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REVOLUTIONARIES NOT TERRORISTS: Terrorist-tagging is old hat

in Mainstream 
by Vida Gracias

In early December, days after he terminated the peace talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte formally declared as “terrorists” the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA).

But for those who have grown with the revolution in the country for almost 50 years, the demonization of the CPP-NPA started way back since Marcos’ martial-law dictatorship. In fact the reactionary military—then and now—never stopped using the tag “Communist Terrorists” against real, suspected or imagined revolutionaries.

The terrorist tagging has resulted in an all-out war waged against not only the CPP-NPA but against the entire Filipino people—a war that has combined all the worst features of past and present counter-insurgency programs.

People in the countryside have been inured to seeing slogans on billboards, streamers on walls of houses and trees pointing to the NPA, and even to legal organizations, as “terrorists”. The media, including social media, has been utilized extensively to malign the CPP-NPA. But no matter how zealous current and past regimes have been in such demonization campaign, they have failed to make the tag stick on the CPP-NPA.

Why so? Because the CPP-NPA as a revolutionary force is a far cry from terrorists, who employ armed violence and brutality in wantonly killing people and destroying public facilities and private property to foment widespread fear among the populace. The CPP-NPA uses armed force in a revolutionary war against the reactionary state to seize political power and bring about fundamental social, economic and political changes beneficial to the people that would lead to attaining just and lasting peace.

All past regimes have failed to crush and defeat the CPP-NPA. Duterte, after all, was never a good student of history.

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“Back” in the Claws of the American Eagle

in Editorial

Let’s start with a bit of recent history.

In the last quarter of 2001, then US President George W. Bush launched his government’s vindictive global “war on terror” directed at Al Qaeda, the jihadist group that planned and carried out the worldwide-shocking September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York. Bush called on other nation’s leaders for support, with this foreboding line: “If you’re not with me, you’re against me!”

Bush gave his war this high-minded name: “Operation Enduring Freedom.”

The only Asian head of state to publicly respond was Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She lustily welcomed Bush’s designation of the Philippines as the “second front” of that war. “Oplan Enduring Freedom-Philippines (OEF-P)” opened up the country to the large-scale reentry of US troops (US Special Operations Command Pacific deployed 1,500 soldiers to support the government in fighting the Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah).

Of course, US troops had been in the country since 1946 with two large bases: Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base. But in 1991 the American troops were practically ousted, after the Philippine Senate decided to end the RP-US Bases Agreement. Their comeback was facilitated by the deceitfully-crafted RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) which, under new leadership, the Senate ratified in 1999.

Since January 2002, a new mode of annual joint RP-US military exercises was begun. Dubbed as Balikatan, it prescribed joint exercises in actual war zones, particularly in western Mindanao. Teams of fully-armed American soldiers, as “advisers” and “trainers,” accompanied Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) troops in combat operations mainly against the Abu Sayyaf.

A full-scale war to wipe out the Abu Sayyaf was subsequently planned. The US set up an all-American Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF) inside a Philippine base in Zamboanga City. Batches of US troops, 600 per, were deployed on rotating tours of duty such that, at any one time, there were that number of US soldiers in the country.

That arrangement ended in February 2015. The US removed its JSOTF in the wake of the botched anti-terrorist operation, involving US military assistance, which ended up in the Mamasapano massacre of 44 officials and men of the PNP Special Action Force. But the 14-year drive to wipe out the Abu Sayyaf failed.

Fast forward to 2017.

On September 1 last year, US Defense Secretary James Mattis designated—in total secrecy both in the US and the Philippines—“Operation Pacific Eagle-Philippines”(OPE-P) as the Trump administration’s “overseas contingency operation” in Southeast Asia. Unlike in 2001, when Bush and Arroyo went high profile, this time Donald Trump was silent. So was Rodrigo Duterte.

As detailed in a quarterly report to the US Congress by the US Lead Inspector General, Glenn A. Fine, (dated Oct. 1-Dec. 31, 2017), what Mattis officially launched was a bilateral comprehensive campaign “to assist the (AFP) in their effort to isolate, degrade, and defeat affiliates of the Islamic State (of Iraq and Syria) and other terrorist organizations that do not profess a connection to ISIS (emphasis ours).”

(This editorial’s title uses the word “back” to reflect Duterte’s abandonment of his erstwhile public stance to “move away from the US.” In his speech in Tokyo, Japan, in October 2016, he reiterated that he would abrogate executive agreements with the US, if necessary, to pursue an independent foreign policy. He said: “I want, in the next two years, my country free from the presence of foreign military troops. The Philippines can live without the assistance of the US…”).

