NATIONAL Security Adviser Secretary Hermogenes Esperon Jr. will be standing as a witness to the trial of Jose Ma. Sison, his wife, and 36 others for 15 counts of murder.
The hearing will be held in the morning of November 16, 2020 at the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 32 and will be presided by Judge Thelma Bunyi-Medina.
It will be recalled that Judge Bunyi-Medina issued the warrants of arrest on August 28, 2019 against the defendants in connection with the discovery of a mass grave in Inopacan town, Leyte in 2006.
The Inopacan mass murder is part of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army’s (CPP-NPA) brutal attempt to purge its ranks of suspected government informants.
From 1984 to 1986, the CPP-NPA launched a nationwide purging of their ranks.
In the Visayas, the purge was named Oplan Venereal Disease wherein around three hundred suspected government assets embedded within its organization were arbitrarily sentenced and executed in Leyte alone.
Mass graves have been found in several rural areas around the country, one of which is in Inopacan, Leyte.
It was only twenty years later, on August 28, 2006, that the 8th Infantry Division of Philippine Army’s 802 Infantry Brigade unearthed the skeletal remains of at least sixty-seven individuals in a mass grave site in Mt. Sapang Dako, Inopacan.
More remains were subsequently discovered in various parts of Leyte province.
Esperon, then the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Chief of Staff, filed the case against Sison and 37 others for their criminal responsibility in the Inopacan Massacre in 2006.
Upon the issuance of the warrants of arrest last year, Malacañang called on Sison to “come home to avail of his constitutional right to confront his accusers and prepare for his defense.”
In the same manner, the Secretary sees this undertaking as a demonstration of the democratic principles of justice and rule of law. He further enjoins the defendants, with Sison himself listed as a terrorist individual by the governments of Canada and Australia, to exercise their constitutional right to due process and present their defense in court.
The CPP-NPA, the organization that perpetrated the nationwide massacres of its very own members, is listed as a terrorist organization by the United Nations Security Council under Resolution No. 1373 of 2001.
Governments of the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia have likewise classified them as terrorists.
“It is high time that the CPP-NPA be held accountable for the atrocities they have committed against our people, through the application of the judicial process. Their acts only serve to reinforce the true criminal and terrorist nature of the CPP-NPA masquerading, under the guise of a ‘revolutionary armed movement’” Esperon declares.