By Gigie Arcilla/Philippine News Agency
MANILA – The notion that poverty is the main cause of terrorism and insurgency may be one of the most contentious ideas in global security studies, but for a Communications official, it is radicalization that causes insurgency in the Philippines.
“It is not poverty that causes this insurgency because indeed there are millions of poor all over the world who are not insurgents, but the radicalization of the terrorist CPP-NPA-NDF (Communist Party of the Philippines, New People’s Army, and National Democratic Front) that has caused this insurgency,” Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy said.
In a meeting with Philippine Ambassador to the United States Jose Manuel G. Romualdez at the Philippine Embassy in Washington, DC on July 23, Badoy said it is appalling that because of CPP founding chairperson Jose Maria Sison, millions of Filipinos live in dire poverty with the theft, murder, torture, rape of fellow Filipinos.
“That is his (Sison) business model — to keep the poor poor and to cow them into submission to do as they please with them. This madman and card-carrying members of the CPP NPA NDF,” she said.
Sison, who is has been in self-exile in The Netherlands since 1987, ought to be made answerable for the crimes he has committed against the Filipino people and I am certain the long arm of the law will catch him and make him pay, Badoy added.
“This coward lives in the lap of European luxury while his gullible followers sow terror in the lives of innocent and poor Filipinos, like our indigenous brothers and sisters,” she added, referring to Sison.
Communist-front organizations, she said, sign up unwitting Filipinos and even non-Filipinos into joining their fronts that spread a false picture of gloom and doom of our country at a time of great positive change in our country has come, and for which the overwhelming majority had thrown their full support of the President and his administration.
She added that President Rodrigo Duterte’s Executive Order 70 institutionalizes a whole-of-nation approach in attaining inclusive and sustainable peace and created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF ELCAC).
“The Whole of Nation approach includes Philippine embassies and Heads of Mission around the world and their commitment to join hands with NTF ELCAC because Sison’s terrorist activities have spread to more or less 39 countries,” Badoy said.
She stressed the importance of government missions abroad saying they are the key to ending the spread of the particular brand of terrorism by the CPP-NPA-NDF headed by Sison.
Romualdez, meanwhile, assured the fullest participation of his office in making sure the President’s directives get implemented and that his desire to end communist insurgency will be achieved.
The CPP-NPA is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the Philippines.
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