OPE-P is fully funded by the US. In 2017, the US Department of Defense (DoD) provided US$16 million from its Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Fund. Its 2018 and 2019 budgets have not yet been determined, pending completion of the funding requirements being identified by the DoD, the Pacific Area Command (PACOM), and US military departments concerned.

It has no termination period. It will end, says the report, “when the AFP no longer requires US military assistance to address its internal terrorist threat.” Given the persistence of the Abu Sayyaf, the Maute group, the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters—much more, of the New People’s Army (in irrational anger in December, Duterte declared the NPA as a “terrorist organization” along with the Communist Party of the Philippines)—when can the AFP say it no longer need US aid?

The report points out that, “as with all US military operations in the Philipines, OPE-P is conducted at the request of the Philippine government.” US and Philippine military leaders, it adds, meet annually at 4-star level to discuss the scope of the coming year’s bilateral defense cooperation and training programs.

Under OPE-P, the report notes, the US special operations forces continue to be “advising and assisting the AFP.” All military operations are supposedly conducted “by, with, and through Filipino forces.” This qualification, used since the first Balikatan exercises, is intended to shield the US “advisers” and “trainers” from being called to account for human rights violations in the conduct of military operations.

Obviously sanitized, the report to the US Congress has not dwelt on the political and geopolitical implications of the OPE-P’s implementation. Let’s therefore look at some of the reactions to its launching in September.

Prof. Roland Simbulan of the University of the Philippines, who has written several books and articles about US military intervention in the country and elsewhere, said:

“(OPE-P) marks a new era of US military intervention in the Philippines. Internally, it is directed against the Philippine Left and externally, (at using) the Philippines as springboard to reassert US military power in the Pacific. It is Trump’s way of supporting the creeping authoritarianism in the country while using US military force and assets to make sure that Duterte does not change [his stand] on US military presence [in relation to China].”

Sociology Prof. William Robinson of the University of California concurred with Simbulan’s view. He backstopped it by citing historical precedents when the US used the Philippines as “principal rearguard and staging point” for its interventionist wars against North Korea (1950s) and against North Vietnam (1960s-70s). “The US military presence was also the hinge around which the counterinsurgency war was organized against the NPA in the 1970s and 1980s.”

Prof. Jose Ma. Sison, chief political consultant of the NDFP peace negotiating panel, observed:

“It is very clear to Trump that the Duterte regime is securely a puppet of US imperialism. All the major treaties, agreements and arrangements that have tied the Philippines to the US economically, politically, culturally, and militarily remain intact. Trump’s comment reflects the fact that the US dominates the Philippines as its ‘most prime real estate’ in Southeast Asia and is an important forward base of the US in the East Asia-Pacific region.”

As to the NPA’s response to OPE-P, national spokesperson Ka Oris undauntedly stated:

“Expanding the mass base, strengthening and expanding the NPA through trainings and massive recruitments, making sure the revolutionary work is done in a comprehensive manner—to ensure that the guerilla forces and bases can withstand and outlast the relentless attacks from enemy forces.”

These, Ka Oris said, must be done “alongside the strengthening and adaptation of the NPA and the people to US sophisticated weapons, such as surveillance and attack drones, that the (AFP) forces are already using against civilian communities.”�Last words from Prof. Sison:

“It would be politically and financially costly, at the expense of the people, if the Duterte regime relies solely on its ‘all-out-war’ policy, Oplan Kapayapaan and Operation Pacific Eagle-Philippines and tries to bribe the AFP, PNP and paramilitaries to go on a rampage of mass murder with P25,000 for the killing of every suspected or maliciously listed ‘NPA member.’ ”

Let’s follow through how this revived US imperialist “contingency operation” will proceed, and be militantly ready to expose and oppose every anti-people project it will launch.

Download our October-December 2017 issue

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Word War

“Doing determines being.” This Marxist maxim means you’re called a teacher if you teach, a business man if you do

Pola: A Woman Toiler Turned Warrior

in Mainstream
(Adapted from “Manggagawa, Mandirigma” by Ka Lina published in Ulos 2016)
by Pat Gambao

With the persistent pursuit for gender equality, women have transcended the patriarchal norm that a woman’s place is in the sanctity of home. With the advance of capitalism, women have entered new arena where their capability, vitality and intellect are recognized or rather harnessed. Yet as women toilers in factories and business establishments, they continue to experience the same degree, if not greater, of discrimination and exploitation.

