The Philippines' Unending Guerrilla War
Thursday, Jan. 25, 2007 By ANDREW MARSHALL
Comrade Giegie is getting married. Her wedding will be held in a jungle clearing, which she will enter through an archway of raised assault rifles. The bride and groom will make their vows draped in a red flag bearing the spear and Kalashnikov of the 7,400-strong New People's Army (N.P.A.). Then they will pledge allegiance to the masses and promise to raise their children as revolutionaries. There will be no priest, no confetti, no wedding gown. So how will Giegie dress? "Like this," she smiles. Giegie, 22, is wearing a faded sweatshirt, jogging pants, Wellington boots and an Uzi submachine gun.
Hidden in mountainous Mindanao in the southern Philippines, Giegie's platoon is fighting a rebellion older than most of its members. Since 1969, the N.P.A., the armed wing of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines, has waged what it calls a "protracted people's war" in which a total of some 40,000 guerrillas, soldiers and civilians have so far died. Her platoon's armory is motley—it includes rifles, grenade launchers and an aging mortar, mostly captured from soldiers or police; and its members are young, idealistic and, in many cases, already scarred by battle—eight members of Giegie's platoon have been injured, two with bullets still buried in them. There are other sacrifices, too. Every aspect of N.P.A. life is regulated, including romance. It took almost a year before communist officials granted Giegie and her betrothed, a 25-year-old rebel called Dods, permission to date. Guided by a document called "On the Proletarian Relationship of the Sexes," they must court for another year before marriage. Premarital sex is forbidden.
Heavy monsoon rains won't alter their wedding plans, but the escalating conflict might. Peace talks with the government stalled in 2004. Recent clashes between the N.P.A. and government forces have claimed scores of lives across the archipelago, particularly in the rebel strongholds of Luzon and Mindanao. In a few bloody days last month, the military shot dead three N.P.A. commanders, while an ambush by 30 rebels killed four policemen.
The N.P.A., which both the U.S. and the E.U. have classified as a terrorist organization, is not the only headache in Mindanao for the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. This resource-rich but lawless region is home to two other formidable armed groups. While Manila has struck a fragile cease-fire with the 12,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front (M.I.L.F.), the country's largest Muslim rebel army, it has vowed to eradicate Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaeda-linked outfit accused of a string of terrorist acts, including the 2004 bombing of a ferry near Manila that killed more than 100 people. January brought confirmation that Abu Sayyaf chief Khaddafy Janjalani, as well as many of his top lieutenants, had been killed during an ongoing military campaign aided by U.S. intelligence and hardware. With Abu Sayyaf reeling, Arroyo on Jan. 22 vowed that a massive deployment of troops will now "blunt the tactical edge of the New People's Army." But the N.P.A.'s nationwide reach makes it a tougher foe. "The military has always seen the N.P.A. as a much larger threat because it operates in nearly every province across the archipelago," says Zachary Abuza, a Southeast Asia security analyst who teaches at Simmons College in Boston. "The government will always have to divert resources to deal with it. The N.P.A. won't go away anytime soon."
The N.P.A. boasted 12,000 armed regulars in the mid-1980s, when many saw it as the only force capable of challenging dictator Ferdinand Marcos. But its Maoist leaders were snubbed even by Mao Zedong himself: in 1974, to undercut support for the N.P.A., Marcos dispatched his wife Imelda to Beijing, where she supposedly swept Mao off his feet. ("I like Mrs. Marcos because she is so natural, and that is perfection," he gushed.) After People Power ousted Marcos in 1986, the N.P.A.'s declining popularity was devastated by internal purges in which hundreds of people were tortured and executed. In 1988, 121 cadres were butchered in one N.P.A. camp in Luzon alone, while up to 900 were killed in Mindanao.
The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed. Communism was history. But not the N.P.A. Like Asia's other communist rebel groups—India's Naxalites and Nepal's Maoists—the Philippine rebels have survived because they are primarily fueled not by foreign ideology but by domestic realities: poverty, corruption, unemployment. Some 40% of Filipinos live on less than $2 a day, while a tenth of the 87 million population seeks work abroad. Corruption watchdog Transparency International ranks the Philippines near the bottom of its corruption index, alongside Nepal and Rwanda. The N.P.A. promotes communism as the only cure for the Philippines' many ills, but even Filipinos who reject its cause still share its grievances.
Officials in Manila acknowledge that the N.P.A.'s resilience is largely rooted in the country's decades-long inability to improve the lives of the underprivileged. "Remove poverty, and we remove the N.P.A.," says Eduardo Ermita, a former Defense Secretary who is now Arroyo's executive secretary and one of her closest advisers. Ermita says the authorities are serious about providing education for all children, and about tackling other grievances such as corruption. "You cannot win the war through guns alone," he says. "You have to win hearts and minds."
But guns help. Last year, Arroyo declared what she called an "all-out war" to destroy the N.P.A., and she has promised her commanders $200 million for better weapons and pay for their troops. The rebels, for their part, have stepped up operations against what they call an "illegitimate, rotten and brutal" administration. With fighting intensifying nationwide, TIME was invited to join a rebel platoon in Mindanao to take an inside look at the conflict that history forgot.
