Philippines: Struggle continues for rebels

Ka Roger’s raspy voice filters out of the morning radio program, casual and so commonplace that millions of Filipino listeners have come to regard it as part of the daily news rather than a disturbing presence of a guerrilla openly challenging a government.

“There are two governments in this country, the revolutionary government and the reactionary government,” said Roger, nom de guerre of Gregorio Rosal, spokesman for the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA).

“They can’t deny that we exist and we exercise government powers,” Rosal said.

Nilo de la Cruz, a prominent guerrilla commander accused of heading a rebel assassination squad, the Alex Boncayao Brigade, has shifted to organizing the country’s labor force. He broke off from the mainstream group in the early 1990s following differences over revolutionary strategies. The debate continues to haunt the guerrillas.

Besides organizing trade unions, de la Cruz has been helping set up a multisectoral grassroots political party to allow labor, peasant and youth leaders to become party-list members of Congress, which has been long dominated by traditional politicians, powerful landlords and businessmen.

On Friday the communist insurgency in the Philippines marks its 35th year as one of the world’s longest insurrection: divided, relatively weak but still formidable.

The firebrands who founded the communist party in 1968 are getting on in years. Several of them have died in combat, of natural causes or by assassination. The surviving ones keep a firm grip on policy and direction.

But as young cadres are recruited and go up the ranks in a generational shift, there are differing views whether the guerrilla movement would emerge as a more ferocious band or slowly fade in the background as a law and order concern that could be relegated to the police to handle.

Norberto Gonzales, a backroom adviser of President Arroyo and who brokers peace talks with guerrilla groups, predicts that as communist party vanguards like the Netherlands-based CPP lead founder Jose Maria Sison fades from the scene, the group would lose armed struggle hardliners and be more open to a political settlement with the government.

He says formal talks are being scheduled in January. A continuing roadblock to the talks, Gonzales acknowledges, is the “form of settlement” for damages for victims of human-rights violation. The NDF supposedly wants a detailed implementation of an agreement on human-rights protection, down to the creation of a trust fund for compensating victims and how much interest the fund would earn in the bank.

“Our problem is that Congress decides those things, not Malacañang. We’re hoping that they [NDF] would eventually settle for ‘best effort,’” Gonzales said.

He believes the guerrillas have no choice but to settle for peace. “There will be others to take the place of Sison and the others, but the new batch wouldn’t be the same,” Gonzales explains.

But the homegrown guerrillas have shown extraordinary resilience. Battered by logistical shortage, battle setbacks and loss of outside support owing to China’s free-market reforms and the collapse of communist Eastern Europe, the rebels have managed to continue with attacks, which interestingly included large-scale and daring raids on armories in provincial military camps in recent years.

The logistical replenishment has focused inward with Rosal now openly acknowledging guerrilla taxations and announcing recently the NPA would exact “campaign fees” from candidates in next year’s election who would venture into NPA territories.

Recruitment and training of new guerrillas are reportedly at an intense pace, with the military accusing the rebels of drafting minors in violation of international war conventions and as proof of their desperate effort to reinvigorate a dying rebel movement. Rosal has denied minors were being taken to continue the protracted war, but recent TV footage of guerrilla strongholds showed many young recruits, who appear to be underage, barely taller than their M-16s.

The military says the guerrillas now number about 11,000 and have infiltrated at least 500 of the country’s 42,000 barangays.

The 1993 schism pitted major personalities in the Left against each other and brought about various methods of advancing the revolution. Leftists have since then brought their battle to the halls of Congress.

Party-list Rep. Satur Ocampo, a former NDF spokesman, says age has forced him to go aboveground.

“I’m somewhat old now and limited in physical capacity. But there’s no regret because now I can maximize my work without being hampered by age,” he says.

He says his going above ground was “a personal decision. I can’t recommend it for anybody else.”

The CPP and the NPA, regarded by the government as the most serious security threat in the country besides Muslim groups waging a long-running separatist campaign in Mindanao, were borne of deep poverty and political malaise. They actually descended from an old Soviet-leaning communist party from which Sison broke off in the 1960s.

Regarded as an armchair revolutionary brimming with Marxist and Maoist ideas, Sison set out from his hangouts in the University of the Philippines to establish an army that would complement the party he founded. The army began as a ragtag band with a few rusted rifles, led by the legendary Bernabe Buscayno, a former restaurant waiter and taxi driver who became a left-wing icon with the rebel codename Ka Dante.