Initiation to the world of the working class

Raised in a poor family who eked out a living from peddling food stuff for snacks in their barrio, Pola managed to finish high school but failed to pursue her dream of a college degree. Instead, she enrolled in a two-year course in a vocational school through the government’s “study-now-pay-later program”. In that so-called dual training, their only claim to being a student was the ID issued to them. They didn’t have a permanent classroom to pursue formal studies. Perhaps there really was no need as all they were taught to familiarize with different materials－wires, connectors and how to tape them together to assemble the harness of a vehicle. All they were taught were companies’ business concerns. In a semi-feudal society that served as mere supplier of semi-finished products to transnational corporations, perhaps those were all they need to know.

After three months, Pola and her classmates were sent to a factory for on-the-job training as part of the course. They were supposed to be student trainees yet they were made to work like regular workers as relievers or substitutes to absentees. They received P240 per day’s work, part of which went to payment of their tuition fees. The remaining one and a half years of the course were spent in the factory with such meager pay and without any benefit, not even the mandatory social security for workers.

Despite the rigor of the job, Pola worked hard, patiently waiting for the training to end in the hope that she would be taken in as apprentice. She got the job, true, but it did not take long before she was laid off.

Travails of a woman toiler

Thus began Pola’s rollercoaster journey into the world of commodity labor, exacerbated by the onslaught of imperialism’s neoliberal globalization as it dashed fumbling for a panacea to its crisis. The woman’s values of good-naturedness, patience and subservience inculcated by a feudal class society were fully taken advantage of.

Pola later applied as a saleslady in a well-known mall in their province. But she resigned after a month. She could not stand the difficult working condition and the ridiculous and repressive policy of the establishment. For a measly wage, she had to remain standing the whole day to reach her quota for the brand of dress apparels she was selling. There was a time when she was reprimanded for bringing her handkerchief inside the store without first registering it. Personal belongings had to be registered before bringing them in lest you would be accused of stealing.

From the job in the mall, Pola worked in an electronics company where she assembled “male” and “female” terminals used in television sets. But after more or less four months, her contract ended. This was the endo (end of contract) they call in the labor lingo.

Pola ended up in a food factory, where she was hired through an agency. With a spoon, she raced after the cups of noodles to determine if the noodles and condiments were of the right quantity or if needed to be reduced, add on, or changed. Also, if the machine that put on the cup lids was out of order, she had to do it manually. They worked by shifts in the factory. There were three shifts in all. But if a worker for the next shift was absent, she was obliged to take over and work up to 16 hours. Then again, it was endo after five months.

Pola also tried working as caddie in a golf course. She was an umbrella girl who trod on the heels of the golfer to shed him from the sunlight. But unable to stand the harassment from her bosses, she left the job after two months.

Through an employment agency in Makati, Pola was back as a factory worker. This time it was in a company manufacturing plastic lids for bottles of lotions, medicines, etc. Initially, her job was trimming the extra plastic around the lids to even them out; later, she was transferred to the packaging section. Sometimes, she relieved the operator of the machine that molds the lids.

As trimmer her quota was 6,000 plastic lids a day. Due to the thinness of the lids and the absence of a protective devise, her fingers often got wounded. As instant remedy, she would put on some adhesive tapes. But in the long run, her fingers have become numbed that she would not mind at all anymore. If she had not reached her quota, she was obliged to go on “overtime-thank you”, meaning overtime without pay. Again, after five months, endo. But she could continue working there as an “extra”－ doing the same work, but with lower pay and without a contract.

Since life is difficult for Pola, any job is a welcomed treat just to earn a living.

The dawning of revolutionary consciousness

One day, coming home from an arduous day’s work in the factory, Pola met some students who stayed in their community. She was invited to sit-in to their discussions on the Philippine society and revolution. That awakened her to the stark realities－the immense oppression and exploitation of workers like her, as well as of peasants, professionals, youth, women and other sectors in society. She learned that their affliction was not destined. It was designed－a sinister scheme of the ruling class to hold on to power and wealth. But the greatest lesson she learned from their discussions was the solution to the people’s problems.

Pola could not contain her rage, as well as anxiety, with that realization. All along she had been entertaining the thought of leaving her job in the factory which did nothing but extract the workers life blood and sinew to accumulate huge profits for the capitalists. After thinking it over for days, weeks, and on to several months, Pola finally decided to work full time in the movement. This was the most decisive action she took in her whole life. She has the chance now to look at life from a different perspective and open up to new opportunities, best opportunities.

Sometimes, she reminisced about her past life in the factory, in the mall, in the golf course and how she spent it in vain. She could do nothing about it now but it would serve as a potent inspiration for her to get involved and take action to change this oppressive, unjust structure.

Smashing the chains

After more than a year of working in an urban center, Pola is now Ka Lina, a red warrior of the New People’s Army. She no longer held spoons, wires, connectors, dresses, umbrellas or plastic lids. She now carries an armalite. The broad countryside is her school and each day they delve into the strategies of the people’s war that will topple the semi-colonial, semi-feudal structures that oppress the people.