The original invitation to visit one N.P.A. unit was canceled due to "bad weather"—rebel code for increased enemy activity. Instead, we travel north along a half-finished highway through Compostela Valley, another guerrilla stronghold, where troops assigned to Arroyo's security detail had been injured in an N.P.A. ambush in July.
At the town of San Francisco—a dreary, concrete facsimile of its famous namesake—we are picked up by two N.P.A. men in jeans and T shirts in a four-wheel drive with darkened windows, then speed out of town along potholed logging tracks. As we leave the highway far behind, the villages grow visibly poorer; a rare stretch of paved road is announced by a sign bearing the President's face and the slogan GLORIA CARES. In many villages, government troops are dug in behind sandbags and razor wire. Three hours later, we transfer to trail bikes and roar along deserted tracks to a semi-derelict logging shack. Waiting there are five N.P.A. soldiers with M-16s, who guide us through the darkening jungle to a camp lit by flickering oil lamps. "The comrades are very excited you're here," says a voice from the gloom.
The voice belongs to Comrade Victor, 39, the political officer assigned to look after us. (Victor, like all N.P.A. fighters, uses a nom de guerre. The platoon's machine gunner is called Comrade Bren.) A handsome man dressed in shin-length shorts and orange flip-flops, Victor first apologizes for his poor English (he speaks it perfectly), then for our circuitous journey: a rebel operation had caused more "bad weather" to the south. "Our people were carrying out a punitive action," says Victor, meaning an assassination by an N.P.A. "sparrow unit" or death squad. The man killed was a farmer, he explains, but his role as a police informer had earned him "a blood debt against the revolutionary movement."
About a fifth of N.P.A. fighters are under 18, according to Jane's Information Group, an authority on defense and terrorism. Most of this 30-strong platoon are too young to recall the purges and, despite embracing communal life, have often joined the rebels for personal, rather than political, reasons. Many are high-school dropouts with no job prospects, impressionable youths whom the N.P.A. recruits and molds into loyal killers for the communist cause. For Joven, 21, joining meant personal salvation. "I had a different lifestyle before," he says. "I was addicted to marijuana and alcohol. I hung out with a neighborhood gang." Joven was shot during an offensive four months ago and the bullet rests painfully under his spine. But he says, "I'm happy with the comrades. Even though we come from different neighborhoods, from different classes, we fight as one."
By the often lethargic standards of troops fighting long-running jungle wars, this N.P.A. platoon seems hyperactive. At 4 a.m., hours before daybreak, its soldiers are performing drills and martial arts in flip-flops and bare feet, then practicing grenade throwing with rocks from a nearby river. Their entire week is plotted out: from Monday to Friday, there's military and medical training, plus basic education and indoctrination sessions; weekends are devoted to food production and cultural activities. Even off duty, the platoon stays on message, gathering around a guitar to sing rebel songs or—possibly for the benefit of the platoon's foreign guests—the N.P.A.'s own anthem: "The New People's Army is not the army of the rich/ Which follows the orders of the greedy/ Awakened, we freely join the People's Army/ We offer our lives to the poor."
There are few other diversions. The newspapers I bring are read and reread, then torn into strips to
use as cigarette papers. Alcohol is banned and food is scarce. For two days there is gristly pork—a treat for the guests—and afterwards only tiny salted fish or lentil gruel. When the Philippine army blocks supply routes, the rebels hunt the depleted forests for wild pigs, monkeys, snakes and beetle grubs.
"There are no ranks in the N.P.A.," Victor tells me, "only responsibilities." But experience makes some comrades more equal than others. Platoon leader Jorex, 41, is a brooding giant with a bandolier of grenades strung across his chest. As a youth, he was recruited by a government militia to fight the N.P.A. but instead defected to the rebels.
A personal tragedy—the 1993 death of his brother, also an N.P.A. guerrilla, in a firefight with government troops—reaffirmed his commitment to the cause. "He died in my arms," says Jorex. "It was painful. But I feel the same pain when one of my comrades dies."
Jorex and his wife Wendy, 33, have five children aged 3 to 12, who live in Mindanao with relatives. They see the children twice a year, surreptitiously, to avoid detection by the authorities. An N.P.A. fighter for 15 years, Wendy is tormented by the idea that her children are vulnerable. "Sometimes it terrifies me to think what the soldiers might do to them," she says. Wendy claims that the military has taken photos of the house where they live, and that on one occasion a government soldier interrupted an N.P.A. radio communication to announce: "If you kill our colleagues, we'll kill your children." Executive Secretary Ermita says the accusation that the military would threaten or target children "is pure N.P.A. propaganda. If that really happened, the commanding officer would have known and we would have known. The soldier would have been punished."
