It goes without saying that the most brutal but officially denied component of this campaign is the unabated killings, abductions, surveillance and harassment of the leaders, organizers and even ordinary members and supporters of these party-list groups.
And yet what are these aforesaid party-list groups truly guilty of? They are being pilloried for standing on a political platform that calls for genuine land reform and national industrialization, for upholding and promoting fundamental human and democratic rights and institutionalizing people’s empowerment through vibrant grass-roots organizing, militant mass struggles against oppression and exploitation and using the ballot to elect genuine servant-leaders of the people. Of course, they sealed their doom by taking a leading role in pushing for the impeachment of Mrs. Arroyo and joining the call for her ouster through another massive demonstration of unarmed “people power.”
Are not the political objectives, aspirations and actuations of the progressive party lists strikingly similar to that espoused by the armed revolutionary movement? Of course they are! And why not, they are unashamedly self-proclaimed to be on the Left of the political spectrum.
Does this not then constitute prima facie evidence that they are mere “communist front organizations” as the loathsome troika Gonzales-Esperon-Gonzalez would have us believe? Not so. These organizations are politically legitimate and legally recognized. They operate openly, do not engage in armed struggle and are democratically organized with an expanding mass constituency that the Arroyo regime is trying hard to terrorize with the military’s guns and vicious psychological warfare. As a matter of fact, the countryside funds of Bayan Muna representatives are subject to the same accounting and audit requirements of other members of Congress and, even more so, the prying eyes of Messers. Gonzales et Gonzalez. Thus the latter’s much ballyhooed accusations about these funds being diverted to the NPA are just a lot of hogwash.
It must be pointed out that part of the so-called “peace offensive” cum counter-insurgency measure of the Aquino and Ramos governments was to entice and co-opt the revolutionaries under the umbrella of the National Democratic Front (NDF) to join electoral politics. Now that the legal Left has successfully entered Congress while not relinquishing the autonomous parliament of the streets and without denouncing the right of the people to take up arms against an oppressive government, Arroyo’s hit men cry foul, raise the communist bogey and resort to the most underhanded of tactics to halt the legal Left’s fledgling inroads into an arena still very much dominated by reactionary and discredited politicians like themselves.
While Mrs. Arroyo and her cabal of widely perceived liars, plunderers, blood-thirsty fascists and die-hard anti-communists insist that the deliberately mislabeled Human Security Act is geared to go against “terrorists” like the Abu Sayyaf/Jemayah Islamiyah, we all know better.
The people’s democratic movement is in for fearsome and trying times not unlike that of the Marcos martial law period. But it will surely persevere, gain further strength and win wider support from the Filipino people and the peoples of the world as it struggles to overcome another fascist dictatorship in the making. Business World / Posted by (Bulatlat.com)
* Published in Business World, 9 March 2007
