Rebellion against US imperialism

 MANILA, Philippines—The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was established by trade union leader Crisanto Evangelista in November 1930. Leaders and members came mostly from workers’ ranks.

The Commonwealth government legalized the party in 1937. The next year, it merged with the Socialist Party of the Philippines (SPP), which was formed in 1932.

Following the outbreak of World War II in 1942, the CPP-SPP movement suffered a crisis in leadership when the Japanese invaders captured and executed its principal leaders.

On Dec. 26, 1968, English professor Jose Maria Sison reestablished the CPP to “rectify errors” committed by the previous leadership of the Lava brothers Jose and Jesus.

In March 1969, the CPP formed the New People’s Army (NPA) as its armed wing with Bernabe Buscayno (alias Kumander Dante) at its helm.

The CPP advocated a “national democratic revolution against US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism” and adhered to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist principles.

With armed struggle as the main form of revolutionary struggle, the strategic line called for encircling the cities from the countryside over a protracted period.

The revolution aims to rid “the nation of US domination, particularly in the political, economic, military and cultural” arenas, as well as to “free the peasant masses and the entire people from feudal and semi-feudal conditions.”

The party regarded itself as “the genuine continuation of the Communist Party established in 1930.”

With only a few scores of members to begin with, the CPP rapidly grew after President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972.

The NPA started with only 60 fighters armed with nine automatic rifles and 26 single-shot rifles and handguns in the second district of Tarlac, which then had a peasant base of about 80,000.

Armed strength

Accumulation of weapons became possible through tactical offensives. By the organization’s own estimates on its 20th anniversary, during their first year (1969-1970), the NPA was able to accumulate some 200 rifles.

By 1977, the NPA had about 1,000 rifles and a mass base of a million people in both urban and rural areas.

Tactical offensives became frequent and widespread on Samar island by 1979 and in Mindanao by 1981.

By 1983, the NPA had accumulated almost 5,000 high-powered rifles. By 1988, the number of high-powered rifles in NPA possession was around 10,000, and NPA units operated in at least 60 guerilla fronts in 12,000 villages—or significant portions of 800 municipalities and 63 provinces in the country.

Estimates from the military put the NPA strength at over 5,000 as of last year.

While this was still a notable increase compared to about four decades ago, these numbers are considerably less, compared to the 1980s, when the NPA membership peaked at more than 25,000, still according to military estimates.

Witch-hunts

In the 1980s, the CPP launched campaigns to identify and arrest suspected military spies or “deep-penetration agents” in its ranks, which resulted in the imprisonment, torture and killings of scores of cadres by their comrades.

The Cadena de Amor campaign in 1982, for instance, claimed the lives of 32 people in the Quezon-Bicol zone. The Takip Silim campaign three years later, though confined to a district in southern Quezon, left some 30 people dead.

The Kampanyang Ahos in Mindanao in 1985 to 1986, described by Sison as the “very worst of the bloody witch-hunts,” resulted in the deaths of from 400 to slightly over a thousand people.

Operation Missing Link in Southern Tagalog, implemented in 1988, killed over 60 people.

Sison partly attributed the purges to an “erroneous” line of thought among some party leaders who “espoused quick victory at the expense of painstaking mass work and solid organizing.”

Party splinters

The CPP founder’s attacks on the leaders supposedly espousing “insurrectionist” lines of thought led to the party’s breakup into the “rejectionist” (RJ) and “reaffirmist” (RA) factions in 1992.

The reaffirmists stayed with Sison’s group while the rejectionists broke away.

In August 2002, the CPP and the NPA were designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” by the United States in a move described as an important step in the US “continuing efforts to combat global terrorism.” The European Union followed suit in November.
Under Philippine laws, the CPP is a legal organization.

In 1992, Republic Act No. 7636 repealed the old Anti-Subversion Law (RA 1700), which was enacted in 1957 at the height of the communist insurgency in the country. RA 1700 punished membership in the CPP and any organization with the same purpose.

Peace talks

The Philippines’ failure to lift the terrorist tags has been partly blamed for the interruption of peace talks between the government and the National Democratic Front—the umbrella organization for communist groups and their allies—in 2004 and is until now considered an impediment in the peace negotiations.

Peace talks have been held “on and off” since they formally began in Belgium in June 1995.

By Kate V. Pedroso
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Red revolution at 40 (Sison now croons to keep cause alive)

(First of two parts)

MANILA, Philippines—Founded 40 years ago Friday, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) is “grasping at straws,” its guerrillas resorting to banned land mines, its self-exiled leader reduced to crooning patriotic songs on YouTube to stoke the flames of his revolution.

“Their activities have an extricable link to moneymaking activities,” Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. says in an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “Some of them are merely using ostensible ideologies as a cover for syndicated criminal activities.”

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has directed the Armed Forces of the Philippines to eliminate the insurgency by the end of her term in mid-2010.

By military accounts, the troops are on track to meet the objective in their campaign against the CPP’s armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA).

“The CPP-NPA movement is still the number one threat to the security of the state as they have not given up the goal of overthrowing the government through violent means,” says Lt. Gen. Cardozo Luna, AFP vice chief of staff.

“But by 2010, they should not be a national security problem anymore. They will just become a common police problem,” Luna says.

Adds Teodoro: “This is one way of addressing the insurgency because it shows that our eyes are open—that those who are sincerely advocating a justifiable cause will be treated differently from those who are merely using rebellion as a cover.”

