The Joma factor

In a recent speech, President Rodrigo Duterte challenged Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison to return to the Philippines and end his exile in the Netherlands. The President contrasted Sison’s lifestyle in Europe with those of the communist rebels in the country’s hinterlands and said Sison must personally lead the struggle here. Sison has been in exile since 1987.

The claim that some communist leaders are taking it easy abroad while their people here are doing the dirty work has actually been made often through the years. Also in the Netherlands is Luis Jalandoni of the National Democratic Front (NDF). That carries with it the thinking that these communist leaders are continuing to lead the communist movement from abroad.

Sison’s stint as CPP chairman actually ended when he was arrested in 1977 under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. When he was released by the Cory Aquino administration after Marcos was toppled by the 1986 Edsa People power uprising, he stayed above-ground even after the peace talks between the government and the NDF bogged down in early 1987 and until his exile in the Netherlands.

In the CPP’s organizational structure, at the top is the party Congress, the highest policy-making body, but because of the revolutionary situation, congresses are rarely held. The Congress elects members of the party’s Central Committee, which in turn elects a smaller Political Bureau to run the party’s day-to-day affairs. Interestingly, even as government insists that Sison is directing CPP activities from abroad, the CPP itself announced the holding of Congress last year.

If true, this is only the second congress since the first was held in 1968 when the CPP was founded. A story in the website kodao.org quoted the CPP as announcing that, “For the first time in nearly five decades, key leaders and cadres representing the Party’s close to seventy thousand members, were assembled to strengthen the Party’s unity, amend its program and constitution based on accumulated victories and lessons and elect a new set of leaders.”

The election of a new set of leaders should be particularly interesting in the light of the Joma-Duterte verbal exchange. The CPP communique, released during the anniversary celebration this year of the March 29 founding of the New People’s Army (NPA) said that the party has elected new Central Committee members more than half of whom are young and middle-aged cadres. Sixty percent of the 120 delegates who attended the congress reportedly had ages ranging from 45 to 59 years old, 14 percent were 44 years old and younger and only 30 percent were above 60 years old.

And where is Sison situated in this recent development? A resolution passed during the congress reportedly extolled him as a “great communist thinker, leader, teacher and guide of the Filipino proletariat and torch bearer of the international communist movement” and that his counsel will continue to be sought. So while Sison has remained the symbol of the communist struggle in the country, he is old. He could not be running the CPP’s affairs now.