MANILA, Philippines – The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) called President Rodrigo Duterte a fake patriotic as his clamor for the U.S. to return the Balangiga bells allegedly was not about the chief executive’s love of country but his own interest.
“Duterte is raising the Filipino people’s clamor for the return of the Balangiga bells…only for self-serving purposes: First, this is meant as countermove against calls by some sectors in the U.S. to investigate violations of human rights in Duterte’s drug war,” the CPP said in a statement issued Wednesday, July 26.
“Secondly, he wants to use the Balangiga bells as a bargaining chip to push his insistence on the U.S. to provide him with brand new weapons, instead of the second-hand junk (that) the U.S. provides.”
The party, founded by Duterte’s former college professor and on-and-off friend Jose Maria Sison, claimed that the President’s alleged “pseudo-patriotism is meant to conceal his servility to the U.S.”
“He is, in fact, so dependent on the U.S. to feed his obsession to drop bombs on homes and schools. He is making so much noise about the history of U.S. abuses in the country but is silent about current U.S. military interventionism which serves his strongman rule and wars of death and destruction,” the CPP said.
“Duterte has become despicably mute in the face of US construction of several new military facilities inside AFP camps. He has no shame in upholding the anti-national US-RP Mutual Defense Treaty and all other unequal military treaties and in letting the US military remote-control the operations in Marawi City through its advisers and military contractors,” the party added.
The CPP also assailed some U.S. officials and called them “hypocritics” for invoking human rights in denouncing abuses in Duterte’s drug war.
“The US government is, in fact, equally culpable for all the abuses by the AFP which it has indoctrinated, armed, trained and used in waging its all-out war under Oplan Kapayapaan,” it said, referring to the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ campaign plan launched last January that serves as blueprint of military operations under the present administration.
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