They Said It about the Npa

There are bad stories as there are good stories about the country’s longest-running armed revolutionary group – the New People’s Army. Many stories are narrated by people who have met its members eyeball-to-eyeball. And their accounts speak of an ideology that endures despite its detractors’ attacks.

By Alexander Martin Remollino
Bulatlat.com

They used to be called “Nice People Around” during the dark years of the Marcos dictatorship. Guerrillas of the New People’s Army (NPA) were known as a ragtag army who otherwise gave a valiant fight against the armed machine of the dictatorship that sowed fear in both the rural and urban villages.

Dissension – chiefly as a result of adventurism by some of its leaders and rightist capitulationism by others – almost divided the ranks of the NPA. The internal strife was used by government authorities to not only launch further counter-insurgency campaigns but also to undercut the NPA’s claimed popularity.

This government strategy, called by its critics as a process of “demonization” where the armed Left was to be reduced to a mere criminal gang, apparently continues today.

Former Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff Angelo Reyes, who is now Defense Secretary, once called the NPA a huge "extortion racket." He has also accused it of "destroying the future" of Filipino children.

In a reversal to what even her predecessors had said – that the armed rebellion is rooted in poverty and injustice – President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo now blames the NPA for being against progress. As the NPA has also been accused of derailing the further implementation of government’s agrarian program.

Last year, the NPA together with the Communist Party of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front, was tagged by the U.S. Department of State as a "terrorist" organization. Military spokespersons at home have brought the tag further, calling NPA members "terrorists who glorify themselves by calling themselves communists." Interestingly, military spokespersons used to berate NPA members by calling them "communists disguised as freedom fighters and defenders of the poor."

But, as military sources themselves admit, the NPA continues to gain strength, mainly through the support of the populace, especially from the impoverished sections of society. It has also earned some respect from elements of the ruling classes, namely the comprador bourgeoisie and the landlords, whose economic and political dominance the armed Left avowedly seeks to replace with a social order that is characterized by genuine freedom and upholds the rights of the people.

What could have driven the NPA's supporters and sympathizers to its side, in spite of all the government propaganda aimed against it?

Their stories

I have had the fortune to talk, in various instances, with people who have had contact with the NPA, or know someone who has rubbed elbows with the NPA. Some of their stories are hereby cited.

For obvious reasons, those who are anonymous shall have to remain anonymous.

Old woman

A relative who has been to an island province south of Luzon not too long ago shared this story of an old woman who had an interesting interaction with the NPA.

This old woman, I was told, had grown up with a fear of guns and people carrying guns. Thus, even as NPA guerrillas had been coming to the village where she lives for quite sometime, she would not talk to them as often as her fellow villagers do.

The story goes that before NPA fighters started coming to her village, the residents were frequently harassed by drunkards who made a hobby out of stealing their chickens and castrating their goats. After NPA guerrillas started coming to their village, the drunkards stopped stealing and hurting their animals and made it a point never to disturb them again.

The old woman would herself be running to those NPAs for help.

She and her sons had been planting vegetables on a small piece of land. A local politician's son tried to grab the land from her and claim it for himself. She thought of turning to the authorities but she saw no point in doing so since one of them was the father of the man who was giving her trouble.

Desperate, she approached the NPA whom she had been scared of. After a long talk with her, the NPA fighters undertook measures to address the issue.

The local politician's son never bothered her again.

Visit by a woman

Another story came from a woman from a province in Southern Luzon. This woman had visited us at home sometime in 2000 to thank us for a very small help we gave her a few weeks back when she needed it very badly.

While making small talk with my mother and I, she commented on the scraggly beard I had started to grow then, saying I looked like some of the NPAs she had seen in her province.

And then she began to tell us about those NPAs.

According to her, it had always been a matter of course for they in their village to give food to the NPA guerrillas, some of them young amazons, going around them and mingling with them. She said those NPAs would partake of a small amount of the food and give the rest to people living in poorer villages.

She also told of a drunkard in their village who used to beat up his wife as a dog takes to barking. As she could no longer bear the abuse, the woman complained to the NPA. The NPAs dealt with the matter, and after that the man never laid a hand on his wife again.

Newspaper column

Most telling, perhaps, is what Enrique Zobel de Ayala said of NPAs in a column published in Business World on October 16, 2002 - because he hails from the ruling classes and, by his background, should be expected to be against the NPA - but what he wrote in that column casts a different light on the NPA.

He fearlessly admitted to having some friends who are members of the NPA. He did not directly dispute the "terrorist" tag on the NPA, but he said that he understands NPAs to be "primarily against greedy and corrupt government officials," and therefore not against good government employees. He also wrote that many of the NPAs he knows - both men and women - are actually nationalists.

By sheer terror?

Opponents of the NPA have charged that it has survived solely by inflicting terror upon the populace.

The Japanese Imperial Army of World War II is an example of an armed force that lived solely by terrorizing the populace. Though it succeeded in propping up a colonial government, it was never able to completely conquer the Filipino people - for in all the years of its occupation of the Philippines it had to put up with a bitter resistance that eventually devastated it without help from the Americans, who in the first place had abandoned the Filipinos they were supposedly helping and returned only when the fight was practically over.

The stories cited here seem to confirm what the late nationalist senator and civil libertarian Jose W. Diokno, said of the NPA in a speech he made in 1985: "If they have grown - and they have grown - then obviously they must be meeting a need of the people." Bulatlat.com

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