Youth should realize communist insurgency is a lost cause

Four members of the New People’s Army were killed in an encounter with government troops in Binalbagan, Negros Occidental, Wednesday last week. One of them, a young woman, was later identified as someone who attended college here in Cebu City.

While encounters between government troops and communist insurgents are not so commonplace these days --usually because more and more communist insurgents are leaving the armed struggle-- the presence of the young woman in the NPA suggests that active recruitment is still going on.

The youth should realize that the armed struggle is a lost cause. How lost? Even the head of the Communist Party of the Philippines has decided to leave this country for a life of luxury abroad, leaving the hard part of the fighting to his half-starved, outnumbered, and outgunned cadres in the mountains.

He will never know about their suffering, or even their names.

While the NPA was quick to condemn the killing as “a massacre of sick Red fighters,” it really doesn’t matter.

Sick or not, when they chose to pick up arms against the duly-elected government they became combatants and were bound to be treated as such during an encounter. We cannot expect any different from them had they come across sick government soldiers.

Unless they throw down their arms or show true intent to return to the fold of the law, members of the armed insurgency must be treated as enemy combatants.

Take note that while we discourage youths from taking up arms against the government, we are not discouraging them from activism.

By all means take up worthy causes through the legal means. Again we draw a distinct line between activists and communist insurgents. Activists are those who advocate for legal changes that will benefit some marginalized groups or even the public at large; communist insurgents want to overthrow the government and put their own people in power.

The youths must realize that in taking the violent path, that in choosing to take up arms against the government that has been put into place by the people, they are making themselves enemies of the very people they claim to fight for.