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.