Buscayno was reportedly drifting aimlessly in Central Luzon’s hinterlands until he united with Sison. Together they challenged President Ferdinand Marcos’s regime. When Marcos placed the Philippines under martial law on September 21, 1972, the guerrilla movement gained momentum and spread nationwide as government troops displaced them from a Luzon camp, dispersing rather than halting the budding the insurgency.

Under martial law, the guerrillas flourished, with strong support from North Korea and China. Marcos’s 1986 downfall took the wind out of the movement at a time when it was at the peak of its military strength. In what many say was a legendary blunder, the guerrillas boycotted the snap election called by Marcos, allowing aboveground left-wing groups, political moderates and liberal elites, led by Corazon Aquino, to capture power in the post-Marcos period.

The communists remained marginalized, and some leading members started grumbling about guerrilla strategies and Sison’s solid grip on the movement. The conflict turned personal at some point and broke out into the open a few years later.

The feud eventually turned bloody. Early this year, mainstream guerrillas assassinated Romulo Kintanar, a party stalwart and famous guerrilla commander known for his battle exploits. Kintanar was accused by Sison as having committed revolutionary crimes and of being a military spy.

The long-running rebellion ran smack into the US-led global antiterrorism war when Washington placed the CPP-NPA and Sison on its list of terrorist organizations along with such groups as al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah, outlawing any financial support to the group and barring entry to America to any guerrilla. Europe, prodded by the Arroyo government, also listed the guerrillas as terrorists.

The post-September 11 antiterror campaign has revived US-Philippines military relations, frozen throughout the 1990s, and allowed Manila to secure American military training and weapons primarily to deal with Muslim extremists in the South. The US assistance, officials would say later, was also to be used against the communists.

That sparked a rampage of communist guerrilla attacks that curiously coincided with the military’s preoccupation with US-backed offensives against the Abu Sayyaf and, later, the more established Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

President Arroyo has adopted a talk-and-fight strategy, but negotiations with the communists have been stalled for a variety of reasons, including government protests over rebel assassinations of politicians like Rodolfo Aguinaldo, an Army officer accused of human-rights violations who became a congressman and later on gunned down by the rebels.

The President has stressed that poverty has bred many of the decades-old insurrections she inherited and pledged to bring development to far-flung areas. Communist guerrillas dismiss that as a hollow slogan that has been used by past presidents. In the deep recesses and rural outback, the conditions that gave rise to the Marxist insurgency—poverty, landlessness, government neglect and the stranglehold of elite families and businesses on the economy and political power—remain as real as ever to breed another generation of resistance fighters.

With her cozy relations with Washington, Mrs. Arroyo has been condemned by the communists, who say a peace deal would be impossible in her term.

The President has proceeded with negotiations with rebel factions, including that of de la Cruz. The government’s blueprint for the talks does not specify how it would reconcile the parallel talks with rival groups, along with dialogue with the milf, which maintains a tactical alliance with the Left.

A comprehensive political alliance between the Marxists and Muslim separatists is far-fetched, ideologically.

Yet in the often convoluted turn of events in the Philippines, the two forces have found a common path and are helping each other wage a war that has outlived four presidents.

“But eventually, all the true revolutionaries will unite. And when that time comes, it will be an achievement for the people,” Dela Cruz said.

Rebels conducted bloody purges to rid movement of ‘spies’

By Annie Ruth C. Sabangan, Mio Cusi and Ric Puod, Senior Reporters

THE story was that he sang the communist anthem Internationale and shouted long live the NPA before the sword pierced his heart. Benjie Liboro was killed not by the enemy but by his own comrades.

That was almost 15 years ago. But his younger brother Raymund felt as if it was just yesterday. “He was supposed to come home for Christmas. My mother was expecting him. I told her later that Benjie had been killed in an encounter with government troops. I did not dare tell her that Benjie’s own comrades in the revolution were his executioners.”

A surge of persecutions swept the leftist underground from 1982 to 1989. The leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army suspected deep-penetration agents of the military among its cadres. Anti-infiltration teams carried out a wave of torture and executions.

One method of torture, according to a book, To Suffer Thy Comrades, written by Robert Francis Garcia, himself a survivor of the purge, was the “flag ceremony.” The victim, tied at the wrists, was hoisted until only his toes barely touched the ground. The ordeal lasted from a few hours to a few days.

To escape the brutal interrogation, many cadres admitted to being spies.

Some survived the ordeal. Many did not. Benjie, who came from a group of NPAs operating in Mount Banahaw in Quezon, was in a batch of suspected DPAs arrested and “tried” in 1988 under Oplan Missing Link, the bloodiest and the most extensive purge carried out by the Left, covering Central Luzon, Cordillera, Leyte, Cebu and Metro Manila.

