MINDANAO - PHILIPPINES: New People's Army -

A "Terrorist Organisation" ? by Vera Butler

This is how the NPA is classified by the USA and EU - but it is by far not the only military unit opposing the government of president Gloria Arroyo, the daughter of former Filipino war hero Macapagal. There is the 12,000 strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front (M.I.L.E.), and Abu Sayyaf, the al-Quaeda linked group accused of terrorist acts such as the 2004 bombing of a ferry near Manila,causing some 100 victims. US intelligence and the military are involved, to bolster government forces. Yet those in Manila understand that for as long as 40% the population are forced to exist on less than $US2 a day, and 10% of its 87 million people seek work abroad, they will not vanquish the NPA or the various other bodies promising relief and salvation.

Arroyo's big talk about "all-out war" has not, to-date, shown results. Victor, a political officer who hosts a group of visiting American journalists, mocks such claims as "unrealistic" because the Filipino army is only thinly dispersed. Felipe Miranda, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines, agrees:- "The military does not have the capability, in terms of both logistics and manpower, to deal with an insurgency that has been around for almost half a century." (1)

Victor, from a "petit-bourgeois family", as he says, defends the core NPA ideology, claiming that no communist state has ever collapsed, because none ever existed:- East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia -none had "true" communist governments. The Soviet Union and China were socialist in name but capitalist in practice, argues Victor.

In recent years, but especially since 2006, another war has flared up. Hundreds of anti-government activists across the Philippines - labour leaders, lawyers, journalists, even priests - have been assassinated. Many were members of legal left-wing political parties, but were publicly accused of cooperating with the NPA. Local and international human rights groups suspect the military is involved in the killings. Justice Secretary Raul Gonzales says the NPA itself might be responsible, trying to "destabilise" the government.

But even without guerrilla pressures the Arroyo administration is under siege. There were two impeachment attempts for electoral fraud and human rights abuses, as well as three coup attempts by the military. Arroyo wants to keep the military on side, because two of her predecessors, Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada, were toppled when the military withdrew their support.

What is beyond dispute, says the "Times" journalist, is that the government is in perpetual conflict with a significant portion of its population. The NPA should be a long-forgotten cold war relic. Instead -and despite repeated purges - ordinary Filipinos look at the revolutionaries as guarantors of a better life, a better future.

(1) "Time" magazine, 5 February 2007, by Andrew Marshall.

Dr Vera Butler is a Melbourne based political economist.