BY GILBERT P. BAYORAN
The Army’s 3rd Infantry Division is bracing for the revival of the New People’s Army urban hit squads, as announced earlier by Communist Party of the Philippines spokesperson, Marco Valbuena, and called it “illegal and in violation of the Law of the Armed Conflict”.
Maj. Cenon Pancito, 3ID spokesperson, said yesterday that it has been an NPA tactic to deploy SPARU (Special Partisan Units) or assassins units, and stressed that “it shows how barbaric these enemies of the state are”.
“There is a standing order for the NPA to form partisan teams to mete out punishments against enemy units and officers who have committed bloody crimes against the people,” Valbuena said in a statement he issued.
The series of killings in Guihulngan City, Negros Oriental, where the latest victims were a doctor and her husband, were blamed by the NPA to an anti-communist vigilante group.
At the height of the insurgency problem in Negros in the late 1980s, NPA hit squads carried out assassination activities in Bacolod City and neighboring areas, killing policemen, soldiers, and civilians with alleged blood debts.
While they had been crying for justice, the NPAs are the gross violators of the very clamor they had been trying to project, Pancito said, as he recalled the testimonies of Ka Joross, a former NPA assassin who used to operate in Negros and who had surrendered to the government, who testified how they were directed by the NPA to carry out assassinations of government troops, or even their own comrades, just to project chaos in Negros.
Pancito said the Philippine Army has been fighting against these kinds of tactics of the NPA in the past. “We will make sure that they will fail again,” he stressed, noting that such tactics have not been effective in the past.*
