Oppose Aquino policy of endangerment and targeting of civilians under Oplan Bayanihan

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) condemns the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Aquino regime for its prevailing war policy of deliberately endangering the lives of civilians and making civilian communities targets of the AFP’s Oplan Bayanihan war of suppression.

Over the past three years under the Aquino regime, the AFP has used the signboard of “peace and development” to undertake military operations that target civilians. The AFP carries out its Oplan Bayanihan operations against rural communities of peasants and minority peoples, especially those which the military suspect are sympathetic, supportive or active in the revolutionary cause.

Under the Oplan Bayanihan, the AFP carries out the following acts which endanger at target civilians:

1. Saturation drives in communities, with armed soldiers violating the people’s domiciles by staying in their homes.
2. Setting up of military detachments within civilian communities, making use of day-care centers, schools, barangay halls and other civilian infrastructure as soldiers’ barracks.
3. Requiring civilians to render compulsory labor in building military encampments, erecting enclosures, digging trenches and the like under threat of being treated as suspects.
4. Forcibly recruiting and arming civilians in paramilitary organizations.
5. Subjecting to surveillance, abduction and torture residents who are active in democratic organizing and mass struggles.
6. Supplanting civilian agencies in the delivery of medical and dental services in a vain attempt at covering up military brutalities.
7. Forcibly conscripting civilians, especially young children, as guides for its military operations.
8. Allowing, and even forcing, civilians to ride in military vehicles with armed soldiers, police and paramilitaries.

The CPP holds the Aquino regime and its armed forces culpable for violations of international rules of war in the endangerment and targeting of civilians. Such acts of endangerment and targeting of civilians in the conduct of its war against the people’s revolutionary armed resistance should be thoroughly exposed and opposed.

The CPP calls on international humanitarian agencies, human rights organizations, religious associations and lawyers’ groups to give prime attention to the situation of civilians being endangered and targeted by Aquino regime and its armed forces’ Oplan Bayanihan war of suppression.