In late 2005, the rebels launched hundreds of raids across the country in what Victor describes as "the first nationally coordinated N.P.A. attacks since 1992." He claims 200 firearms were seized in Mindanao alone. With the violence intensifying, Giegie's sister Lenlen, 19, has already survived three shoot-outs; she was almost killed during an N.P.A. attack on an army post in Agusan del Sur province in 2005. One bullet hit her neck and ripped an exit through her armpit, while a second drilled into her thigh. "All I could think was, 'If I die here, I die for the people,'" she recalls. But within weeks Lenlen had recovered—young flesh heals fast—and by December 2005 she had joined a weapons raid by 43 rebels on a police headquarters in nearby Loreto town that netted a dozen firearms and killed two policemen. Their deaths don't bother her. "They tried to fight back," she shrugs.
Lenlen says she is happy to have joined a group that is "guided by Marxist-Leninism and Maoist thought." But as a high-school dropout from remotest Mindanao, it's not clear how much she truly knows or even cares about such matters. By contrast, Victor—a well-educated cadre from a "petit-bourgeois family" (his words)—gives an eloquent if specious defense of the N.P.A.'s core ideology. No communist state has ever collapsed, he argues, because none has ever existed. East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia—none had "true" communist governments when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, while the Soviet Union and post-Mao China "were socialist in name but capitalist in practice." The same jungle that has shielded the N.P.A. from military defeat has also isolated its fighters from a modern world where their cherished ideology is deader than disco.
While outright victory is not a possibility for the N.P.A., neither is extinction. Victor asserts that Arroyo's "all-out war" is unwinnable. The Philippine army is thinly dispersed, he argues, capable of engaging only a quarter of the N.P.A.'s 120 "fronts" nationwide while remaining vulnerable to hit-and-run tactics. "We have learned a lot about guerrilla warfare in 37 years," he warns. Felipe Miranda, a political-science professor at the University of the Philippines, agrees: "The military does not have the capability, in terms of both logistics and manpower, to deal with an insurgency that has been around for close to half a century." Officials in Manila admit troops are stretched, but insist they are gaining the upper hand. Cabinet Secretary Ricardo Saludo says there has been a "major reduction" in N.P.A. troop strength, from 12,000 five years ago to 7,000 or so, and that the armed forces are seizing more N.P.A. weapons than ever. "The Filipino people and the government are working together to reduce all threats to the state, including the N.P.A., while spreading the bounty of economic development nationwide," says Saludo.
Military success against the rebels in Mindanao also depends on restarting peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. After all, the Philippine army would be hard-pressed to fight the M.I.L.F. and the N.P.A. simultaneously, especially at a time when more than 6,000 government troops are already involved in a third entanglement—attacking Abu Sayyaf's jungle strongholds on Jolo Island. Adding to all this bloodshed is the other war: in recent years, but especially in 2006, hundreds of antigovernment activists across the Philippines—labor leaders, lawyers, journalists, even priests—have been assassinated. Many were members of legal left-wing political parties that senior state officials have publicly accused of supporting, and even fighting for, the N.P.A. Local and international human-rights groups suspect the military is involved in the killings, though last month an Arroyo-appointed commission cleared it of blame for a slew of murders in Negros, an island north of Mindanao. The efforts of a previous government task force were stymied by what the New York-based Human Rights Watch called "a climate of fear and a lack of cooperation by military authorities." Human Rights Watch said that victims' families were "afraid to cooperate with police for fear of becoming targets of reprisal." Officials deny soldiers are behind the extrajudicial deaths, while Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez says the N.P.A. itself might be responsible in the hope that such killings might "destabilize" the government.
Yet even without the N.P.A., Arroyo's administration is under siege. So far she has survived two impeachment attempts over allegations of election fraud and human-rights abuses, as well as three coup attempts involving government troops. Some see her declaration of war against the N.P.A. as a concession to the military top brass, which she desperately needs to stay in line. "The military, rather than Arroyo, is pushing the political agenda," says Southeast Asia security expert Abuza. "Arroyo wants to keep the military on her good side. She's always concerned that it will at some point withdraw support for her."
She is right to worry: both Marcos and Arroyo's predecessor, Joseph Estrada, were toppled by popular protests after the army withdrew support for them. Yet Arroyo's reliance on the armed forces could backfire. "There's a lot of concern from Filipinos about their democracy being rolled back," says Abuza. "These military-driven policies certainly play into those perceptions." Ermita counters: "Don't forget that the commander-in-chief is a civilian, and that there is a chain of command which is strictly followed. You cannot militarize the country because this is a democracy, not a military government."
What is beyond dispute is that the government is in seemingly perpetual conflict with a significant portion of its population. The N.P.A. should be a cold war relic, a forgotten insurgency rotting away in the Southeast Asian jungle. Instead—and despite its bloody purges, its "sparrow unit" death squads and its defunct ideology—it remains an enduring symbol of the failure of successive governments to improve the lives of ordinary Filipinos. Deep in the mountains, Comrade Victor has no doubt that his "protracted people's war" will outlast Arroyo's presidency, although in one sense he'll be sad to see her go. Government opponents who now fear for their lives "are being encouraged to take the great leap to join the N.P.A.," he says. "Arroyo is our greatest recruiter."
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