By Andrew Marshall
Time.com
A fighter in the New People’s Army, which has waged war in the Philippines for over 30 years Comrade Giegie is getting married. Her wedding will be held in a jungle clearing, which she will enter through an archway of raised assault rifles. The bride and groom will make their vows draped in a red flag bearing the spear and Kalashnikov of the 7,400-strong New People’s Army (N.P.A.). Then they will pledge allegiance to the masses and promise to raise their children as revolutionaries. There will be no priest, no confetti, no wedding gown. So how will Giegie dress? “Like this,” she smiles. Giegie, 22, is wearing a faded sweatshirt, jogging pants, Wellington boots and an Uzi submachine gun.
Hidden in mountainous Mindanao in the southern Philippines, Giegie’s platoon is fighting a rebellion older than most of its members. Since 1969, the N.P.A., the armed wing of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines, has waged what it calls a “protracted people’s war” in which a total of some 40,000 guerrillas, soldiers and civilians have so far died. Her platoon’s armory is motley—it includes rifles, grenade launchers and an aging mortar, mostly captured from soldiers or police; and its members are young, idealistic and, in many cases, already scarred by battle—eight members of Giegie’s platoon have been injured, two with bullets still buried in them. There are other sacrifices, too. Every aspect of N.P.A. life is regulated, including romance. It took almost a year before communist officials granted Giegie and her betrothed, a 25-year-old rebel called Dods, permission to date. Guided by a document called “On the Proletarian Relationship of the Sexes,” they must court for another year before marriage. Premarital sex is forbidden.
Heavy monsoon rains won’t alter their wedding plans, but the escalating conflict might. Peace talks with the government stalled in 2004. Recent clashes between the N.P.A. and government forces have claimed scores of lives across the archipelago, particularly in the rebel strongholds of Luzon and Mindanao. In a few bloody days last month, the military shot dead three N.P.A. commanders, while an ambush by 30 rebels killed four policemen.
The N.P.A., which both the U.S. and the E.U. have classified as a terrorist organization, is not the only headache in Mindanao for the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. This resource-rich but lawless region is home to two other formidable armed groups. While Manila has struck a fragile cease-fire with the 12,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front (M.I.L.F.), the country’s largest Muslim rebel army, it has vowed to eradicate Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaeda-linked outfit accused of a string of terrorist acts, including the 2004 bombing of a ferry near Manila that killed more than 100 people. January brought confirmation that Abu Sayyaf chief Khaddafy Janjalani, as well as many of his top lieutenants, had been killed during an ongoing military campaign aided by U.S. intelligence and hardware. With Abu Sayyaf reeling, Arroyo on Jan. 22 vowed that a massive deployment of troops will now “blunt the tactical edge of the New People’s Army.” But the N.P.A.’s nationwide reach makes it a tougher foe. “The military has always seen the N.P.A. as a much larger threat because it operates in nearly every province across the archipelago,” says Zachary Abuza, a Southeast Asia security analyst who teaches at Simmons College in Boston. “The government will always have to divert resources to deal with it. The N.P.A. won’t go away anytime soon.”
The N.P.A. boasted 12,000 armed regulars in the mid-1980s, when many saw it as the only force capable of challenging dictator Ferdinand Marcos. But its Maoist leaders were snubbed even by Mao Zedong himself: in 1974, to undercut support for the N.P.A., Marcos dispatched his wife Imelda to Beijing, where she supposedly swept Mao off his feet. (“I like Mrs. Marcos because she is so natural, and that is perfection,” he gushed.) After People Power ousted Marcos in 1986, the N.P.A.’s declining popularity was devastated by internal purges in which hundreds of people were tortured and executed. In 1988, 121 cadres were butchered in one N.P.A. camp in Luzon alone, while up to 900 were killed in Mindanao.
The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed. Communism was history. But not the N.P.A. Like Asia’s other communist rebel groups—India’s Naxalites and Nepal’s Maoists—the Philippine rebels have survived because they are primarily fueled not by foreign ideology but by domestic realities: poverty, corruption, unemployment. Some 40% of Filipinos live on less than $2 a day, while a tenth of the 87 million population seeks work abroad. Corruption watchdog Transparency International ranks the Philippines near the bottom of its corruption index, alongside Nepal and Rwanda. The N.P.A. promotes communism as the only cure for the Philippines’ many ills, but even Filipinos who reject its cause still share its grievances.
Officials in Manila acknowledge that the N.P.A.’s resilience is largely rooted in the country’s decades-long inability to improve the lives of the underprivileged. “Remove poverty, and we remove the N.P.A.,” says Eduardo Ermita, a former Defense Secretary who is now Arroyo’s executive secretary and one of her closest advisers. Ermita says the authorities are serious about providing education for all children, and about tackling other grievances such as corruption. “You cannot win the war through guns alone,” he says. “You have to win hearts and minds.”
But guns help. Last year, Arroyo declared what she called an “all-out war” to destroy the N.P.A., and she has promised her commanders $200 million for better weapons and pay for their troops. The rebels, for their part, have stepped up operations against what they call an “illegitimate, rotten and brutal” administration. With fighting intensifying nationwide, TIME was invited to join a rebel platoon in Mindanao to take an inside look at the conflict that history forgot.
The original invitation to visit one N.P.A. unit was canceled due to “bad weather”—rebel code for increased enemy activity. Instead, we travel north along a half-finished highway through Compostela Valley, another guerrilla stronghold, where troops assigned to Arroyo’s security detail had been injured in an N.P.A. ambush in July.
At the town of San Francisco—a dreary, concrete facsimile of its famous namesake—we are picked up by two N.P.A. men in jeans and T shirts in a four-wheel drive with darkened windows, then speed out of town along potholed logging tracks. As we leave the highway far behind, the villages grow visibly poorer; a rare stretch of paved road is announced by a sign bearing the President’s face and the slogan GLORIA CARES. In many villages, government troops are dug in behind sandbags and razor wire. Three hours later, we transfer to trail bikes and roar along deserted tracks to a semi-derelict logging shack. Waiting there are five N.P.A. soldiers with M-16s, who guide us through the darkening jungle to a camp lit by flickering oil lamps. “The comrades are very excited you’re here,” says a voice from the gloom.
The voice belongs to Comrade Victor, 39, the political officer assigned to look after us. (Victor, like all N.P.A. fighters, uses a nom de guerre. The platoon’s machine gunner is called Comrade Bren.) A handsome man dressed in shin-length shorts and orange flip-flops, Victor first apologizes for his poor English (he speaks it perfectly), then for our circuitous journey: a rebel operation had caused more “bad weather” to the south. “Our people were carrying out a punitive action,” says Victor, meaning an assassination by an N.P.A. “sparrow unit” or death squad. The man killed was a farmer, he explains, but his role as a police informer had earned him “a blood debt against the revolutionary movement.”
About a fifth of N.P.A. fighters are under 18, according to Jane’s Information Group, an authority on defense and terrorism. Most of this 30-strong platoon are too young to recall the purges and, despite embracing communal life, have often joined the rebels for personal, rather than political, reasons. Many are high-school dropouts with no job prospects, impressionable youths whom the N.P.A. recruits and molds into loyal killers for the communist cause. For Joven, 21, joining meant personal salvation. “I had a different lifestyle before,” he says. “I was addicted to marijuana and alcohol. I hung out with a neighborhood gang.” Joven was shot during an offensive four months ago and the bullet rests painfully under his spine. But he says, “I’m happy with the comrades. Even though we come from different neighborhoods, from different classes, we fight as one.”
