[antiwar-van] WW: CPP on terror list.

Tue Sep 3 20:42:17 PDT 2002

-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 5, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------

BECAUSE THEY "OPPOSE U.S. PRESENCE", 
STATE DEPT. ADDS PHILIPPINE LEFT TO "TERRORIST" LIST

By Scott Scheffer

The U.S. State Department has added two groups from the 
Philippines--the Communist Party of the Philippines and its 
armed wing, the New People's Army--to the list of so-called 
Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

If this were not such a serious development, it would be 
laughable that the U.S. government--currently on the brink 
of a catastrophic war against the people of Iraq--is 
accusing anyone else of violence or terror.

After all, neither the NPA nor the CPP has dropped 5,000-lb. 
bombs from warplanes killing thousands of civilians--the way 
the U.S. military has in Afghanistan. Nor has either one 
poisoned the land or people with depleted uranium weapons--
the way the U.S. military did in Iraq and Yugoslavia. The 
list of just the most recent terror crimes by the Pentagon 
is long.

Jose Maria Sison, who founded the CPP in 1968, pointed out 
in an Aug. 14 news conference that, on the contrary, the NPA 
"abides strictly by its own Rules of Discipline." He said 
all NPA soldiers are required to adhere to "the Guide for 
Establishing the People's Democratic Government, which 
serves as the constitution for the areas under NPA control." 
He further pointed out that this people's army lives up to 
the Geneva Conventions and Protocol I--international law in 
situations of internal armed conflict.

The State Department maneuver was unexpected because the 
corporate press in the United States has been focused on Abu 
Sayyaf--a small group characterized by the Philippine 
movement as bandits without any relationship to the 
progressive struggle.

U.S. troops had been sent to the Philippines, according to 
the media and the government, to combat Abu Sayyaf, not the 
NPA.

Yet, suddenly, according to an Aug. 9 State Department memo, 
the NPA is being called a terrorist organization because it 
"strongly opposes any U.S. presence in the Philippines and 
has killed U.S. citizens there."

The charge omits the fact that the U.S. citizens were four 
soldiers killed in an NPA attack more than a decade ago, at 
a time when the U.S. military had a huge presence at Clark 
Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base.

Demonstrations against the Pentagon presence had grown so 
large and frequent that the brass ultimately had to close 
both bases--the two biggest outside the continental U.S. It 
was a stinging blow to their imperial prestige. And, it was 
politically difficult for the U.S. media, in the atmosphere 
that existed at that time, to sensationalize the incident in 
which the U.S. soldiers were killed. Better to take the 
licking quietly, they probably thought at the time.

Even when the events of Sept. 11, 2001, gave them the 
political capital and confidence to try to recoup their 
losses, they were compelled to use a campaign against the 
relatively insignificant Abu Sayyaf as a way to test the 
waters for a renewed U.S. intervention in the Philippines.

A CRIME TO 'OPPOSE U.S. PRESENCE'?

The rationale for singling out the NPA--that it "strongly 
opposes any U.S. presence in the Philippines"--is also true 
of dozens of other Filipino people's organizations. Filipino 
sovereignty is a common thread uniting organizations from 
all sectors of society, including peasants, students, 
workers, groups fighting for the rights of women, gay and 
transgender people, the many oppressed indigenous 
nationalities and the oppressed Muslims of the southern 
Philippines.

Since the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-
Arroyo signed on to the Bush/Cheney "war on terrorism," 
stepped-up repression has been launched against all these 
people's organizations, as well as a campaign of mass 
arrests in the Muslim areas of the south. Defense Secretary 
Angelo Reyes, in particular, has been threatening to go 
after all the so-called "front groups" of the CPP. The 
government has even threatened and red-baited the militant 
trade union confederation KMU.

Pentagon military planners have always coveted the 
Philippine islands, with their strategic location in the 
Pacific, as a forward base in Asia and a stepping stone to 
China. From 1898 to 1946, the U.S. military occupied and 
held the islands as a colony of Wall Street. Since the 
humiliation of being kicked out in 1992, Washington has been 
looking for an excuse to return.

The giant U.S. oil companies want to get their hands on the 
unknown amounts of oil under the South China Sea, and also 
make sure that no one else gains access to nearby deposits 
of natural gas off Indonesia--which is 20 percent of the 
world's supply.

They've found the Arroyo administration to be more than 
helpful, but standing in their way are the 12,000-armed 
partisans of the NPA and the hundreds of thousands of 
Filipinos who are part of the broad movement opposing U.S. 
imperialism.

This movement has proven to be tenacious and formidable. The 
imperialists have been proceeding cautiously until now. An 
all-out campaign to retake the Philippines would be 
reckless, but that doesn't mean it's out of the question.

The anti-war movement here in the United States needs to up 
the ante and build real solidarity with the Filipino 
struggle.

- END -

(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to 
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but 
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact 
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: 
ww at wwpublish.com. Subscribe wwnews-on at wwpublish.com. 
Unsubscribe wwnews-off at wwpublish.com. Support the voice of 
resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)

-------------------------------------------
Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
--
In the contradiction lies the hope.
                                     --Bertholt Brecht