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NDFP Condemns Arroyo Regime and General Esperon for Inventing Lies Against Jalandoni and Sison
By Fidel Agcaoili
Chairperson, Human Rights Committee
National Democratic Front of the Philippines
2 September 2006
On behalf of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), I condemn in the strongest terms
Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) chief of staff General Hermogenes Esperon Jr. for inventing lies and
making false accusations against the NDFP negotiating panel chairperson Luis Jalandoni and chief political
consultant Prof. Jose Maria Sison.
Esperon lies brazenly when he claims that Jalandoni and Sison were co-signers of an order to kill 300
suspected spies and bury them in mass graves in southern Leyte in the 1980s. Since the late 1970s,
Jalandoni had been a political refugee in The Netherlands. Sison had been under maximum military
detention from 1977 to 1986. After his release in 1986, he taught for six months in the University
of the Philippines and left for abroad to carry out a lecture tour in Asia-Pacific and European universities.
Esperon is engaged in the old psywar dirty trick of misrepresenting as mass graves of the alleged victims
of the New People's Army (NPA) old abandoned cemeteries as well as graves of the victims of the AFP
from the time of the Marcos fascist regime onwards. False discoveries of NPA graves have been made
by the AFP from time to time in Misamis Occidental, Bukidnon, Quezon and elsewhere. And the AFP
has made announcements of filing charges against the leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
After all the media hype, no charges are filed.
We are certain that Esperon will not file any formal charge against Jalandoni and Sison after reaping all
the propaganda mileage from his big lie locally and internationally. We are also certain that Esperon is
making dirty propaganda against Jalandoni and Sison in order to deflect attention away from the extrajudicial
killings, abductions and other human rights violations for which the Arroyo regime is held responsible by the
Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, as well as religious groups such as the World
Council of Churches and the United Methodist Church in the United States.
We condemn the Arroyo regime for waging a dirty war, unjustly killing so many unarmed people to keep
itself in power and at the same time putting the blame on the revolutionary forces for the bloody crimes
of its military and police minions. For having military subalterns like Esperon, who are notorious for electoral
fraud and cowardly attacks on unarmed people, the Arroyo regime will continue to be a puppet, corrupt,
brutal and lying regime, hated by the people and targeted for overthrow.
As a consequence of the Second Great Rectification Movement, the Communist Party of the Philippines
(CPP) has grown in strength and advanced since 1992. The renegades who had engaged in anti-infiltration
campaigns without due process in the 1980s left the CPP in the early 1990s or earlier and joined the reactionary
government directly or formed counterrevolutionary grouplets. Some of these grouplets have become
paramilitary adjuncts of the AFP.
It is futile for the Arroyo regime to kill unarmed legal activists, including progressive party list leaders, journalists,
lawyers, pastors, trade union leaders, peasant leaders, women and youth activists, and then accuse the
communists of killing them. The crimes of bloody intrigue by the Arroyo regime are easily exposed because
there are surviving victims and direct witnesses, the close relatives, colleagues and friends of all victims who
present the facts and point to the criminal actions of the military, police and death squads of the regime. ###
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