Even now, soldiers deployed in “red zones” are encouraged to treat areas of conflict as crime scenes and recover evidence to prosecute in regular criminal courts malefactors hiding behind the cloak of rebellion.

“That should be examined,” Teodoro says. “Rebellion is a softer crime than component criminal acts.”

The defense chief refers specifically to the torching of telecommunication sites, extortion, kidnapping and the mounting use of antipersonnel mines.

The planting of land mines has maimed millions of civilians, including women and children, caught in recent conflicts from Cambodia to Mozambique. The device has been banned under the Geneva conventions.

English teacher launches party

English professor Jose Maria Sison founded the CPP on Dec. 26, 1968, in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split, breaking away with the socialist orientation of the much older Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas and aligning himself with Maoist dogma and tactics.

The NPA was established three months later. From around 60 recruits, the force grew to some 25,000-strong during the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos. Officials say NPA regulars as of last year number around 5,000.

Whether Sison was solely responsible for the rise and fall of the CPP’s fortunes remained unclear.

Sison was captured in 1977, tortured and imprisoned. He was freed after the peaceful People Power Revolution in 1986 that ousted Marcos and installed Corazon Aquino to the presidency.

While on a lecture tour overseas, his passport was canceled in 1988, and Sison sought political asylum in The Netherlands.

While he was away, the world turned many times over.

At home, an internal party witch-hunt resulted in mass executions of dissident commanders and cadres and roiled the communist movement.

Abroad, the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Soviet Union disintegrated. China embraced open-market capitalism. Dotcoms bubbled, turned the planet into one global village and burst.

Many disgruntled Filipinos, unable to find opportunities at home, went overseas instead of heading for the hills.

One political science professor says those attracted to the OFW phenomenon fit the persona of the adventurous, if romantic, potential recruits of the CPP revolutionaries, except that now they’d rather go abroad.

‘Passé figure’

In the wake of 9/11, Sison was placed on the US list of terrorists.

Teodoro, 44, describes the bespectacled CPP leader, scion of a landed Ilocano gentry, as a “passé figure.”

Sison is no Fidel Castro, in the view of commentators, who with scores of rebels overthrew the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship after a revolution that spanned six years in the 1950s.

But they also point out that Cuba was unlike the Philippines in the 1960s. A leading US think tank then proclaimed that the next economic miracle in Asia after Japan will occur in the Philippines, until Marcos took strongman powers and ruined the country. That Sison’s revolution waged from halfway around the world may be open-ended does not faze keepers of the flame.

Last year, the 69-year-old revolutionary was photographed dancing with sexy siren Ara Mina. His patriotic songs are posted on YouTube, the hugely popular video-sharing website, that has ostensibly become one of his main propaganda vehicles.

Genuine movement

Rep. Teodoro “Teddy” Casiño of the leftist party-list group Bayan Muna scoffs at suggestions that the CPP is on its death throes, or that its guerrillas are nothing more than a gang of bandits and opportunists with very superficial likeness to the Vietcong or Hamas.

“Only a genuine social movement can achieve such longevity and capacity to survive through generations,” he says.

“Those charges have been made by the government ever since I could remember but the fact is the armed movement has persisted,” says Casiño, who was born a month before Sison launched the CPP.

“Rather than ignore or dismiss them, the government should resume peace negotiations with them in earnest,” he says.

Last month, the government announced plans to send a peace panel to Norway for an informal meeting following the collapse of talks in August 2004 with representatives of the CPP and the NPA and their umbrella group, the National Democratic Front.

“Peace as an ideal where several people disavow any resort to violence doesn’t happen sometimes in the real world,” Teodoro warily points out. “It must be within the context of enforcement of the law.”

Army role to go on

Throwing more money into national defense and security is also essential to wage effective anti-insurgency measures, he says.

The defense department is spending a meager 6 percent of the country’s GDP, he says, or P50 billion, of which P10 billion is earmarked for gasoline, bullets and weapons to sustain operations, including disaster response.

But, as he puts it, the fault does not fall on the government but on the poor awareness level of Filipinos “as to how much importance they place on security.”

Despite the seemingly weakening force of the movement, the military could not just yet relegate enforcing the law against communist rebels to the police because of the gravity of the crimes they are committing, according to Teodoro.

“They have weakened in terms of number but as they get smaller they get more desperate,” he adds.

The AFP is particularly keeping a tight watch on Abra, Surigao and Compostela Valley, where violence perpetrated by communist insurgents is described by the military as blatant and nasty.

Status of belligerency

Last month, the commander of the Army’s 11th Special Forces Company of the 3rd Special Forces was abducted by communist rebels after a two-day encounter in Monkayo, Compostela Valley.

Up to now, 1st Lt. Vicente Cammayo is still held captive by the NPA.

Early this month, five soldiers from the Army Personnel Management Center in Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City, who were basically engaged in clerical work, were killed when their vehicle struck a land mine on their way to a military camp in Surigao del Sur.

“Perhaps, they would want us to protest pursuant to the Geneva Conventions to get a status of belligerency,” Teodoro says.

He says the CPP leadership is obviously getting more desperate.

“They are losing straws to clutch on to retain their political advantage in certain areas,” Teodoro says.

“This is a political movement, but we don’t know if the political movement is for the narrow perpetuation in power of its leaders.”

 By Jocelyn Uy
Philippine Daily Inquirer