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Proclamation 1017 is a Tyrannical Act of Desperation, Incites the People to Intensify Oust-Arroyo Movement
By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
NDFP Chief Political Consultant
25 February 2006
Gloria M. Arroyo has issued Proclamation 1017 to combine a declaration of a state of emergency and invocation
of commander-in-chief authority to call the troops to suppress rebellion. By this proclamation, she claims to have
the power to prohibit peaceful assemblies, revoke rally permits issued ministerially by local mayors, order warrantless
arrests, suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, and so on.
The real malevolent objective of Arroyo in issuing the proclamation is to suppress the people's assemblies in the
nationwide anniversary celebration of the events of 22-25 February 1986 that resulted in the overthrow of Marcos.
She is terribly afraid that the people's mass actions critical of her rotten and hated regime would encourage her
own military and police forces to withdraw support from her.
Indeed, she has undertaken so-called preemptive actions by ordering the arrest of military and police officers
suspected of opposing her regime and revoking rally permits nationwide and ordering the violent dispersal of
people in peaceful assembly. The proclamation and its immediate consequences demonstrate that Arroyo is
tyrannizing the people and even her own military and police officers whom she suspects of siding with the people.
Proclamation 1017 is a tyrannical act of desperation by an utterly isolated usurper of authority and her small coterie.
It proves that Arroyo will go to any length, including the bloody suppression of the people and her opponents. It is
the prelude to worse tyrannical acts to come if the people and the broad united front of patriotic, progressive and
all other anti-Arroyo forces do not act promptly to stop her.
To oust the Arroyo regime, it suffices for the legal patriotic, progressive and other anti-Arroyo forces and their allies
among the active and retired military and police forces to do their best in mustering their own respective following
and in drawing the broad masses of the people to gigantic mass actions in the vicinity of the presidential palace and
key points in the national capital region and in the provinces. The people hate the Arroyo regime for its puppetry
to foreign interests, electoral fraud, corruption, brutality and mendacity.
According to reports received by the Negotiating Panel of the National Democratic Front (NDFP), the New People's
Army (NPA) led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) is determined to continue intensifying the
revolutionary armed struggle by concentrating its fire on military, police and paramilitary units that are deemed
loyal to the Arroyo regime because they do not demonstrate that they are anti-Arroyo by raising a red flag or
the Philippine flag with red side up and allowing the troops to wear the red arm bands.
According to the same information, the CPP, NPA and NDFP are desirous of a revolutionary transition council
(predominantly patriotic and progressive) to replace the Arroyo regime on a program of upholding national
sovereignty and independence, realizing genuine land reform and national industrialization, promoting a patriotic,
democratic and scientific culture, carrying out an independent foreign policy for peace and development, and
opting for truce and alliance with the revolutionary forces against foreign and local oppressors and exploiters.
The information reveals that among the opposition parties, the legal forces of the national democratic movement
and the ranks of retired and active anti-Arroyo military and police officers in the broad united front, there is a
growing common desire to form a transition council that can negotiate a just and lasting peace with the NDFP
by addressing the roots of the civil war. Otherwise, the US-dominated ruling system of big compradors, landlords
and corrupt government officials cannot be overhauled in favor of a new Philippines that is truly independent, democratic, socially just, progressive and peaceful. ###
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