Communist Revolt Alive and Active in Philippines - "tactical alliance" with the Muslim insurgents

SAN AGUSTIN, the Philippines - A seeming anachronism that was almost eliminated in the mid-1990's, the world's longest-running Communist insurgency is coming back to life. It took the Rev. Paul Sahagun by surprise the other day.

He was leading a group of women in choir practice when, without a word of warning, armed soldiers were clambering all over his little whitewashed church - up the stairs, onto the roof, across the terrace.

"I just told the women: `Let's keep on practicing. Just ignore them,' " he said the other day. "All of a sudden we heard shooting, loud shooting." Everybody screamed and ran."

Just beyond the little dirt-floored pool hall beside the church, five Communist rebels were hiding in the shanty of a farmer named Felipe Mallari.

For more than two hours, the priest said, there were bursts of gunfire followed by periods of dead silence. Then the soldiers were carrying out the bodies, four men and a woman.

"People say the girl was just taking a bath, the amazon, and she went inside to change her clothes," said Zenaida Sigua, who owns a tiny grocery opposite the house, using the popular term for the women among the guerrillas. "That's why the amazon, she's the only one fighting. The others, they were taking a snack outside the door, under the guava tree."

So common have such encounters become around the country that this shootout in the rice fields north of Manila drew just four paragraphs in a national newspaper. In the past three years, the Philippines has seen a steep rise in attacks, ambushes and assassinations by the insurgents, as well as raids by the military.

A nationwide movement that feeds on the country's widespread poverty and government abuses, the Communist rebels - the New People's Army - pose a greater potential long-term challenge, according to analysts, than does the Muslim insurgency in the south that today preoccupies the military, as well as the United States.

Active in a number of areas around the country, the insurgents generally operate in small units, although they sometimes carry out attacks with as many as 100 or 200 fighters.

Here in the shadow of Mount Arayat, a rebel stronghold, villagers say the Communists are more active than ever. "Do I feel safe?" said Father Sahagun. "Who feels safe in a place like this? Nobody feels safe."

Adding to the danger, the Communists have threatened to form a "tactical alliance" with the Muslim insurgents, who are fighting a separatist war on the southern island of Mindanao and on smaller neighboring islands. Some of the Muslims are believed to have links with terrorist groups associated with Al Qaeda.

The United States has placed one small, violent band, Abu Sayyaf, on its list of terrorist organizations and earlier this year offered to send some 2,000 troops to help fight it. It is the much larger group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, with which the Communists have been in contact.

Last August, at the request of the Philippine government, Washington also added the Communist insurgency and its front organization, the National Democratic Front, to the list.

A party leader, insisting that only his underground name, Ka Oris, be printed, denied that the Communists' carefully selected targets constitute terrorism. But the designation seems to have fired the insurgency into showier attacks and more belligerent statements, including threats against American military personnel here on training exercises.

"Any deployment of United States troops within or along the periphery of the territory of the revolutionary movement may be regarded as acts of provocation," said Gregorio Rosal, a Communist spokesman.

A freeze on money transfers to terrorist groups also appears to have led to an increase in the extortion of "revolutionary taxes" from plantations, fisheries, logging operations, bus companies, cattle ranches, construction projects and cellular telephone companies, as well as to reprisal raids against those that refuse to comply.

Along with ambushes of military patrols and raids on armories, newspaper reports show, the guerrillas are busy burning farm equipment, logging trucks, bulldozers, generators, buses and cellular telephone relay stations.

The Communist insurgency, founded in the mountains near here 34 years ago, reached its peak in the mid-1980's as the main outlet for opposition against the martial-law rule of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, who was driven from office in 1986.

Undermined by amnesties and weakened by military offensives, surrenders and internal purges, the insurgency withered in the following years. But the poverty and corruption that gave rise to the movement continues to animate it today.

A local reporter who has watched the insurgency come back to life here in central Luzon said that time was on the side of the rebels. "I believe it's easier to recruit these days because people are so poor and there is so much graft and corruption in government," he said.

After the Marcos years, many of the group's leading figures returned to the Philippine mainstream as social workers, professors, even in some cases as prominent members of government.

