IN the following pages, we print a long report by Walden Bello on perceptions among activists of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) of the state of that organization. Walden Bello is a Fili-
Communist Party at the crossroads
Introduction by Paul Petitjean pino currently living in the United States who has played a leading role in solidarity activities there through the establishment of the Forum for Philippine Alternatives ((FOPA). He has written a number of works on the Third World and is an executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy.
The following document is a revised version of a talk given in San Francisco on July 30, 1992, to a public meeting organized by the FOPA. Since its publication in the US magazine Philippines Alternatives the report has been reprinted in two other journals produced by the Filipino left: Debate, produced in the Netherlands, and Kasarinlan which comes out in Manila-Quezon City. The version published here is taken from Debate #4,
September 1992. This level of interest is easily explained. Not only does Bello give a platform to some 20 CPP and National Democratic Front (NDF) cadres; he also throws light on some important elements of the crisis in which these organizations find themselves and thereby touches on some basic questions of principle.
In particular he pays considerable attention to the purges that stained the CPP in the southern island of
Mindanao in 1985-86 and in South Tagalog, a region in the northern island of Luzon in 1988.
In both these cases, campaigns aimed at weeding out infiltrators sent in by the military (so-called DPAs, or
Deep Penetration Agents), let loose collective paranoia leading to the execution of perhaps hundreds of innocent people. Bello describes this as a "crime against humanity" committed inside the revolutionary movement in the grip of a fatally self-destructive dynamic.
Walden Bello asked those he spoke to - some of whom were directly involved in these traumatic events - how such a catastrophe could have happened. The answers, however piecemeal, touch on problems common to other organizations engaged in armed struggle: legal guarantees inside a clandestine party, the effect of militarist conceptions, safeguards against outbreaks of collective paranoia, Marxism and the notion of "class justice", and respect for human life and human rights
Walden Bello's "report of an investigation" is all the more important in that it has come at a moment when the CPP is in the grip of unprecedented debate and internal political struggles. For some years now, a growing number of Communist party militants have been calling for a comprehensive discussion on the lessons of their struggle in the Philippines and on the crisis of the "socialist camp".
The central leadership has postponed the opening of such a debate indefinitely; one attempt to stimulate such a debate - announced in the central committee's journal Ang Bayan in January 1991
- has been stamped on.
The stifling of debate has only made the internal crisis worse. Kasarilan has just published two documents that show this. The first is a long text by
Armando Liwanang, the CPP president, who wants to "reaffirm" the "basic principles" of the party and "rectify the misand for a long time the CPP's main theoretician.
12 future issues of IV. *
International Viewpoint # 240 • December 7, 1992
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PHILIPPINES The Philippine
THE following is Bello's report on the crisis in the Communist Party of the Philippines. He plans on eventually interviewing other members of the Philippine left such as activists in the independent socialist organization Bisig, the left wing Social Democrats and the Movement for Popular Democracy. DOCUMENT
HE central question I posed was the following: Was the movement "in crisis? Most said yes it was in crisis. Only two did not say it was in crisis one giving his answer after thinking aloud for about two minutes, the other offering a vague reply.
As an indicator of the crisis, several respondents came up with the same set of figures: a 40 percent decline in "organized forces" and a similar 40 percent reduction in territories controlled by the NPA in the
Some qualified this figure by saying that in the last two years, there has been some recovery, especially in Mindanao, while others said that recently recovered territories were cancelled out by new territories lost to the Armed Forces of the Philippines. But among those who gave figures, most agreed that the number of organized forces still remains significantly below the figure
But was the movement "marginalized"? To this, there was a more equatable division, with about half saying yes and other half responding in the negative.
What were the reasons for the crisis? There were different factors emphasized by different people. But let me discuss in some detail the principal reason pointed
One key factor cited was effective AFP counter-guerilla operations. After Aquino came to power in 1986, the AFP was able to form three extra divisions or about 30 battalions, a move made possible by releasing units which had been previously pinned down in Manila by the necessity of guarding Marcos during the dictatorship.
