Reds ready to take on US troops — Ka Roger

The country’s mainstream communist movement is "ready" in the event that the joint RP-US military exercises direct their live fire at local guerrillas, a rebel spokesman said in a message sent though e-mail last Monday night.

Gregorio "Ka Roger" Rosal, spokesman for the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)’s Mt. Banahaw Command, said the rebels are not discounting the possibility that Malacañang and the White House would soon unleash the might of the US military on them.

"The US will not limit its armed intervention to Basilan and the Abu Sayyaf," claimed Rosal, referring to the more than 600 American soldiers who are now being deployed in Mindanao purportedly to train Filipino soldiers in fighting terrorism.

He pointed out that no other than Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes repeatedly declared that the New People’s Army (NPA) and the National Democratic Front (NDF) would come next as live targets of "military operations masquerading as military exercises."

The NPA is the CPP’s armed wing, while the NDF is the left’s political umbrella.

Months after the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington and the subsequent US-led anti-terror strikes in Afghanistan, the White House came out with an updated list of terrorist organizations around the world that included not only the Abu Sayyaf but also the NPA.

Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. raised a howl against the so-called US "terrorist exclusion list" as concerned sectors expressed fears that it would adversely affect ongoing negotiations to peacefully settle one of the world’s longest running communist insurgencies.

The rebels also condemned their inclusion in the US terror list, insisting they were "revolutionaries."

Rosal, of the Melito Glor command based in Quezon, said that the military exercises that are being pursued through the Visiting Forces Agreement of 1999, are merely being used by the US "to underhandedly put in place its armed intervention in the expanding and intensifying (conflict) between (the left) and (the government)."

When the VFA was ratified during the early months of the Estrada administration, the CPP-NPA-NDF immediately protested by withdrawing from the peace talks.

"Such intervention is a direct affront to national sovereignty and has perverted even the Constitution and laws of the government," said Rosal. "Such premeditated and direct intervention portends more massive and more virulent forms of US military aggression."

Rosal, who is also being suspected by authorities of being the NPA’s commander-in-chief, said the movement is "determined to frustrate such moves."

"We are ready to make the Macapagal-Arroyo regime pay dearly for its out-and-out puppetry and treachery to the country," he added.

Earlier, President Arroyo dismissed the "united front" being organized nationwide against the deployment of US troops in the country, saying that only the local communists oppose the arrival of American soldiers in Western Mindanao.

Militants as well as mainstream nationalist and cause-oriented groups have, however, branded Mrs. Arroyo’s statement as "communist witch-hunting and McCarthyism."