The NPA Hammers the AFP In Mindinao

In the last 2 weeks of September, there was very heavy fighting in Mindanao between the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the New People's Army (NPA).

This blog strongly supports the NPA because we feel that capitalism in the Philippines has completely failed, seems destined to continue to fail into the foreseeable future, and it's time to give something else a try. In other words, capitalism in the Philippines has had a good 100-200 years or so, and it's done nothing but fail. Just how much more time do we need to give it until the experiment finally starts working?

Capitalism in the Philippines seems hopeless. A tiny, corrupt, semi-feudal, murderous elite monopolizes almost all of the land and most of the wealth.

Any attempts to make the situation the slightest bit more fair or democratic are met with repression, arrests, harassment, beatings torture, and murder. Hence, all peaceful avenues for change have been blocked and will continue to be blocked into the foreseeable future. In cases like this, armed struggle becomes a clear and logical option.

The NPA themselves have said that if there were a democratic opening for their movement, they might just lay down their arms. Factions of the NPA have broken off many times in the past few decades to try to run for office. Most have suffered repression and many have been killed outright. However, the NPA even has supporters in the Philippines Legislature, so the situation has become more democratic in recent years.

The corrupt, closed and semi-feudal nature of the Filipino elite has made it almost impossible to develop this country into a modern industrialized nation. Similarities with Nepal, Peru, Bolivia, Indonesia, India and other backwards 3rd World capitalist wrecks are appropriate.

The NPA is a vast movement with probably many millions of supporters across the Philippines. These are mostly in the rural areas, but there are also some in urban slums. It's pretty typical for militant students at the University of the Philippines to drop out at some point and head off into the hills to join the NPA.

In many areas, the NPA is the de facto government. Local producers and businesses must pay revolutionary taxes in order to operate in these areas, and workers' efforts to achieve higher wages are often negotiated through NPA intermediaries.

I had a Filipino physician back in the mid-1990's who was an NPA sympathizer, despite the fact that he made a very good income in the US. He said that a number of the kids he grew up with had joined the NPA. They had wanted him to join too after he got his MD, but he had declined.

He said that if you go to his rural village, you have to go through numerous rebel checkpoints. Along the way, you will see NPA forces walking down the side of the road with uniforms and machine guns as if nothing is out of the ordinary.

The size of the NPA is controversial, but I figure they have at least 20,000 regular forces under arms. Part-time militias probably number into the 100,000's. The support base is huge, surely in the millions.

The NPA is surely not as large as it was about 20 years ago. A series of insane and murderous purges badly damaged the movement and led many people to quit in disgust. The purges ended quite a while ago.

The NPA closely follows the rules of warfare and even refuses to use land mines, as they are considered banned weapons. In many attacks, government forces and police just surrender and give up their guns, because the NPA treats prisoners very well. In such cases, the local cops or soldiers are just disarmed, offered a chance to join the NPA and released if they choose not to.

The Bush Administration has labeled the NPA a terrorist organization, but that's a load of shit. They're one of the cleanest-fighting armies on Earth.

Being an archipelago, it's hard to supply the NPA with weaponry. Hence the NPA has to rely a lot on seized weapons.

It's true that the NPA has had serious problems making inroads with ordinary working class and middle class Filipinos in the big cities, most of whom dislike the movement without despising it. They simply see no value for themselves in the NPA project. This is a failure of the NPA in articulating how their project can benefit the average middle class to working class person in the big cities.

The NPA supports religion and has cultivated a friendly movement with the armed Moros in Mindanao (the sane ones anyway). There is a vast NPA support base in lay workers, parishioners and even priests in the country. Most cadres are Catholics and many priests openly support the movement, take up arms along with fighters, and minister over fighters and villagers in the base areas.

The NPA strongly supports women's rights, of course, but oddly for Maoists, they also support gay rights. This has been used by supporters of the Philippines government to portray the NPA as radical and out of step with a conservative, Catholic country.

Truth is that the Filipinos, despite the Catholicism and machismo, are easy-going SE Asians with a fairly open attitude about sex, in particular male homosexuality, which is widely accepted in Manila anyway.

Two NPA comrades getting married and sealing their marriage vows with a kiss. The NPA stunned the world when they came out for gay marriage, but really, it's a proper progressive stance. I always thought that the persecution of homosexuals by the USSR, the East Bloc, China, Cuba, Peru's Shining Path and Nepal's CPN-M was preposterous.

In the USSR, this was caused by Stalin's return to Great Russian Orthodox Christian-type social conservatism in the 1930's. The heavily-Jewish Bolsheviks from 1917-1927 actually supported gay rights.

A problem, nevertheless, is that the NPA has cultivated a seriously extremist form of Leftism that denounces most of the rest of the Left as revisionists or sell-outs. That's not so great for building movements.

In the last two weeks of September, the Brigade-size military operations in Eastern Mindanao by the composite 36th Infantry Battalion, Division Reconnaissance Company, 67th Infantry Battalion, Scout Rangers Company of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police's 1105th Provincial Mobile Force were hit head-on in the series of tactical offensives by the NPA under the Conrado Heredia Command of the Front 20 Operations Command of the NPA.

The AFP suffered 19 killed and 20 wounded in these operations. This area is in the mountains along the border of Surigao del Sur and Davao Oriental in west-central Mindanao on the coast.

Illegal logging in Bisling, Mindanao, on the coast near Linging where the heavy fighting took place last week. As you can see, this area is a tropical forest.

These logging trucks are waiting along the side of the road for the idiotic police to shut down their roadblocks at 5 PM (They go home for the day!). Then they will transport their illegal logs (all logging here is illegal) to a local paper mill after dark where the logs will be unloaded. Everyone knows what is going on here, but no one does anything about it. What a stupid, fucked-up, chaotic, corrupt, dysfunctional mess of a country. Photo credit Bob Martin.

September 22: the NPA launched two operations against the AFP: one against the 36th IB-AFP detachment in Cabunsuan in Linging township, and later, an ambush on AFP reinforcements.

September 24, 3:15 pm: The NPA ambushed the AFP in Bogak, also in Linging township in Surigao del Sur.

September 30: The NPA fighters engaged the AFP in Sumilao in Boston township, Davao Oriental.

During the offensives, one NPA fighter was wounded and later died of his wounds.

In the Surigao del Sur-Davao Oriental border area, the AFP troops are protecting American-Australian -owned Omega Gold and the gold mining ambitions of Asia's largest paper mill, PICOP. These multinational operations don't do anything for the locals, but the Filipino elite rakes in big money via their relationship with foreign capital.

NPA official website (really cool).

Official website of NPA Bicol Region (very well done).