This enabled the military to saturate a target area with troops and keep them there for an extended period even if the NPA turned up the heat in other guerilla fronts to relieved pressure on the first front. This time there were reserve troops that could be dispatched to deal with guerilla activity
This was the case in Central Luzon in the late 1980's according to a former member of the CL regional leadership. Under sustained military pressure, the guerillas had to abandon and could not return to long established base areas. Deprived of guerilla protection, revolutionary mass organizations in these areas could be maintained only with great difficulty, leading to a marked reduction in political activity and revo-
Another reason cited by some respondents was related to intense militarization. This was war weariness in the peasant base. According to one former high-ranking officer of the NPA, "Peasants are shrewd. You can't expect them to keep fighting indefinitely if they cannot taste the fruit of their struggle their own land -except on the distant future.
They weigh the costs exacted by their revolutionary participation - which might include children who were recruited into the NPA - against this promise, and you can understand why many might scale down their commitment."
While not discounting the impact of militarization, some respondents put more emphasis on internal failings, in particular on what they regarded as the "militarization" of the left's strategy. They said that up until 1990, the left's strategy for coming to power was heavily oriented toward a military seizure of power.
Assuming that there was a "revolutionary flow" in the late 1980s, the CPP focused the movement's energies on expanding the NPA, upgrading the size of its units to battalion level in preparation for mobile warfare, and acquiring heavy weaponry, like mortars, that would be decisive during a period that would be marked by what the leadership called the "strategic counterof-
Neglect of mass movement
This emphasis on military work resulted in serious neglect of the mass movement of the peasantry in the rural areas, and little energy devoted to figuring out new creative forms of intervention in the legal and electoral arenas. The notion of the strategic counteroffensive, these respondents noted, was dropped only two years ago, in 1990.
Others saw the overemphasis, on military work as a manifestation of a deeper problem, which they traced to the inability of the movement's leadership to devise a strategy appropriate to the new period inaugurated by the Aquino assassination in 1983 and the EDSA uprising of 1986 which would take into account several key developments, including!:
• The shifting of much political debate from the underground to above ground as
PHILIPPINES the dictatorship's capacity for control eroded;
• The key role played by the politicized middle class or middle forces in the antidictatorship movement, which necessitated careful united front tactics and new, sophisticated ways of popularizing the NDF program to appeal to these new
• The continuing vitality of the tradition of formal, democratic electoral politics as a source of political legitimacy, not only among the middle class but also the peasantry and workers.
Related to this last point, some respondents felt that the orthodox CPP analysis is too economistic or reductionist and does not pay enough attention to culture, consciousness and values. As one of them put it, just because economic indictors show that things are going from bad to worse does not mean that people interpret the totality of the situation from going from bad to worse. Traditional political attitudes remain strong, even among the organized
Strength of traditional values
As one person in the NDF leadership pointed out, a number of NPA-controlled areas in Isabela and Cagayan went for Eduardo Cojuangco and Imelda Marcos in the recent elections.?
A reductionist analysis would not be able to explain this phenomenon, he said, but one sensitive to the continuing strength of traditional values would be able to understand that even politicized peasants have what he called a "split-level conscious-
He also lamented the fact that Antonio Gramsci, whom he regarded as the Marxist thinker with the most profound insights into the role of culture in revolution, still has to make the CPP's reading list of indispensable readings.
Among other factors precipitating the crisis, a few mentioned the collapsed of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. However, most of these respondents were quick to qualify that the impact of socialism's break-up was felt not so much within the rank and file of the the party and NDF but mainly among middle level cadres about the crisis of socialism 1. In 1983 the leader of the opposition, Benigno Aquino was assassinated by the Marcos dictatorship. This led to mass anti-regime demonstrations throughout the urban centers. The political crisis reached a height in February 1986 during the presidential elections with a military rebellion and a peaceful mass uprising under the name EDSA in reference to the location of the army barracks. 2. Isabela and Cagayan are two provinces where the Communist guerillas have been long present as have been powerful political clans" who had been tied to the dictatorship. Eduardo Cojuangco was a leading She dictar Both were candidates in the 1992 elec. 13 businessman under Marcos. Imelda is the widow of
International Viewpoint # 240 • December 7, 1992
PHILIPPINES said that it has had a profound impact on them.
Their attitude, he said, could be summed thus: "Why should we keep fighting for socialism if in the end people might just throw us out?" A combination of the internal crisis and the international crisis of socialism, he suspected, was behind the dropping out of organized underground life of many middle-ranking CPP cadres.