At the time, Raymund was working on the legislative staff of Rep. Greg Andolana. Raymund was also a member of the Left, with a semilegal and semiunderground task.

“A man, a senior member of the underground, came to our office in Congress. He asked if Romy Sandoval was my brother. That was Benjie’s nom de guerre. I smiled and asked him why. Then he asked again if I was indeed Ka Romy’s brother. I said yes. He cursed what had happened to Benjie. He wept hard and said pinatay nila ang kapatid mo.”

Benjie was just 22 then, a year older than Raymund. Almost all of the six Liboro siblings had participated in what they believed was a “higher cause” of serving the people through a revolution being espoused by the Left.

Benjie was the family’s most “GND” (grim and determined) leftist, according to Raymund. It was unusual. Benjie studied at the University of Santo Tomás, definitely more conservative than the University of the Philippines—known at the time as the wellspring of cadres—where Raymund, their other brother and three sisters studied.

Despite being detained for three months, Benjie, who was suffering from asthma, was highly optimistic. He even told his batch mates they would hold a reunion at the Liboro house in Quezon City after they survived the interrogation.

Even at the time when Benjie knew they wouldn’t spare his life, he never blamed nor condemned the party, Raymund said.

Raymund had ideological debates with Benjie. He said his brother was a good party soldier while he was the dissenter.

During a raid by Benjie’s group in Dolores, Quezon, Raymund asked why they had to burn the municipal government building. Benjie was sure of his answer: because “it was the symbol of an oppressive and repressive state.”

“I said that was not how the masses perceived it. To them, it was just a place where birth certificates were kept. So pag sinunog mo’ yon, matatapakan mo rin ang interes ng masa,” Raymund argued.

Raymund did not immediately resign from the party after knowing about Benjie’s death. For weeks he talked to comrades, searching for his brother’s body. In November 1989 Raymund found the body in a shallow grave in Cavinti, Laguna.

An emissary from the party was supposed to lead Raymund to his brother’s grave. But the military earlier overran the area. They exhumed Benjie’s body and took it to Camp Nakar in Lucena City.

“The military wanted me and my family to first cooperate with them before they give us Benjie. But I knew my brother would not like that. So we refused and they later on released the body. Of course, if Benjie were alive, he would not allow himself or any member of his family to be used by the enemy. Until death, he remained loyal to the ideals of the party. It was so sad that death was the price for his loyalty.”

The Liboros buried Benjie. Raymund also buried the ties with the party through a long letter, addressed to the cpp-npa’s Central Committee and then to the party leader Satur Ocampo. He asked the party to return Benjie’s personal belongings to his family.

Raymund did not get a reply.

Another former NPA, Redentor (not his real name), joined the movement to realize his envisioned social order. He left when internal contradictions bogged down his perceived means for reforms.

Redentor went UG (underground) when he joined a militant student organization at the University of the Philippines. As the typical tibak (colloquial for “activist”), he “educated” student groups on social issues and provided a choice of appropriate responses for the students. “I was tasked to infiltrate student groups not yet influenced by the Left,” he said.

When the call to participate in the struggle became stronger, Redentor dropped out of school and trained in the hinterlands as a cadre. “That was the first time I experienced joining an eight-hour night trek in the mountains.”

The party appointed him to work full-time on one of its technical staffs after members noticed his organizational talent. “Besides organizing meetings, I also had to secure funds, open bank accounts, provide safe houses and vehicles, and give security to members, particularly those with a P1-million price on their heads.”

Seeing that his skills were better applied to psychological warfare, his leaders assigned Redentor to the group’s propaganda arm.

Once, Redentor was ordered to assassinate a recruiter for the civilian militia. “Lucky for his group and luckier for mine that he didn’t arrive at the designated place. The operation would have been bloodier on our part because the subject was always carrying a rifle. I only brought a .45 while two men who served as my back-ups had revolvers. One of them even carried a paltik,” he said.

As cadres continued to participate in underground activities against the government, the solidarity of the organization began to erode.

“In the early nineties, I read about Joma Sison’s paper reaffirming the party’s basic commitments to the Maoist doctrine. He also directed the downsizing of companies and battalions. But many within the hierarchy, like Popoy Lagman for instance, adhered to the Marxist-Leninist ideology. In fact, the Metro Manila-Rizal Regional Party Committee submitted a paper rejecting Joma’s pronouncements. This started the emergence of the reaffirmists and the rejectionists,” Redentor said.

