Permit for illusion?

By JUAN L. MERCADO, juan_mercado77@yahoo.com
April 28, 2013

It’s dolled up as “permit to campaign”. In remote Northern Luzon outposts or Mindanao backwaters, candidates cough up cash for a clearance, from armed groups, before they pitch for votes.

“”The permit is exchanged for a cash “contribution” to the kilusan (movement),” wrote Inquirer’s Randy David.“ “(That’s) a cryptic reference to… the Communist Party and New People’s Army…But some may be no more than extortionists, posing as revolutionaries…”.

NPA North Central Mindanao Regional Command spokesman apologized for their attack on 78-year old Gingoog Mayor Ruth de Lara-Guingona and companions. Self defense, he claimed, and repeated warnings against armed escorts. “There’s no mention of the permit-to-campaign fee”, David writes. “But…that is what this is about.”

The assault came at an NPA roadblock collecting “revolutionary taxes”, Inquirer’s Conrad de Quiros wrote. Fine, if you accept NPA has every right to mount checkpoints to fleece candidates. “The NPA calls it tax, everybody else calls it extortion”.

There is only one government and one president, (former Vice President and Foreign Secretary) Teofisto Guingiona said. “That’s not the NPA”. Understandably, TG is unforgiving of the NPA. Laudably, he looks beyond retribution. “It is only when we have a genuine peace agreement that we can move forward.”

Peace talks resumed in Norway 2011 – six years after they broke down. The Oslo negotiations aim at ending the “longest-running Maoist insurgency in the world.” Diana Rodriguez and Soliman M. Santos, Jr wrote in their 2010 book “Primed and Purposeful.”

Armed clashes, across almost five decades left 4,745 killed and injured 1,534, incomplete tallies claim. Most were civilians. And 1.2 million became refugees. Bogged down in strategic defense of it’s ‘protracted people’s war’, the Reds never achieved a “great leap forward” of mass adherents, Rodriguez and Soliman add.

Will events on the ground outpace the Oslo initiative?

NPA still reels from paranoid purges of the late 80s. Over 1,400 were slaughtered, from ‘Cadena de Amor', in Bicol-Quezon zone, in 1982 to “Olympia” in Metro Manila in 1989. A “Cannibal Revolution” devoured its own children, noted Inquirer (Jan. 2, 2004) “Remains of comrades” killed without pretense of trials molder today in unmarked graves, reminiscent of Cambodia's “killing fields”.

Some NPA executioners today are button-down executives in Metro Manila offices. “The Party already condemned the abuses,” wrote Anne Buenaventura of the party's information bureau to Inquirer. But it shredded names of the victims and location of their graves.

From it’s peak in the 1980s, CPP ‘withered and splintered”, Australian National University’s Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet wrote in “Philippine Human Development Report”. Weakened by internal pogroms, an CPP evaluation confirms "ideological superficiality.”

Mindanao’s communism party building was notably weak. Communist ideology is part of leaders’ vocabulary. But even among students, analytical sophistication and ideological understanding was inadequate. Cadre training was limited, never systematic.

Lack of ideological cohesion and policy disagreements, after “People Power” toppled the Marcos dictatorship, “contributed to splits and splits-within-splits” in the CPP into the 2000s. That trigged clones of Luzon pogroms. Hundreds died and chaos rocked the party.

Studies in Mindanao, Negros, Nueve Ecija or Cordillera show a large majority of guerrillas and supporters have neither been CPP members, believers in communism nor seekers of a communist run state.

“Their framework in most NPA areas is systematic oppression of the many by a few in Philippine society. And they speak in terms of “no rich and no poor”, rights to land and decent human living conditions.

“In recent years, some analysts find that the guerrilla organization has become a kind of business enterprise. (It) sells protection in exchange for money and other compensation. Customers include corporations, gambling and drug syndicates, government agencies and large landowners…

"Some NPAs are akin to employees who receive monthly wages. Local NPA leaders (resemble) branch managers. And high NPA officials are the enterprise’s central managers and board members.” Kerkvliet urges further studies into this corrosion. But there is hard and repeated evidence of cash for permits to campaign.

Conflict-weary Filipinos make up a constituency for peace, PulseAsia says. Out of every 100 respondents, 35 cited “peace in the country as an urgent national concern. That ranked up there, with inflation (45%) and graft (36%).

Time and history have moved on. Communism as an ideology has collapsed. “It is glorious to be rich,” Den Ziao Peng said. Rebel leaders Jose Maria Sison and Luis Jalandoni (a Dutch citizen) are in their late 70s. They wage “revolution” by fax, then Internet, now by twitter and Facebook from Holland.

Their contact, let alone control over NPA units in backwaters here, are tenuous at best. Few NPA units would carry their signatures on “permits to campaign”. JoMa’s ill-disguised bid is to sit down with President Aquno, one on one, as MILF leader Mohagher Iqbal did. This is illusion at it’s most intense.