A final reason for the crisis of the left was what some characterized as self inflicted wounds". They were referring tp the "Anti-DPA Campaigns" in Mindanao from September 1985 to March 1986 and in Southern Tagalog in 1988.3 Whereas in
1988 and 1989, the CPP leadership still saw the two campaigns as justified while lamenting their "excesses", by 1990, the two campaigns were characterized as "madness" that swept the ranks, with no redeeming value.
This characterization is more than justified, for in Mindanao, several hundred cadre were reported to have been executed in these efforts to ferret out
AFP agents that were feared to have infiltrated the NDF-NPA-
CPP structure. The high estimate for those killed in Mindanao is 900, the low estimate 600
Since several reports place the number of those executed in
Southern Tagalog at less 100, I will provisionally use 700 as the figure for total casualties.
"Madness"
The label "madness" is apt for another reason: whereas in other revolutionary movements, similar purges on such a scale took place after the seizure of power, in the
Philippines it occurred before the seizure of power, something which is rare in revolutionary history.
It almost seemed as if the movement was intent on eliminating itself, for not only were precious lives squandered in Mindanao and Southern Tagalog but hundreds of trained cadres were eliminated on whose development the party had spent a lot of resources and time.
The people killed were indispensable parts of the backbone of the revolutionary movement, and it is hardly a cause for surprise that the NDF movement in Mindanao suffered such serious reversals in 1986 and
Why did such massive purges take place? The respondents gave a variety of explanations, the most important of which were the following: The movement was illprepared to carry out an internal security
14 campaign since the methods of dispensing justice had not been institutionalized.
The party groups that carried out the investigation of suspected infiltration were the same groups that arrested the suspects, interrogated them, judged them and execu ted them. This violated the judicial principal that these different tasks must be carried out by different people to assure impartiality.
### Tremendous frustrations
According to some respondents, these explanations are incomplete and the real cause lies deeper, that is, in the militarization of strategy. According to this analysis, the desire for quick military victories crea-
In the name of peac Hey hey hey! For everlasting peace... ted tremendous frustrations when NPA plan were foiled by the AFP.
Reports that some NPA officials were shot in the back during firefights then provided the spark that turned these frustrations into a feverish search for saboteurs in the ranks that ran out of control. The "insurrectionary line" as the basic cause of the purges is a line of explanation endorsed by a very influential CPP leader, who implies that they would not have occurred had the movement continued the emphasis on careful political organizing entailed by the classical strategy of "protracted people's war".
The problem with this analysis is that while the movement in Mindanao could be characterized as having followed the insurrectionary line, the same cannot be said of the movement in Southern Tagalog, which if anything, was marked by an adherence to the classical people's war strategy. Yet the same paranoidal dynamics of the Mindanao ahos (garlic) campaign marked the Southern anti-DPA campaign.
Probably a key part of the explanation is a phenomenon that was described by a number of respondents: collective paranoia. I tended to discount this until I began hearing the very graphic description of people who had participated either a victims or as executioners in the purges. Paranoia, it seemed, took on a momentum of its own in Mindanao after some reports of some suspicious cases of death in battle of
NPA commanders.
Given the momentum of the paranoia, it is difficult to fault solely the CPP leadership, since there were times that when the leadership itself seemed to be carried by the momentum of paranoia sweeping the ranks. Of course, the regional leadership bodies in Southern Tagalog and
Mindanao must bear a great deal of the responsibility, not only for initiating the campaign but for failing decisively to stop it once it appeared that it was getting out of hand.
But, to underline the complexity of the situation, one respondents said that had individuals within the national or regional leadership stepped forward to object at the height of the campaign in Southern
Tagalog, there was a good chance that they might be arrested by the campaign committees and thrown into the stockade, if not worse.
Indeed, a leading personality of the NDF said that he could not intervene lately for fear of being tagged a DPA and possibly loosing his life. In such a situation, he said, his status and prestige would not count for much.
Momentum of paranoia
To give you a-sense of the momentum of paranoia, let me recount the story of Teresa
(not her real name), a young activist who was involved in the anti-DPA committee in one of the regions of Minadanao. At first, she was recruited mainly to be one of the recording secretaries. Then step by step she became a judge, as the head of the committee began to regularly consult her on the guilt or innocence of the people being arrested, many of whom she knew.
At this point, she said that she gave a guilty verdict, both because she felt that they were guilty, but also because she felt
3. "DPA" stands for Deep Penetration Agents"
army agents sent into revolutionary organizations.