She is optimistic about the future, not only hers and her family’s, but also of the coming generations. Although she may not live to see victory, she is confident that time will come when the wealth that the people produce will serve not only a few but all. She vows to commit everything about her for the revolution, which will liberate the people from the fetters of exploitation and oppression.###

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Solving the Drug Problem (Part 3 of 3)

in Mainstream

The New People’s Army  fight vs Drugs

by Pat Gambao

Aware of the disastrous consequences on people, the society and the revolution, the revolutionary movement from its inception has been fighting the drug menace—long before Duterte started his own “drug war”.

The organs of political power in the guerrilla zones have impressed on the masses the dangers of addictive drugs. In conjunction with this, they helped the masses cope with the prevailing conditions that forced them to turn to drugs either for the money to beat the debilitating poverty or to escape from its reality. People were organized and they joined hands to increase production and income. They were initiated to meaningful activities. They were trained for tasks on health care and education to fill in the vacuum left in the far-flung barrios by the reactionary government. The youth were drawn to sports and cultural activities that challenge their vibrant energy and creativity.

Through political education the masses have been enlightened and have fully understood the root cause of their problems and the solution that is in their very hands. Their awakening has instilled in them a sense of purpose for being. With these the scourge of addictive drugs was eventually licked as they imbibed the revolutionary discipline.

In 2015 for example, the revolutionary youth movement, Kabataang Makabayan (KM, Patriotic Youth) in Central Luzon launched various activities in their respective barrios to draw the youth, as well as adults, away from marijuana and shabu. The KM conducted forums on the youth situation and how the decadent system has engendered the problems of drugs and criminality. It led meetings with the barrio youth to plan on productive activities with them. They formed a basketball league and held tournaments lasting for one and a half months. Some 50 youth participated in the tournaments initially. The number swelled later.

Simultaneous with these activities, the New People’s Army (NPA) in coordination with the Party branches issued series of warnings to pushers and users in the barrios of Central Luzon. The NPA, in coordination with the KM, widely disseminated the policy of the revolutionary movement and the people’s democratic government on the trafficking and use of drugs, be it in small or huge volume.

Meantime, drug traffickers, their activities, networks and laboratories in the guerrilla fronts of Panay were banned. The Coronacion Chiva “Waling-waling” Command of the NPA uprooted the marijuana plantations in Barangay Buloc, Tubungan town a few years back. Two years ago, a known drug dealer was arrested, disarmed and driven out of the NPA front after bringing in drugs in a town in Capiz. In April 2016, the Napoleon Tumagtang Command, also based in Panay Island, launched a campaign against illegal drugs in barangays surrounding the town of Tubungan. The drug production facilities of drug lord Edwin Odicta in the NPA area and the entry of the Richard Provendido’s drug syndicate in San Joaquin, Iloilo has been subject of NPA’s surveillance. Odicta was shot by an unidentified man on his way back home from Manila while Provendido was killed in a police operation.

In 2016, the revolutionary movement in Northern Samar investigated illegal drug trafficking that implicated high officials of the province.

In the Southern Mindanao Region, the NPA has launched tactical offensives to dismantle the network of operation of drug syndicates. A police chief here once said that criminality and drug addiction is practically absent in areas where the NPA is strong. In the Central Mindanao Region, the NPA burned marijuana plantations run by the killer paramilitary group Alamara.

Aware of the NPA’s fight against drugs, Duterte has once called on them to run after drug lords. However, seeing that the Duterte regime’s war on drugs is clearly anti-democratic and anti-people, having become a frenzied campaign of extrajudicial killings and vigilante murders perpetrated by the police and police-linked criminal syndicates, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) withdrew its support to the regime’s drug campaign.

The revolutionary movement recognizes that the drug plague is rooted in the basic problems confronting the Filipino people—the historic imperialist dominance perpetuating the feudal and bureaucrat capitalist conditions in the country. The NPA will continue its anti-drug campaign but will adhere to its policy of differentiating poor drug users and victims of drug abuse from the rabid perpetrators of the drug trade. The NPA will continue to intensify its campaign to arrest and disarm drug trade operators and protectors in its territory.

The revolutionary movement has its own criminal justice system and offenders are given due process as well as due punishment. Meanwhile poor drug victims will be rescued and rehabilitated through political education and meaningful activities.

SOLVING THE DRUG PROBLEM (Part 1 of 3):
Duterte’s Drug War: Via Body Count or the People’s Movement
SOLVING THE DRUG PROBLEM (Part 2 of 3):
China’s Experience Under Mao

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