Sison and reality
President Rodrigo Duterte has made good the threat he made at the height of the Maute group’s siege on Marawi City about going after the revolutionary Left next. After officially terminating talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), the rebels’ umbrella organization, he is raising the decibel of his verbal attacks on rebel leaders.
In a speech last Friday before alumni of the San Beda College of Law, Duterte focused on Sison, the founding chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) who is in exile in the Netherlands. “I will not allow him to enter his native land and that is a very painful experience, especially if you are dying and you think you should be buried in your own cemetery, in your own town,” he said.
The President has claimed in the past that Sison is sick with colon cancer, which Sison denied. What is true is that Sison, who is 78, is old like Duterte, who is 72. They are both at the sunset of their lives. Which in turn makes the President’s attacks on Sison merely symbolic. Whether Sison returns to the country or not won’t matter to the CPP-led revolution. Sison exercises moral, not actual CPP leadership.
Cadres who are in the country lead the CPP, the main rebel organization whose military arm is the New People’s Army (NPA). In fact, the CPP months ago held a congress, only the second time since the first one was held when the party was founded in 1968. That says many things about how the organization is now being run. The congress elects members of the party’s Central Committee.
A CPP statement said that the committee now is composed of veterans and a good number of younger cadres. Call it a replenishment of the communist leadership, which has been hit by arrests and deaths through the decades. The Central Committee has the smaller Political Bureau that runs the day-to-day affair of the party. Government is surely working double time to establish the identities of the new party leaders.
Which shows why defeating the communist rebellion is not as easy as the President and his advisers may think. Government is dealing with an underground organization that is also spread across the country, unlike the Maute group or even the Abu Sayyaf and the various Islamic State-aligned militants that are operating only in some areas in Mindanao.
It would be interesting to find out what the Duterte administration would do differently from the past regimes that failed to suppress the rebellion, from the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos to the governments of Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Benigno Aquino III. Perhaps the Duterte administration can raise the level of the violence targeted at the rebels but even that has already been done by the Marcos regime.
That is why I am for the continuation of the peace talks and for both the government and the NDFP to reach a negotiated political settlement. On this, I think the NDFP also needs to review its position of refusing to agree to a temporary cessation of hostilities if the talks resume. I agree that it is awkward to talk peace while skirmishes continue in the field.