Many former rebels believe that the purge in the late eighties helped widen the chasm between party members, but Redentor disagrees with that line. “I wasn’t with the party at that time, so I really don’t know if the purge and the split had a direct link,” he said.

What he heard from comrades was that the old guard of the First-Quarter Storm were neither spared during the purges of Operation Ahos and Missing Link. “One leader was even a grandchild of Guerrero’s Socialist Party,” Redentor said.

Joey Faustino, executive director of the Coconut Industry Reform Movement (coir), sought to find the answers to the disappearance of his brother Gerry during the martial-law regime. Memories of his brother linger, guiding Joey in discovering his own identity while interacting with the underground movement in the early eighties.

At that time UST was not known to be a hotbed of student activism. Faustino, who is also a member of United Coconut Planters Bank’s board of directors, recalled how the UST Reds started stoking the embers of activism until the flames of student militancy spread in the Catholic university.

He took part in the organizing activities of the National United Front, which was influenced by the Communist Party of the Philippines-National Democratic Front. “I was building alliances among students, teachers and employees. I had to enroll for three or six units at UST just to be considered a bona fide college student,” Faustino said.

During mass actions, Faustino realized that the party was not at ease with critical minds within its ranks. “In my case I was articulate. I was a member of the think tank, but I never became secretary or deputy secretary, because I kept on questioning them.”

The fundamental question, which he constantly posed to members of the NDF, was the relevance of certain policies by the group to UST. He was branded a “bourgeois reformist” for his hard-line stance on some initiatives by the party for the student population of the university.

Although he respected other policies of the party in pursuit of social reforms, Faustino was obsessed with the primacy of democratic socialization, or consulting with various sectors before making a move.

“The party thinks that you should never enter into an alliance with any group if you are not going to get the top position. In case of disagreement, efforts should be made to separate the ‘pure’ from the ‘pale’,” he said.

Faustino would later realize that his independent stand spared him from the misfortune that befell his fellow activists who joined the armed struggle. He remembered five of his school friends who joined the NPA. One of them was Benjie Liboro.

“We were alarmed when Benjie’s body was found. All the other four guys from UST were reported to have suffered the same fate,” Faustino said.

Steve Quiambao was an activist at 15 and a communist political cadre at 39. That spans more than two decades. “I was a victim of the purge,” Quiambao said of the 1992-93 great debate within the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Quiambao, now 49, belonged to a faction that rejected the CPP’s original line of a protracted people’s war, Mao Zedong’s theory that seeks to empower the masses through prolonged education and self-organization—before any revolution is won.

“It couldn’t work here in the Philippines and, therefore, we rejected the affirmation of CPP chairman Jose Maria Sison, the couple Benito and Wilma Tiamson, vice chairman and secretary-general, respectively, on this line,” Quiambao said. What made him abandon the Chinese experience was the party’s seeming indifference to the pressing agrarian issue. The rejectionists were accused of deviating from the counterrevolutionary theory, as they no longer held the basic principles of the national democratic revolution.

Quiambao said, “Is the party really serious about the agrarian struggle? The problem is that it actually failed to give importance to the struggles of other peasant organizations.” The party believed that the interest of the peasantry must be “subsumed” in the conduct of the people’s war, which Quiambao viewed as weak and ineffective. “The only peasant organizations it considered was the New People’s Army, thinking that the agrarian and other problems could be resolved only through arms struggle.”

When the Aquino administration declared total war on the communists, Quiambao, who then headed the party’s National Peasant Secretariat, embarked on innovations to carry out the agrarian struggle and other issues. That came in 1988, when the military had launched a massive offensive against the NPA. Farmer organizations under the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas started to disintegrate. Many of their offices were padlocked.

“We made use of the open and legal issues, not the simple agitation of people in terms of propaganda. And while we were at it we reorganized the farmers, wanting to push more for victories of our land struggle,” he said, only to be accused more than four years later of deviating from the party principles of the people’s protracted war.

Quiambao could not say how many of his former comrades were booted out of the party. His estimate is 40 percent. The biggest chunk was the Manila-Rizal, then the Visayas Commission, and the Central Mindanao region.

Quiambao, who now heads the Peace Foundation, prides himself on what he considers the real struggle for the peasants, having won close to 300,000 hectares of land for farmer beneficiaries of the land reform program. “We organized the farmers, gave them a voice and let them engage with the government in legal and open means.”

theory, as they no longer held the basic principles of the national democratic revolution.

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