December 7, 1992 that the campaign committee head wanted her to say that they were guilty, and she could not afford to do so for fear of her own security. Soon she was asked to participate in torturing people during interrogation, and she felt compelled, in fact, to hit the victims for fear that had she refused, the finger of accusation would be on her.
Out of control
Paranoia became normal, the number of victims mounted, and she became resigned to eventually becoming a victim herself.
The campaign had, in fact, run out of everyone's control while everyone felt compelled at the same time to fuel it, and it was not surprising that it ended, like the French
Revolution's Reign of Terror, with the party member most responsible for the executions - the head of the campaign - being himself executed.
The Reign of Terror, in fact, continually leaped to mind when she and others were recounting the events in
Mindanao and Southern
Tagalog. Just as in Mindanao, paranoia reigned, as the
Revolution first consumed
Danton, then Saint Just, then
Robespierre himself.4
The parallel is important because, contrary to conservative propaganda, it is not only Marxist mass movements that are susceptible to self-inflicted bloodletting but probably all mass movements, be they Marxist, nationalist, bourgeois or fascist.
it for
What means progressive movements, though, is that they must not only institute guidelines for_ the dispensing of justice, but equally important, guidelines for the scientific investigation and assessment of political phenomena.
And above all, guidelines for the preservation of common sense - common sense which would tell you that it would be endowing the AFP with superhuman powers to think that over a number of years it could infiltrate hundreds of people within a revolutionary movement who would not reveal themselves but behave day to day as earnest revolutionaries, who were so good that they fooled their wives, children and closest friends!
Such guidelines are especially important given the results of the two anti-DPA campaigns: in Mindanao, only about five people were proven to be likely enemy agents, and of these five, only three were guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt. In other words, to net five AFP agents, some 600 lives were sacrificed. Not only was this criminal and tragic. It was also shockingly senseless.
Surely this was one of the worse internal security campaigns carried out in the history of revolutionary movements internationally! Having said that, one must also point out, however, that, except possibly for Manila-Rizal (where intensive arrests and interrogations occurred, though with few executions carried out), the anti-DPA campaign did not gain momentum in other regions, an in many cases, in Central Luzon, this was because the regional leadership intervened decisively early on to prevent paranoia from spreading by lashing discussion and debate to the mast of com-
The paranoia explanation does not, however, satisfy other respondents. One person, a prominent leaders of the NDF, speculated that the ultimate cause might be Marxism's concept of "class justice" According to him, Marxism does not have a developed concept of individual rights; individuals have rights, in other words, only by virtue of their membership in the right classes or, failing that, in their holding the right politics.
### Paradoxical events
Thus, if an individual is suspected or judged to be a class enemy, he or she has no innate rights to life, liberty and respect, and what happens to him depends purely on the tactical needs of the movement. Thus, one may release AFP prisoners for propaganda
PHILIPPINES points while, at the same time, executing
CPP cadres who were judged as DPA's.
And indeed, this seemingly paradoxical event occurred in Southern Tagalog during the 1988 purge.
I have gone back and forth on this expla nation, thinking initially that it was the root cause of the Mindanao and Southern Tagalog events. Currently, while I think that while it was principally the absence of an institutionalized system of justice and scientific assessment that allowed paranoia to spread unchecked, a tactical view of individuals - a tendency to evaluate their worth mainly on whether or not they advance or obstruct the left's class-determined political objectives — also played a role.
An instrumental view of people is a tendency that affects particularly activists in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, making them vulnerable during moments of paranoia at the height of the revolutionary struggle to expediant solutions involving the physical elimination of real or imagined enemies. In normal times, the combination of a tactical view of people, ideological fervor, youth and the gun already carries a threat potential. Touched off by social paranoia, it can easily become an uncontrollable force, as it did in Mindanao and Southern Tagalog.
Thus, while not placing the principal emphasis on the class view of justice in explaining the purges, I fully agree with this particular NDF leader's recommendation that
CPP and NDF activists must internalize the fact that individuals have innate rights to life, freedom and respect and other valued conditions that come with their being human, that individual rights do not derive from class membership or political ideology.
This particular respondent, incidently, felt extremely guilty that he did not intervene to stop the process for fear of his own life. His intervention might have saved lives, he said, but he failed to take what would have been the most glorious move in his life for fear of the consequences of defying the "power of collective consen-
But fear and trembling, to pirate a phrase from Kierkegaard, was not the only story.
