Because they 'oppose U.S. presence'
State Department adds Philippine left to 'terrorist'
list
By Scott Scheffer
The U.S. State Department has added two groups from the
Philippines--the Communist Party of the Philippines and its
armed wing, the New People's Army--to the list of so-called
Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
If this were not such a serious development, it would be
laughable that the U.S. government--currently on the brink of a
catastrophic war against the people of Iraq--is accusing anyone
else of violence or terror.
After all, neither the NPA nor the CPP has dropped 5,000-lb.
bombs from warplanes killing thousands of civilians--the way
the U.S. military has in Afghanistan. Nor has either one
poisoned the land or people with depleted uranium weapons--the
way the U.S. military did in Iraq and Yugoslavia. The list of
just the most recent terror crimes by the Pentagon is long.
Jose Maria Sison, who founded the CPP in 1968, pointed out
in an Aug. 14 news conference that, on the contrary, the NPA
"abides strictly by its own Rules of Discipline." He said all
NPA soldiers are required to adhere to "the Guide for
Establishing the People's Democratic Government, which serves
as the constitution for the areas under NPA control." He
further pointed out that this people's army lives up to the
Geneva Conventions and Protocol I--international law in
situations of internal armed conflict.
The State Department maneuver was unexpected because the
corporate press in the United States has been focused on Abu
Sayyaf--a small group characterized by the Philippine movement
as bandits without any relationship to the progressive
struggle.
U.S. troops had been sent to the Philippines, according to
the media and the government, to combat Abu Sayyaf, not the
NPA.
Yet, suddenly, according to an Aug. 9 State Department memo,
the NPA is being called a terrorist organization because it
"strongly opposes any U.S. presence in the Philippines and has
killed U.S. citizens there."
The charge omits the fact that the U.S. citizens were four
soldiers killed in an NPA attack more than a decade ago, at a
time when the U.S. military had a huge presence at Clark Air
Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base.
Demonstrations against the Pentagon presence had grown so
large and frequent that the brass ultimately had to close both
bases--the two biggest outside the continental U.S. It was a
stinging blow to their imperial prestige. And, it was
politically difficult for the U.S. media, in the atmosphere
that existed at that time, to sensationalize the incident in
which the U.S. soldiers were killed. Better to take the licking
quietly, they probably thought at the time.
Even when the events of Sept. 11, 2001, gave them the
political capital and confidence to try to recoup their losses,
they were compelled to use a campaign against the relatively
insignificant Abu Sayyaf as a way to test the waters for a
renewed U.S. intervention in the Philippines.
A crime to 'oppose U.S. presence'?
The rationale for singling out the NPA--that it "strongly
opposes any U.S. presence in the Philippines"--is also true of
dozens of other Filipino people's organizations. Filipino
sovereignty is a common thread uniting organizations from all
sectors of society, including peasants, students, workers,
groups fighting for the rights of women, gay and transgender
people, the many oppressed indigenous nationalities and the
oppressed Muslims of the southern Philippines.
Since the administration of President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo signed on to the Bush/Cheney "war on
terrorism," stepped-up repression has been launched against all
these people's organizations, as well as a campaign of mass
arrests in the Muslim areas of the south. Defense Secretary
Angelo Reyes, in particular, has been threatening to go after
all the so-called "front groups" of the CPP. The government has
even threatened and red-baited the militant trade union
confederation KMU.
Pentagon military planners have always coveted the
Philippine islands, with their strategic location in the
Pacific, as a forward base in Asia and a stepping stone to
China. From 1898 to 1946, the U.S. military occupied and held
the islands as a colony of Wall Street. Since the humiliation
of being kicked out in 1992, Washington has been looking for an
excuse to return.
The giant U.S. oil companies want to get their hands on the
unknown amounts of oil under the South China Sea, and also make
sure that no one else gains access to nearby deposits of
natural gas off Indonesia--which is 20 percent of the world's
supply.
They've found the Arroyo administration to be more than
helpful, but standing in their way are the 12,000-armed
partisans of the NPA and the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos
who are part of the broad movement opposing U.S.
imperialism.
This movement has proven to be tenacious and formidable. The
imperialists have been proceeding cautiously until now. An
all-out campaign to retake the Philippines would be reckless,
but that doesn't mean it's out of the question.
The anti-war movement here in the United States needs to up
the ante and build real solidarity with the Filipino
struggle.
Reprinted from the Sept. 5, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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