Communists in Mindanao: A Growing or Declining Force?

By Edwin G. Espejo
Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project

While renewed fighting between Moro rebels and government forces in Mindanao dominates the headlines, the island’s other long-standing conflict goes on.

The New People’s Army (NPA) has been waging its so-called ‘revolutionary war’ against the government in Manila since 1969, and by the army’s own reckoning, 40 years after the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was founded, its armed faction remains most active in Mindanao.

Depending on who one believes, the NPA saw in the beginning of 2009 with anywhere from between a few thousand and 20,000 soldiers or more nationwide.

Self-exiled communist leader Jose Sison recently claimed the NPA had ‘tens of thousands’ of members during a call to arms marking the party’s anniversary last month.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), ordered by President Arroyo to put an end to the insurgency ‘once and for all’ by 2010, puts the figure to be in the low thousands. Army spokesman Lt. Col. Bartolome Baccaro has claimed the Maoist rebels are at their weakest in 20 years.

A military briefing given to the media at Camp Aguinaldo in Manila last August put their strength at fewer than 5,800 –the group having reportedly suffered a 20 per cent dip the previous year.

Despite that, the NPA, the armed wing of the CPP, remains the “biggest threat” to national security according to National Defense Secretary Gilbert C. Teodoro Jr.

The history of the NPA in Mindanao dates back to 1971 when a handful of inexperienced but determined communists established two cells — one in Iligan and the other in Davao.

The years that followed saw it exploit widespread poverty among both indigenous peoples and poor peasants in the countryside, as well as among many Christian settlers.

By mid-80s, when the NPA was at its strongest, the rebels were outpacing their counterparts in Luzon and Visayas and were attacking and temporarily occupying remote town centers and setting up shadow governments as both a show of their military strength and political organization.

On several occasions the group launched battalion-sized offensives –subsequently deemed by their leadership to be tactical and costly mistakes.

Suffering huge and successive losses and succeeding only in alienating the local population, they suspected they were infiltrated by the military.

A series of bloody purges followed that almost decimated their ranks.

According to one of their own leaders in Mindanao, Ka Oris, the purge saw more than 600 party members, activists and supporters killed in the island alone.

The military command claims the NPA in Mindanao, at least, is no longer the ideological force it once was and is today dependent instead upon attracting restless and rootless young unemployed to its ranks from the countryside, according to Colonel Alan Luga of the 1001st Infantry Brigade in Compostela Valley who spoke to the Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project in December.

Yet according to Ka Oris, the nom de guerre of one of fewer than 10 original local party members from Mindanao left after nearly 40 years in the communist underground movement, the rebel group has rebounded from its bloody past to re-establish a presence in “more than 2,000 barrios (villages) in 200 municipalities in 19 provinces in the island.”