Ramos now to focus on NPA

Ramos now to focus on NPA

By Cecilia Quiambao

MANILA (JP): As one of the longest-running insurgencies in
Southeast Asia heads toward oblivion, the exiled leaders of the
Philippines' communist guerrilla movement are under mounting
pressure to settle with the government amid a rapidly changing
political landscape at home, analysts here say.

A landmark peace settlement last month with the main Moslem
guerrilla force in the southern Philippines, and a similar accord
last year with right-wing military rebels clears the way for
President Fidel Ramos, a former general, to turn his full
attention to the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its
New People's Army (NPA).

"For all practical purposes, the insurgency has been
defeated," said political scientist Alexander Magno of the
University of the Philippines.

"Except for small pockets of guerrilla activity that persist
only because of benign tolerance by a government that has put
primacy on peaceful settlement of internal conflicts, the `armed
struggle' is virtually dead," he added.

Chief presidential aide Ruben Torres discretely flew to the
Netherlands last month for a series of meetings with CPP
founder Jose Maria Sison and reported afterwards that
"preliminary talks" were due to start before the end of the year.

Executive Secretary Torres, a political activist in the 1970s
and contemporary of the Philippines' leading guerrilla figures,
has emerged as Ramos' secret weapon against insurgent groups. He
was instrumental in convincing his ex-classmate Nur Misuari, the
leader of the Moro National Liberation Front, to pursue the
three-year-old talks to their logical conclusion when
disagreements threatened to unravel the negotiations with the
Moslem rebels.

For communist leader Sison, the blade is double-edged because
the Dutch justice ministry has initiated legal proceedings to
expel him, citing a law which makes it unlawful for the Hague to
grant asylum to suspected terrorists.

Sison, who organized the CPP in December 1968 and launched the
NPA rebellion three months later, has vowed to fight the
initiative in the courts. Torres said Sison and the other exiled
communist leaders there feared for their safety in the
Philippines, even though they would be accorded safe conduct
passes.

The communists came dangerously close to achieving the
capability to seize power in the mid-1980s, but some critics say
their hidebound resort to dogma affected their strategic and
tactical decisions on the war front.

The CPP-NPA was the only viable opposition during the 20-year
rule of the late president Ferdinand Marcos, most of its members
under military rule when the legal opposition figures were either
in jail or had fled abroad.

By the time the dictator was toppled in February 1986, the NPA
had achieved its peak, with more than 25,000 regular fighters
who operated in several guerrilla fronts, virtually all over the
archipelago.

However, the NPA, under strict orders to adhere to the Maoist
strategy of protracted guerrilla war in the countryside, chose to
sit out the bloodless "people power" revolt, led by Manila's
middle class, which was sparked by allegations that Marcos had
stolen a snap presidential election from Corazon Aquino, the
widow of an opposition senator who had been assassinated by
Marcos' soldiers and police at Manila airport in August 1994.

It was all downhill after that. Even as the communist ideology
was being torn down in Europe with the demolition of the Berlin
Wall, Aquino, who succeeded the toppled Marcos, unleashed the
military on the communists after brief peace talks failed in
early 1987.

From within, the rot also grew with open dissension centered
on guerrilla strategy. Several key guerrilla units, notably the
Alex Boncayao Brigade of Manila-based death squads and another in
the central island of Negros, broke ranks and left the Sison
loyalists with a severely reduced armed force. The government
crackdown also led to the arrest of a sizable chunk of the rebel
leadership.

Up to 12 people a day were being killed in insurgency-related
incidents across the country during the peak of the rebellion,
but now there is hardly any fighting after the guerrilla rank
and file, confused by the leadership wrangling and demoralized,
hunkered down in their remaining camps.

Political analyst Magno said that with a rapidly improving
economy and with the other major rebellions settled, time is not
on the communists' side. The government, in effect, "is willing
to grant that their cause is just," and that it is offering the
rebel leaders an "honorable way" to settle the rebellion.

The leader of the House of Representatives, Jose de Venecia,
has even publicly offered Sison a seat as a sectoral
representative in Congress, which the rebel leader disdained.

Magno said the communists appear to be bent on prolonging the
talks "as a platform to project an image of political importance
that is not commensurate with the realities on the ground".

The risk in this strategy is that "government may unilaterally
declare the insurgency over, grant blanket amnesty for all who
seek it and simply close the books on whatever remains of the
movement," he said.

In this eventuality, the rebels would be reduced to common
outlaws to be hunted down like common criminals.

Window: For communist leader Sison, the blade is double-edged
because the Dutch justice ministry has initiated legal
proceedings to expel him, citing a law which makes it unlawful
for the Hague to grant asylum to suspected terrorists.