New People's Army must employ the tactics of dismantling and rendering unprofitable the operations of these land-greedy entities and thus forcing them to leave the land. Concomitantly the landless tillers must be organised to take over the land," the CPP said in a statement posted on its website.

Earlier, President Gloria Arroyo, congratulated the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) on its 73rd anniversary last Monday, hailing the supposed "big drop in the number of the communist rebel fronts". Accordingly, communist fronts have dropped to 63 from 107 in 2005. This year alone, the President noted, "our troops neutralised 150 of the most notorious communist insurgents".

But the CPP claimed its guerrilla fronts increased to 168, meaning, "having a guerrilla front in every congressional district in all the provinces in consonance with the line of intensive and extensive guerrilla warfare based on an ever widening and deepening mass base."

The CPP said this includes the activation of "armed city partisan units" with specific missions in highly urbanised congressional districts.