There were also profiles in courage, like the Central Committee member who insisted from the very beginning that the Sou-
4) Robespierre, Saint-Just and 102 others were executed berven July 28-31, 1794 following the coup 1 5 d'Etat of the ninth of Thermidor (July 27 1794).
International Viewpoint # 240• December 7, 1992
PHILIPPINES / USA thern Tagalog executions were wrong and persisted in his convictions even when the finger of accusation threatened to close in on him. And of course, there were the cadres who accepted their fate but still their loyalty to the Philippine Revolution even as they were being executed.
But, you ask, why do I dwell on this shameful episode of the Philippine revolutionary movement?
First, because it contributed significantly to setting back the movement. Certainly in Mindanao, the main factor reversing the revolution in the mid and late eighties was the anti-DPA campaign. Not only because of the loss of personnel but also because practically all political work in both the city and the countryside was suspended for months as the movement turned on itself during the critical period from September 1985 to March 1986, when the Marcos regime fell and the Aquino administration consolidated itself.
Second, for the sake of shedding light on tumultuous events that had such a crippling impact on the morale of hundreds if not thousands of people and directly or indirectly contributed to their leaving or lying low. Ignorance, confusion and rumor continue to surround not only the general public's perception of these events but also that of the ordinary NDF and party activist.
Making public the truth about Mindanao and Southern Tagalog would not only be an important step in the CPP leadership's regaining of the cadre's confidence in its leadership. It is also the best weapon against the distortion that the AFP and the right have spread regarding the purges, a lot of which were picked up by such reactionary papers as the Wall Street Journal.
### Never again
Third, because by carefully analyzing what happened, we can make sure it never, never happens again. These were lives snuffed out in their prime, an nobody can bring them back. This was, let us admit it, a crime against humanity. But it is a crime that must be placed within the context of a civil war in which the other side — the Armed Forces of the Philippines — was guilty of even graver violations, including the indiscriminate shooting of non-combatants, as in the Lupao massacre and the Mendiola massacre.
And finally, I dwell on this episode because the CPP's willingness to confront its responsibility for it and acknowledge its guilt should give us all hope that it has a future in the Philippine progressive movement. It must also be said in this connection that the CPP has made an effort to identify relatives of the victims and that the whole Mindanao Commission has offered 16 action. While these actions can never make to resign and be subjected to discipline up for the lives lost, they are nevertheless not insignificant.
Another development that gives me hope is the openness with which many CPP and NDF officials received our Forum's initiatives. A leaders ion one of the party's national commissions, in fact, asked if the Forum's activities could be more organically tied to the process of renovation within the party. I had to say, however, that the Forum was a pluralistic endeavor that was concerned with the whole whole progressive movement, not just one sector.
Having said that, let me just emphasize that the renovation of the party is important not only for the national democratic movement as a whole because of the CPP's centrality. Indeed, at this time it is not so much competition that marks the current attitude of most other sectors of the movement towards the CPP as concern for its future.
As one leader of Bisig put it, "We all have a stake in the CPP and the ND movement not disintegrating because this would weaken all of us. Whatever our differences, we have a stake in the renewal of the ND movement."
But before concluding, let me just address an opposite advanced by some other people. We shouldn't worry too much about the future of the CPP and the NDF, they argue, because they have already performed their historical function.
For one, the CPP and NDF have produced scores of politically conscious activists who are now the mainstays of non-governmental organizations and people's organizations whether or not they remain part of the ND movement.These NGO's and PO's, on this view, are now supplanting the traditional political organizations of the left as the backbone of the "new movement"
I disagree with this perspective. I think that although they are very vibrant, NGO's and PO's cannot step effectively into the role played by the parties of the left, which is to articulate a comprehensive vision and strategy for change.
The role of NGO's and PO's is to articulate sectoral and community needs, not serve as a thousand and one spontaneous substitutes for a comprehensive movement such as the ND movement. NGO's and political parties are complimentary, and if either tried to perform the role of the other, this would most likely lead to a decline in effectiveness of both.
In conclusion, let me say that although the CPP and NDF are in crisis, the problems of our people are so great that come what may, a powerful progressive movement will again emerge as a powerful player in Philippine politics. Will the CPP and NDF be key elements of this movement?
Or will they be marginal to it? The answer lies in the CPP and NDF's willingness to confront the extent of their current crisis and to courageously take the necessary steps to renew themselves. Now. *