Philippines Communist
Party leaders in danger
In these conditions, it is important to mobilize international solidarity as quickly as possible on behalf of the CPP cadres who have fallen into the hands of the
A leaflet distributed by the Vananu defence committee said: "The Israeli government has shown many times that it shrinks from nothing. Nuclear weapons in such are a real danger for the entire
The only way to tie the hands of people capable of destroying the Iragi nuclear power plant, of killing more than 150 people in less than four months because they
ISRAELI STATE • PHILIPPINES
INTELLIGENCE units of the Philippine army managed to arrest a threw stones and burned tires, of invading number of cadres of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) on
Lebanon to turn it over the the Phalange
March 29 in San Juan, a neighborhood in the Metro Manila urban and let them massacre thousands of men, complex. Among the seven activists captured were national leaders of women and children in Sabra and Shatila is to reveal its secrets in order to alert local and international public opinion. That was
Mordechai Vanunu's choice.
The Vanunu affair has not set off a wave of chauvinist and McCarthyite hysteria of the party.
PAUL PETITJEAN
ACCORDING to the army general staff, the following people were arrested: the sort we saw for example at the time of • Rafael Baylosis, alias Manching or Kumander [Commander] Dong, 39 years the arrests of the so-called spy network led by Daud Turki and Udi Adiv in 1972. Sur- • Romeo "Rolly" Kintanar, the main leader of the New People's Army (NPA), prise rapidly gave way to general indifference. This reflects the profound changes • Benjamin de Vera, alias Kumander Benjie, a member of the Political Bureau that Israeli society has undergone and a heading the commission responsible for following developments in the imporclear weakening of the propaganda about security and its effects on society. • Napoleon Manuel, logistics commander of the NPA, and his wife Inez.
Obviously, it is a different story as re- • Marco Palo, a member of the CPP liaison committee. gards the politicians and the media, who The present president of the CPP, Benito Tiamson, was also supposed to have made a common front against "trea- have been in Manila and to have just escaped being arrested. son," with the Zionist left taking the fore- A year and a half ago, on September 29, 1986, the former president of the front once again in the defence of the party, Rodolfo Salas, was arrested in the capital as he came out of hospital nuclear industry and the secrecy surround- while the government, the National Democratic Front (NDF) and the CPP were negotiating a ceasefire. The lawyer José Diokno, former senator and head of
However, if Mordechai Vanunu wanted the President's Committee on Human Rights, wrote to Cory Aquino shortly beto wake up Israeli society, or at least a part fore his death to protest against the conditions of Salas' imprisonment. of it, about the dangers represented by Is- Known also under the names "Rudy" and "Kumander Bilog," Salas was imraeli nuclear weapons, he failed in his en- prisoned for the first time in June 1973 but he rapidly escaped. Over the years, deavor. If he has received the prestigious he has become one of the CPP cadres most sought by the repressive forces. Alternative Nobel Peace Price, he owes that In November 1987, the army announced that it had captured a former cadre to international solidarity and not to any of the CPP Central Committee, Juanito Rivera; and in February 1988 it annon-existent anti-nuclear movement. nounced that it had arrested the "Committee for the Western Visayas"
statement did not make it clear whether the army was claiming to have arrested all or only part of the committee; the Visayas are a group of islands in the center
Hundreds mobilized in
Vanunu's defence This is the not first time that the CPP has suffered such blows. In the mid1970s, the best known leaders of the CPP (including its president at the time,
Of course, for the first time in Israel, hun- José María Sison, alias Amado Guerrero) and the NPA (Bernabe Buscayno, aldreds of people, including some renowned ias Kumander Dante) were arrested. At the beginning of the 1980s, the best intellectuals, mobilized in defence of Vanu- known leaders respectively of the NDF (Horacio "Boy" Morales) and Christians nu, whose kidnapping in Rome and draco- for National Liberation (Edicio "Ed" de la Torre) also fell. nian detention were real scandals. The Those arrests did not prevent the Communist Party, the guerrillas and the Nacampaign waged by the Committee to De- tional Democratic Movement from continuing to grow. The jailed leaders were fend Vanunu's Rights, for a public trial and released in 1986, after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship. for normal conditions of imprisonment — The army's successful swoop in March 1988 came at a time when the CPP is an end to the total isolation in which he was going through a difficult political period for the left, and at a time when there is kept, an end to mistreatment, the right to every reason to be apprehensive about the fate in store for those arrested see his fiancée — made a certain impact in Amnesty International has just published a report (extensive excerpts will be the media. It make it possible to hear the published in the next issue of International Viewpoint) in which it expresses point of view of the victim, after the author- alarm about a deteriorating situation as regards human rights. It is to be feared, ities had held a monopoly on all informa- in particular, that those imprisoned will be subjected to torture, which is tending tion about the case, in disregard for the most elementary rights of a defendant. State terrorism, both in an official form (murders perpetrated by the army) and
However, the cause for which Mordechai a parallel-police form (the activity of the Philippine "death squads" and vigilante Vanunu was ready to take enormous risks groups), is assuming graver and graver proportions. The factional struggle in and which has cost him 18 years in prison the army is far from ended, as shown by the escape on April 2 of Gregorio today, the exposure of the Israeli nuclear "Gringo" Honasan, the mastermind of the August 1987 putsch, and other mutidanger for those who will be its first victims, is yet to be won.
The future of the Israeli nation is at stake, but this weighs little in the choices of the Zionist leaders. * old, general secretary of the CPP.
in particular of its elite corps.
tant southern island of Mindanao.
of the archipelago).
again to become a general practice.
nous officers.
repressive forces. *