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