MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte’s “stupid and outrageous” offer of P50,000 bounties for the deaths of New People’s Army commanders “is an old discredited trick of the military, which has not worked at all to damage or destroy the revolutionary movement,” the founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines said.
Jose Ma. Sison mocked Duterte, saying he “believes too much in killing revolutionaries and bribing the unscrupulous like him to solve any problem of his, like the growing revolutionary movement of the people.”
At the same time, he slammed Duterte’s bounty offer because it “incites the murder of revolutionaries and induces his own officers with reward money to engage in summary executions or extrajudicial killings.”
Duterte raised the bounty offer during a visit to Camp General Adriano Hernandez in Iloilo province on Thursday. He also offered P25,000 for NPA fighters and unspecified amounts for rebel medics and “tax collectors.”
Explaining why the bounties would not work, Sison, who is now chief political consultant of the National Democratic Front, said “even when the reward money for the head of a revolutionary is P1 million, the killer-informer is lucky if he gets five pesos because the corrupt military officers get a share of the reward money from the level of generals downwards.”
“The killer-informer cannot complain because for him to do so he would be to broadcast his act of betrayal and invite punishment from the revolutionary movement or his own murder by the military agents of Duterte,” he added. “At any rate, when the people get to know who has betrayed and murdered a revolutionary, the traitor is eventually punished by the people´s army.”
