PHILIPPINE President Rodrigo Duterte was accused today of ordering the “summary execution” of two high-profile peace campaigners amid a major clampdown on democratic forces. 

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) condemned a “liquidation operation” after National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) peace negotiator Reynaldo Bocala was killed, along with Willy Arguelles, in a joint police and military operation in the Visayas region on Friday night.

Father Rustico Tan, who headed negotiations with the government in 1987 and served as peace consultant, was also shot multiple times while asleep in his house in Pilar, Camotes Island, the party said. 

“The party holds Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict as the masterminds behind the killings of Bocala, Arguelles and Tan,” CPP spokesman Marco Valbuena said today.

“Clearly, these were co-ordinated at a high level with the aim of driving terror into the hearts of the people and their revolutionary forces,” Mr Valbuena added. 

Hostilities have escalated since President Duterte announced the introduction of new anti-terrorism legislation targeting the NDFP,  a coalition of organisations including trade unions and indigenous rights groups that was founded in 1973.

Last December, there was a global day of action calling for an end to the persecution and killing of trade unionists in the Philippines, organised by the Council of Global Unions (CGU) and backed by Industriall and its affiliates.

The CGU called for the immediate release of six union activists and a journalist who had been “illegally arrested” during the protests, saying that the “intensified crackdown is precisely aimed at stifling  dissent and organised action among the people.”

Mr Duterte often accuses those taking a stand against the actions of his government of being CPP members in an attempt to justify violence against them by the military and security officials.

He claimed that those killed in the recent operations had been fighting back, despite witnesses saying that the men had been unarmed. One was asleep in bed at home when he was shot.

Mr Valbuena said that the latest atrocities, which targeted men in their seventies and eighties, were “co-ordinated killings added to the long list of murders ordered by Duterte and perpetrated by his paid killers…

“They are being summarily executed in line with Duterte’s “take no prisoners” fascist policy in the vain hope of making the people and their revolutionary forces surrender to his terrorist regime,” he said.

The CPP vowed to avenge the killing of the three men. “For having selflessly served the people in their struggle for national and social liberation, they will forever be extolled as heroes of the Philippine revolution,” a party statement said.