This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 45, December
18-24, 2005
Yearend Report
ARMED STRUGGLE
NPA Grew Beyond ‘Critical Mass’ in
2005
Rebel spokesman Gregorio “Ka
Roger” Rosal claims the New People’s Army (NPA) now has an equivalent of 27
battalions or roughly around 13, 500 regular fighters. These exclude members of
barrio militia units or what Rosal describes as “peasants by day, NPA fighters
by night.”
BY ALEXANDER MARTIN REMOLLINO
A
few weeks ago, Malacañang spokespersons were quoted in the news as saying that
the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed component of the clandestine Communist
Party of the Philippines (CPP), remains “the biggest threat to national
security.”
The
Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) described the NPA as the country’s “No. 1
security threat” in mid-2004 – for the first time since the early 1990s.
This
is a tune that is vastly different from what the government was singing as
recently as the beginning of last year. Not too long ago the government was
dismissing the NPA as a “spent force,” an “ideological orphan” engaged in
extortion and other forms of banditry.
While the short time it took the government to make a turnaround on its earlier
assessment of the NPA’s strength can cast doubt as to the accuracy of its
statements, the NPA’s own figures appear to show that it became a stronger force
for the government to reckon with in 2005.
Last
year was a crucial year in the growth of the NPA forces, if we go by the Dec.
26, 2004 statement of CPP Central Committee chairman Armando Liwanag.
“The
NPA now has the critical mass to intensify tactical offensives and increase its
seizure of arms at an unprecedented rate,” Liwanag said in the statement. “It
has raised its capability of arresting for investigation and, if the evidence
warrants, for trial the most rabid puppets of U.S. imperialism, the most corrupt
officials, the most cruel human rights violators, the worst exploiters and crime
lords in prohibited drugs and other nefarious activities.”
“The
attainment of critical mass means it has become extremely difficult, if not
impossible, for the government to overcome the NPA militarily,” said CPP
spokesperson Gregorio “Ka Roger” Rosal in a recent interview with Bulatlat.
Surpassing “critical mass”
In
2005, Rosal told Bulatlat, the NPA grew beyond the “critical mass” it
attained last year.
Rosal said the total number of NPA regular, or full-time, fighters has gone up
this year to the equivalent of 27 battalions. Asked for a more exact figure,
Rosal said the NPA is still in the process of consolidating its data for the
present year. But considering that in the military a battalion has about 500
troops, this would mean that the NPA now has roughly about 13,500 regular
fighters.
And
these are just the regular fighters. This does not yet include the members of
the so-called People’s Militia, the village-based NPA fighters who perform
community police functions – whom, as Rosal pointed out, the military describes
as “peasants by day, NPA fighters by night.”
With
the growth in the number of NPA forces has come an increase in the number of
tactical offensives compared to last year, Rosal said.
Citing data obtained from reports by various guerrilla fronts, Rosal said the
NPA was able to wage a total of 116 tactical offensives from Sept. 13 to Nov. 23
this year. Of these, there were five ambushes, six raids, four sparrow
operations (quick attacks in population centers), eight sniping operations, and
14 executions of “criminals and human rights violators.”
From
these, he said, the NPA was able to seize 54 high-powered firearms, as opposed
to one loss. There were 128 government troops killed in action and 73 wounded
during these offensives, as opposed to five killed and two wounded on the NPA
side.
And
that was just from Sept. 13 to Nov. 23. Rosal in particular cited the Southern
Tagalog region, where a total of 62 government troops were killed in NPA
offensives since March.
“This campaign is continuously being pursued,” Rosal said, “and is going to be
pursued until the end of this year.”
The
tactical offensives for this year were particularly numerous in Mindanao and the
Bicol region, said Rosal – owing, he said, to the relative strength of the NPA
in those areas compared to that in other parts of the country.
The
rebel leader said the NPA wages an average of two tactical offensives every week
in 2004. This is roughly equivalent to 104 tactical offensives for the said
year.
Rosal said the NPA still has to consolidate its figures on the exact number of
tactical offensives from the start of 2005 to the time of the interview with
Bulatlat. However, he said, with the tactical offensives waged in various
parts of the country from Sept. 13 to Nov. 23 alone, the number of NPA
operations for this year has definitely exceeded that of last year.
The
CPP called for an increase in tactical offensives in the latter part of
mid-2005, Rosal told Bulatlat, as a contribution of the armed
revolutionary movement to the struggle for the ouster of the Macapagal-Arroyo
regime – which is under fire for the imposition of what have been described as
“anti-national and anti-people” policies, corruption, electoral fraud, and human
rights violations. The intensification of tactical offensives, Rosal explained,
serves to weaken the AFP’s capacity and resolve to defend the regime.
With
all these, Rosal said, has come an improvement in the NPA’s capacity to wage
agrarian revolution, which the underground revolutionary movement considers a
main component of the armed struggle. He said there were several successful
campaigns this year for the lowering of debt interest rates and the increase in
peasants’ harvest shares as well as the wages of farm workers and the farm gate
prices of crops.
Increasingly formidable
The
NPA, Rosal said, plans in the next few years to increase the number of guerrilla
fronts it maintains from the present 130 to 140, and attain a more advanced
stage of the present strategic defensive phase of the armed struggle and thus
bring it closer to the strategic stalemate where the armed revolutionary forces
would have acquired capacity for engaging in more massive confrontations with
“enemy” troops.
There is a high probability that the NPA would achieve these goals should it be
able to at least maintain the momentum it attained this year. The NPA upped the
ante this year and it appears there is no stopping it from going further.
It
is clear that the NPA has gone beyond the point where the government began to
stop dismissing it as a “spent force.” From all indications, it is capable of
going even further. Bulatlat © 2005 Bulatlat
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Dramatic increase in tactical offensives
Bulatlat