Duterte's P2-M NPA bounty to cause more innocent deaths –Joma

May 13 ------ President Rodrigo Duterte's P2 million bounty for commanders of the New People's Army will lead to further loss of innocent lives, Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria Sison warned on Tuesday. "With this kind of offer, we can expect his armed minions to manufacture more NPA commanders so that they will receive the cash reward as they have from previous fake surrenders and fake encounters," Sison in a Facebook post. "Like his previous order to shoot dead any violator of the lockdown, his order to kill NPA commanders will result in the murder of many innocent people," he later added. In a COVID-19 briefing on Tuesday, Duterte offered the reward for each individual who would be able to kill or pinpoint the hideout of a top NPA commander. However, Sison countered that Duterte did "not care that he will go down in history as a butcher of the Filipino people." "He has the ignominious record of murdering more than 30,000 people in the name of the bogus war of drugs which has been unleashed to favor the drug empire of his son and Chinese partners. He thinks that he can escape the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court by aiming for a fascist dictatorship," Sison said. ‘Gross incompetence and failure’ The President's offer was also a way of deflecting attention from his "gross incompetence and failure" in the fight against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Sison cited the lack of mass testing and contact-tracing as well as the, the high proportion of health workers dying due to lack of protective gear among others. "Duterte has made a rambling and inane multi-media broadcast every week during the lockdown but he has not given any rational plan for the use of 275 billion pesos. And there has been no accounting of the disbursement of these funds," Sison said. In early April, Duterte said that the P275 billion in COVID-19 funds had yet to be collected by the government. Source: gmanetwork.com