The Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC) has designated the National Democratic Front (NDF) as a terrorist organization in the Philippines.
ATC said the NDF is “an integral and inseparable part” of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army. CPP-NPA was designated as a terrorist group last December.
“Article X [of the 2016 CPP Constitution] shows that the NDF aka NDFP (National Democratic Front of the Philippines) is the core and most consolidated group that provides support to the armed and organizational expansion of the CPP-NPA,” the ATC said in a resolution dated June 23.
“Members of the NDF aka NDFP continue to lure and/or recruit people to join the NPA, while the CPP itself admitted and maintained, through public media releases as well as in CPP documents and revelations of former members, the direct and indispensable role of the NDF aka NDFP in its armed operations,” it added.
The National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) is a coalition of revolutionary social and economic justice organizations, agricultural unions, trade unions, indigenous rights groups, leftist political parties, and other related groups in the Philippines. It belongs to the much broader National Democracy Movement and the communist rebellion in the Philippines.
NDF designated as terrorist group
The NDF has continued its work among the various sectors of Filipino society, often rejecting and protesting against various laws and development programs that they deem as aggravating the “basic problems of the masses” including CARP, Philippines 2000, Visiting Forces Agreement and counter-insurgency programs.
In April, ATC designated as terrorists exiled CPP founding chairman Jose Maria Sison, his wife Julieta, and the rest of the 19-member central committee of the CPP.
Sison lambasted ATC vice-chairperson and National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon, Jr., who had told the Supreme Court about the organizations that are allegedly linked to CPP.
“He has sunk to a lower level of idiocy by describing as red-tagging my simple enumeration of the 18 self-acknowledged component underground organizations of the NDFP (National Democratic Front of the Philippines), which are entirely different and distinct from the perfectly legal Bayan and its federated legal member-organizations,” Sison said.
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