Keeping the status quo
November 4th, 2002
The Arroyo administration has not tired of saying that it wants negotiations with the National Democratic Front (NDF) to continue. The Armed Forces of the Philippines, of which it is supposed to have command, on the other hand, has repeatedly vowed to crush the NDF’s New People’s Army.
Those puzzled by the seeming contradiction between one and the other need not be. Both statements reflect a cohesive strategy to put an end to the 33-year-old armed struggle the Communist Party of the Philippines has been waging since 1969, when the New People’s Army was founded.
The government strategy is not new. The avowed commitment to negotiations is meant to convince the Church, academe, NGOs, peace and other groups that the government understands that rebellion and insurgency cannot be solved through military means alone. The parallel drive to defeat the NPA is, on the other hand, meant to assure the government that it will be bargaining from a position of strength should the negotiations indeed resume.
They’re not likely to—not under the condition the government has set. The government’s proclaimed commitment to negotiations is premised on the defeat, if not the surrender, of the New People’s Army.
The military has conditioned negotiations on the NPA’s laying down its arms since 1986, when the Aquino government first introduced the idea of peace negotiations. The military remained steadfast in this approach during the Ramos administration despite the NDF’s rejection of that condition. It suffered what has turned out to be only a temporary setback when the Ramos government resumed negotiations and signed a number of agreements with the NDF without the latter’s having to lay down its arms.
The military approach was regaining new life during the Estrada administration; it has since become government policy in the Arroyo dispensation.
The critical question is in fact why any government that’s in power will deign to negotiate with any group that has laid down its arms and is thus completely at its mercy. For the NDF to assume that meaningful negotiations—or any negotiations at all—will take place once it lays down its arms would be extremely naïve of it.
The proclaimed government commitment to peace negotiations after the NDF shall have laid down its arms thus cannot escape the suspicion that it is in fact not interested in peace negotiations, but in destroying the NDF through military means.
If it achieved that aim, the Arroyo administration cannot conceivably be interested in dealing with the inequities in the social, economic and political system that for 300 years have fueled over 200 rebellions and uprisings in this country.
The reason would be simple enough. If armed social movements can be defeated with arms, of what use will changing the unjust structures that lead to rebellion be, except to dilute the privilege and power the dominant system guarantees the ruling elite?
Rebellions and armed movements are the last resort of the poor and marginalized, premised on the assumption that static and unjust social systems do not change out of the goodness of the hearts of those who control them. Bonifacio and the Katipunan learned that when the reform movement and its leaders were demonized as filibusteros in the late 1890s. The entire history of the Philippines also demonstrates that fact.
The military approach of “surrender, then let’s talk,” when subjected to objective analysis, thus amounts to a prescription for keeping the status quo, with all the inequities with which Filipinos should be familiar (but the solutions to which still escape them).
The same bottom line is evident in the Arroyo administration’s successful campaign to declare the New People’s Army and Jose Maria Sison terrorists.
Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople has crowed that the United States and, lately, the European Union’s declaration to that effect will “force the NDF back to the negotiating table.” It is difficult to see how that declaration—of the NPA, but not the NDF that has political command over it, and of Sison, alone of all the leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines—can do that.
Ople’s statement, however, is premised on the assumption that the NPA and Sison maintain substantial assets and bank accounts abroad—and that it is these assets, which the United States and the European Union now can presumably freeze, that drives the armed struggle at home.
No one in his right mind has made either claim. Even the Philippine military knows that the NPA receives no substantial support from abroad. The EU’s freezing of its and Sison’s nonexistent assets (it turns out that the latter’s assets consist of housing and medical subsidies from the Dutch government, which the latter subsequently froze!) is thus likely to have minimum impact on the capacity of the NPA to wage armed struggle.
The conclusion is thus inescapable that what the Arroyo administration seeks in having Sison and the NPA declared terrorists are (1) a mandate to wage all-out war against the NPA; and (2) the physical and political isolation of Sison, whom apparently it considers critical to the sustainability of the NPA.
The Ople declaration—which some observers also saw as maddeningly contradictory of the proclaimed government policy not to negotiate with terrorists—is thus meant to camouflage the policy the Arroyo government has actually adopted, but has chosen to conceal from the public. That policy is to defeat the NPA, and therefore the social movement of which it is the military arm, at all costs.
Of course it is using the US campaign against international terrorism in this effort. While it is too much of a stretch to link the NPA and Sison to international terrorism and to the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Arroyo government is banking on the current antiterrorism hysteria in both the domestic and international fronts for popular support. It is getting that support for a number of reasons, among them the US’ eagerness to sustain its so-called international coalition against terrorism.
It should be evident that the Arroyo administration, despite the lip service it customarily pays to “keeping the lines of communication open with the NDF,” “back- channeling peace efforts,” etc., is scuttling the peace talks in favor of a military solution which it hopes will succeed in the changed circumstances since September 11, 2001.
In so doing, it is also scuttling the gains that had so far been achieved in the talks. Among those gains was the developing sense that some measure of reform is necessary both for the sake of social stability as well as development in this country.
The understanding that rebellions are the results, and not the causes, of underdevelopment and poverty, was a critical lesson imparted by the peace process. Today, in total contradiction of both that lesson as well as that from the history of this country, we are instead being told that rebellions cause underdevelopment.
This is an argument that’s basically saying let’s keep things the way they are—meaning the injustice, the mass misery, the ignorance, the galloping poverty that have haunted this country and its people for over three centuries. Scuttling the peace process means scuttling hopes that things will ever change.
(TODAY/ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, November 5, 2002)