CPP FOUNDING CHAIRMAN SAYS: ‘Exploit crisis to incite revolution’

MANILA, Philippines — On the 40th anniversary of the Communist Party of the Philippines, founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison is urging all revolutionary forces in the Philippines to take advantage of the global financial crisis and agitate the people against the government that is being supported by the United States.

“The bankruptcy of the US-instigated policies of neo-liberal
globalization and war on terror has resulted in an unprecedented rapid worsening of the crisis of the world capitalist system and the Philippine ruling system. The crisis conditions inflict terrible suffering on the people but also incite them to wage revolutionary struggle,” he said in an e-mail to media from his chosen home of exile in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

“They are therefore favorable for the rapid growth and advance of the Communist Party of the Philippines and other organized revolutionary forces of the Filipino people,” he added.

Sison, who has been in exile for more than 20 years since his release from imprisonment after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship, said the CPP could maximize its growth during this time of crisis.

“The CPP has a sound organization of cadres and members. This can be the basis for a well-planned accelerated growth of the CPP organization. Tens of thousands of cadres and hundreds of thousands of members are needed for a new great leap in the advance of the Philippine revolution. There are gigantic tasks ahead for the CPP,” he said.

At the same time, Sison admitted the party’s “unstable and temporary alliance with certain reactionaries against the worst of the reactionaries who are narrowed down as the enemy.”

Calling the NPA “the largest revolutionary army since the Philippine revolution of 1896,” Sison said its “thousands of battle-tested Red fighters with political-military education and training” might be used for this expansion.

He said the CPP-led forces of the New People’s Army “move freely in at least 80 percent of Philippine territory” and has “more than a hundred guerrilla fronts covering large portions of 70 provinces and 800 municipalities.”

The CPP was founded in 1969, and has built and led the NPA. The number of armed communist rebels peaked during the regime of the late President Ferdinand Marcos, and has been going down since, suffering severe losses after an ideological and political split within the party.

Sison, who is facing charges before Dutch courts for conspiring to assassinate his former comrades — Romulo Kintanar and Arturo Tabara — from his home in The Netherlands, has said that he has not had operational control of the CPP-NPA for a long time.

In peace talks with the government, his official title is consultant to the panel of the National Democratic Front.

The government and CPP have separately called for a ceasefire during the holidays; it has not been breached so far.

The 40th anniversary of the CPP marks the 40 years of insurgency being waged by one of the few remaining communist movements in the world.

By Veronica Uy INQUIRER.net

The case of 2 ‘missing’ girls

MANILA, Philippines—Since the Supreme Court adopted over a year ago extraordinary measures to curb human rights abuses, the Armed Forces of the Philippines has been on the defensive, receiving a barrage of complaints in connection with extrajudicial executions and disappearances.

But in a little publicized case in February, the AFP’s Civil Military Operations (CMO) found itself in an unusual court battle: Helping parents secure information from leftist groups about two missing teenage girls who they believed had joined the New People’s Army (NPA).

The parents of Khristine Calido and Marissa Espedido sought a writ of amparo, from the Spanish amparar—to protect—adopted by the high tribunal from a successful judicial procedure in Guatemala to combat military abuses in the midst of a rash in political killings and kidnappings of activists.

This time, the respondents were leftist groups that, the parents averred, had recruited Calido and Espedido to pave the way for their membership in the NPA.

The girls were barely 18 years old when they left their homes and abandoned their studies, says Col. Buenaventura Pascual, CMO head.

“Filing the writ of amparo was the only solution so that those who knew where the girls were would be compelled to produce them in court,” Pascual says.

The case was lodged in the Regional Trial Court in Antipolo City against leaders of the Kabataan party-list group, Bayan Muna and individuals who included youth leaders accompanying Khristine and Marissa when their parents last saw them before they went missing.

The groups vehemently denied that they were responsible for the girls’ disappearance.

Volunteer educator

One respondent claimed Khristine gave “volunteer education to tribal folks and farmers” in Tanay, Rizal, on Dec. 26, 2007, but that she had never been seen after that.

Pascual says the court case uncovered the lives led by the girls since they joined the leftist youth organization Anakbayan while attending a national high school where they were both enrolled.

Searching among the girls’ belongings, their parents discovered their diaries where they detailed their activities that included joining lightning rallies, “MOBs” or mobilizations, and campaigning for Bayan Muna in last year’s midterm elections.

Khristine wrote that she became a member of the “UG,” or underground group, Kabataang Makabayan in 2006 as “Ka Liway.” Her mother Elizabeth also found several Anakbayan application forms that had been filled out by students as young as 14 years old.

Marissa’s parents presented a letter where, in poetic language Filipino activists are known to use, she lamented how her father worked hard for a measly salary while his employer continued to get rich.

Signing as “Ka Malaya,” Marissa, also a member of Bayan Muna, told her parents that it was better to die fighting than not doing anything for one’s country.

Recruitment process

Pascual, who provided the Philippine Daily Inquirer copies of the court documents, says the story of Khristine and Marissa shows “the process how young people are recruited by these organizations to eventually join the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and NPA.”

He says the seemingly benign school organizations designed for students to gain friends and be part of community services would eventually turn into a “training” ground “to test them how far they will go.”

The girls disappeared intermittently, for spells as long as a month, Pascual says.

He says the leftist recruiters appear to have a preference for young women who are “a bit more emotional,” those who come from broken families, or those whose parents are working overseas.

He says he learned of the missing girls at a high school forum when a teacher asked for help to track down her goddaughter Khristine, a sociology student at Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP).

Marissa went missing about the same time Khristine disappeared, Pascual recalls PUP officials telling him.

