Here in the shadow of Mount Arayat, a rebel stronghold, villagers say the Communists are more active than ever. "Do I feel safe?" said Father Sahagun. "Who feels safe in a place like this? Nobody feels safe." Adding to the danger, the Communists have threatened to form a "tactical alliance" with the Muslim insurgents, who are fighting a separatist war on the southern island of Mindanao and on smaller neighboring islands. Some of the Muslims are believed to have links with terrorist groups associated with Al Qaeda.
The United States has placed one small, violent band, Abu Sayyaf, on its list of terrorist organizations and earlier this year offered to send some 2,000 troops to help fight it. It is the much larger group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, with which the Communists have been in contact. Last August, at the request of the Philippine government, Washington also added the Communist insurgency and its front organization, the National Democratic Front, to the list.***
The annual meeting of the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission has censured the communist island for its lack of democracy and free speech every year over the past decade except 1998. But in wording that will likely draw U.S. protest as well, the draft measure produced by Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Peru and Uruguay simply asks Cuba to accept a visit by a U.N. monitor appointed earlier this year by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Censure by the U.N. body brings no penalties but draws international attention to a country's rights record.
A spokesman for the U.S. mission to U.N. European offices in Geneva said only that the United States supported the efforts of the sponsoring nations to address the human rights situation in Cuba. In Cuba, at least 75 people, including independent journalists, been arrested since the crackdown was launched last week, according to the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and Reconciliation. ***