But the movement's founder, Jose Maria Sison, who had fled to the Netherlands, remained an inflexible Marxist. The party slowly reconstituted itself behind his hard line and began to rebuild its fighting force.

"As long as you have a society that is 40 to 50 percent poor, 40 to 50 percent hungry and 40 to 50 percent oppressed, the grammar of insurgency will be there," wrote Teodoro Benigno, a columnist and former government official, after Washington labeled the movement terrorists.

"You can't expect peace," he wrote. Recruits for the insurgency "are going to be around," he added, "because of poverty and oppression, because of an economy that is a failure and a democracy that does not work."

The revolutionaries might seem quaint if they were not so dangerous, their statements cluttered with the clichés of an earlier century. Ka Oris, the underground leader, said that despite the decline of Communism around the world, it remained the wave of the future.

"It is not a matter of how many revolutionary movements are following the Marxist path," he said. "It is a matter of which path is correct. As for the revolutionary movement in the Philippines, we adhere to Marxism, Leninism and Maoism because it is the right way for a semifeudal and semicolonial country to launch a revolution for its national salvation."

It appears now that a new generation of Philippine rebels is learning to view the world through this ideological prism.

"The future is bright," Ka Oris said. "I would not give a time frame, but I would only say that in the next two or three decades we will see the victory of the revolution."

Look in our own backyard.

Hugo Chavez - Venezuela

Fidel Castro - Cuba

Chávez's Bolivarian Circles in South Florida - 17 around U.S. - Spreading around world *** Circle leaders draw strength from what they say is a growing Bolivarian international network. The U.S. circle members will hold their first national assembly in New York in March, and Chávez representatives from Venezuela plan to attend.

The Venezuelan government also will host an international Bolivarian Circle meeting in April in Caracas. ''There are circles in Bilbao, Madrid, Denmark -- all over the place. It's really neat,'' said Guillermo García Ponce, Chávez advisory committee coordinator, in an interview with The Herald in Caracas. He acknowledged that South Florida has become an anti-Chávez stronghold. ''I suppose [the Miami circle] will have to keep a low profile,'' García said.

Anti-Chávez activists say they do not oppose the presence of a Bolivarian Circle in Miami as long as it doesn't instigate the violence they allege the circles have caused in Venezuela -- a claim Soto and others deny. ''The government has allowed the Bolivarian Circles to attack the newspapers, attack the reporters,'' said Raúl Leoni, a Venezuelan opposition leader who lives in Weston. ``The fact that you win an election doesn't make you eternal if you're not doing your job correctly.''

……………..The Bolivarian Circles -- along with Chávez's controversial 1999 ''Bolivarian constitution'' -- are part of his overarching ``Bolivarian Revolution.'' Some 70,000 circles exist in Venezuela, made up largely of the working class. Typically, they meet weekly and engage in humanitarian projects such as providing food for the poor -- with military financing -- and building schools. Critics compare the circles to Fidel Castro's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.***

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"The Third Way" is a familiar term from the lexicon of the left with a long and dishonorable pedigree in the catastrophes created by messianic socialists in the 20th Century. It is the most ornate panel in the tapestry of deception I described at the beginning of this essay.

In the 1930s, Nazis used "The Third Way" to characterize their own brand of national socialism as a equidistant between the "internationalist" socialism of the Soviet Union and the capitalism of the West. Trotskyists used "The Third Way" as a term to distinguish their own Marxism from Stalinism and capitalism. In the 1960s, New Leftists used "The Third Way" to define their politics as an independent socialism between the Soviet gulag and America's democracy.

But as the history of Nazism, Trotskyism and the New Left have shown, there is no "Third Way." There is the capitalist, democratic way based on private property and individual rights-a way that leads to liberty and universal opportunity. And there is the socialist way of group identities, group rights, a relentless expansion of the political state, restricted liberty and diminished opportunity. The Third Way is not a path to the future. It is just the suspension between these two destinations. It is a bad faith attempt on the part of people who are incapable of giving up their socialist schemes to escape the taint of their discredited past.** * - Source

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