Infiltration

“They were perplexed. They did not realize how deep the CPP-NPA had infiltrated the youth organizations,” Pascual says.

He says the petition for the writ of amparo was subsequently dropped after the two girls showed up shortly after their 18th birthday.

In court, both girls chose to remain with their peers and in the unnamed place that they came from instead of going with their parents, Pascual says.

But when Marissa resumed her communication with her parents, it paved the way for reconciliation and a happy ending.

Pascual says that while Marissa’s family was poor, it was the strong bond with each other that ultimately brought her back home.

Khristine, however, has yet to return. She showed up in court with a pastor of the United Methodist Church and told her mother, an overseas Filipino worker, that she did not want to go home. She was placed under the pastor’s custody, and the judge approved the visitation rights of her mother.

“The first two visits went well. But on the third visit, Khristine was again missing. The last information we have on her was that she is already an NPA in the Quezon area,” Pascual says.

By Nikko Dizon Philippine Daily Inquirer

RED REVOLUTION AT 40 Campuses source of CPP ‘quality cadres’

MANILA, Philippines—Since Jose Maria Sison launched his Maoist rebellion four decades ago, schools and universities have provided him with idealistic revolutionaries ready to die for his cause.

They still do.

Lightning rallies, mutilated posters of President Macapagal-Arroyo and missing students are telltale signs, according to the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

In response to the continuing proselytizing, the military has mounted a counteroffensive on campuses against the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA).

In August, four members of a student leftist organization at Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) were haled to court for drawing a moustache on an Arroyo poster and destroying announcements of military activities.

The four, including the president of the leftist League of Filipino Students (LFS), were charged with malicious mischief.

Denouncing military “infiltration” of their campus, the students went to the Commission on Human Rights and accused the AFP of baseless “red-baiting.”

The campaign in PUP by the AFP’s Civil Military Operations (CMO) is part of a drive aimed at cutting support and foiling recruitment activities by the CPP in the so-called “white areas” in Metro Manila and other urban centers.

Col. Buenaventura Pascual, CMO chief, says that a PUP student identified as Diana Publico, who was reported as missing since restiveness hit the campus in recent months, may have actually gone underground.

Cradle of youth activism

Before Sison founded the CPP on Dec. 26, 1968, he was the leader of Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth).

KM leaders had turned the University of the Philippines into a hotbed of student activism in the 1960s. Its protests in Manila in the years before President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law usually ended in bloody confrontations with riot police.

Upon the declaration of martial law, many KM activists went to the hills, mostly comprising the cream of the crop of the country’s elite universities.

Army Lt. Col. Leopoldo Galon Jr., 7th Civil Relations Group commander, says the CPP’s armed struggle still relied on universities in Metro Manila for “quality cadres.”

“What we are against is the armed struggle that lured away activists from their activism,” Galon says.

“The school is their training ground. Students and activists join rallies, cultural presentations and carry out ‘pinta-dikit’ operation (vandalism),” Pascual says.

“They have a big impact among farmers and youth in the countryside when they apply all these things in the province,” he adds.

University Belt

But House Deputy Minority Leader and Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo says students joining the armed struggle is a “natural consequence” of grasping the realities of Philippine society.

“There is no question that some youth from colleges and universities have joined the NPA,” Ocampo says.

“But whatever actions the AFP does, either openly or overtly, in schools may not succeed in stopping the underground movement unless the government addresses its problems,” he points out.

The vigorous recruitment that once transpired in the University of the Philippines has now shifted to the state-owned schools in the “University Belt”—with PUP having the the “strongest” underground structure, Pascual observes.

PUP is home to at least 18 leftist organizations, including Anakbayan, Bayan Muna and the LFS, he points out.

“We found out that our list of those killed in and recovered from encounters with the NPA are mostly students from the PUP who became political officers of the armed movement,” Pascual says.

The increasing cases ranging from malicious mischief, robbery, grave threats and assault filed against activists in the PUP are also evidence of NPA activities in the school.

ROTC

As a countermeasure, Pascual has strengthened the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) in the school by stamping out hazing among incoming officers and getting rid of the cadet uniform.

His programs have managed to draw 1,400 freshman students into the ROTC. But Pascual admits that the number is small compared to the more than 8,000 other students who remain exposed to the leftist organizations.

Since 2006, the CMO has been holding dialogues—“campus tours”—with roughly 40,000 students from state-owned universities and city colleges in Metro Manila, warning them of “deceptive” recruitment strategies of the NPA.

“The Left is 90-percent propaganda and 10-percent armed struggle, while the AFP is 10-percent propaganda and 90-percent force,” he says.

“This time, the AFP wants to fight its enemy not with guns, but with words.”

The CMO’s “awareness drives” often take up half a day, where “rebel returnees” share their experiences to the young students.

The military campaign in schools coincidentally was initiated amid a surge in extrajudicial executions and disappearances that has drawn expressions of concern here and abroad.

Leftist inroads

The human rights group Karapatan says that since Ms Arroyo became president in 2001, political killings have reached more than 900. The Inquirer count is about 300.

“I think the government feels gravely threatened by the left in general, in particular its dramatic gains in the electoral parliamentary arena,” says Rep. Teddy Casiño of the leftist party-list group Bayan Muna.

“Thus, they have adjusted the counterinsurgency program to target even activists engaged in the legal struggle, resulting in the systematic and widespread extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and other human rights atrocities,” Casiño says.

Ms Arroyo has directed the military to eliminate the communist insurgency before her term expires in 2010.

Activists say part of the military response is to silence student and youth leaders and neutralize CPP activities on campuses.

With a report from Nikko Dizon

 By Jocelyn Uy Philippine Daily Inquirer