At 45, the NPAs are still a long way to ‘victory’ | Asian Correspondent

At 45, the NPAs are still a long way to ‘victory’ | Asian Correspondent
Edwin Espejo, Dec 29, 2013

They are not yet ready to show their faces – at least that’s the leadership of the Far South Regional Party Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military wing the New People’s Army.

That is the reason they gave to explain why TV cameras were not allowed inside the ‘guerrilla zone’.  On December 26, on the day the CPP celebrated its 45^th founding anniversary, Mindanao’s fastest growing regional command of the communist underground movement opened up a little of its strongest five guerrilla fronts to a few General Santos City-based reporters somewhere in Cotabato.

Ka Efren, spokesman of the rebel group’s umbrella organization, the National Democratic Front (NDF), said the time will come when they will be ready to give their regional command a “face” – similar to the more vocal and open Ka Oris of NDF Mindanao who also held a similar press conference somewhere in Agusan del Sur.  (The Southern Mindanao region of the CPP-NP-NDF likewise invited members of the local press in Compostela Valley).

Ka Efren: "We will persevere no matter how long it takes."

He said the Far South is making inroads and rapidly expanding their influence in the region which includes the whole of South Cotabato and Sarangani, portions of Sultan Kudarat, Cotabato and Davao del Sur provinces.

The area where they celebrated their founding anniversary is part of its Guerrilla Front 72 , one of the oldest in Mindanao and is also the strongest in the Far South region.

It has a company-size formation of young guerrilla fighters, most of them sons and daughters of peasants and farmers.  

Its main regular unit, also called ‘sentro de grabidad’ or SDG, headed by Ka Dencio Madrigal, was said to be in another guerrilla front.  Ka Dencio is Far South’s most wanted man by the military.

Young fighters

Ka Jam, commanding officer of the Mt. Alip Command (Front 72), can easily pass himself off as a college student about to get his diploma.

But at 33, he is the oldest among the ‘Red’ fighters of Front 72.

“The average age is about 25.  Our youngest is 19.  I am 33,” Ka Jam said.

Jam started as a church worker and was influenced by an older brother into joining the NPA.

“I began as an activist in 1999 and got into integration with the (NPA) unit in 2000,” he narrated.

Jam said he decided he wanted to be a red fighter right then and there.  When he went home, his only purpose was to tell his parents of his decision to join the NPA.

It was a slow rise for Jam, frail at about 5’4” tall, who became the commanding officer of the Mt. Alip Command.

A political officer of the NPAs explains to Erning  and Eden the task of their son Ka Diego in the guerrilla movement.

After the anniversary program, 22-year-old Ka Diego had a reunion with his parents who had to walk, travel by bus, then walk again to meet their eldest son.  Erning and Eden came all the way from a remote village in Banga, South Cotabato to see Ka Diego who they have not seen in seven months.

Erning was teary-eyed, holding the AK-47 issued to his son.  Erning and his wife brought along their six-year old youngest son.  Their only daughter was left behind to tend to their home.

Not far away, a young woman Red fighter is carrying – nay, hugging – her son not even a year old.  She has to leave her child to the care of relatives as she and her husband have opted to pursue the 45-year-old armed struggle of the CPP-NPA-NDF.

Such sacrifices are not uncommon for fulltime guerrilla fighters.

Ka Efren and his wife, who is also a fulltime communist cadre, had their Grade 7 son as their special ‘visitor.’

Ka Jam said the biggest ‘victory’ they achieved this year was the ambush of soldiers belonging to the 38^th Infantry Battalion in Bituan, Tulunan in Cotabato province.

The NPA detonated a command controlled land mine just as a military semi-truck passed the ‘killing zone.’  Six soldiers and three militiamen were killed following a volume of fire from the NPAs waiting by the roadside as the landmine exploded.

The military claimed the NPAs used excessive fire to dismember some of the dead soldiers.

Ka Jam however said the soldiers were directly hit by the explosive and this explained the mangled faces of the soldiers.

He said they just fired three M-203 shells and used less than 500 rounds of ammunition.  In the aftermath, Ka Jam said they were able to confiscate seven high powered rifles.

Capt. Ernesto Aguilar, the highest ranking officer who was with the semi-truck, managed to survive and escape capture. 

There were at least four other major encounters in Front 72.  Ka Jam said they inflicted considerable casualties to government soldiers while suffering one ‘comrade’ killed in action in 2013.

Still a long way

In 2008, Ka Oris, NDF Mindanao spokesman, said they were aiming at a strategic stalemate in five years.

In the Rappler story by Karlos Manlupig, Ka Oris did not make any reference to his 2008 statement as their target is coming to pass this year.  

But Ka Efren said they are prepared to bring their revolution to the next level (strategic stalemate) no matter how long it will take.

Like Ka Oris, he noted the steady rise in the number of tactical offensives, new recruits and armaments over the last few years.

“Our tactical offensives will became bigger, more frequent and in more locations next year,” said Ka Efren.

It is a veiled warning shared by Ka Jam who said while the NPAs perform their revolutionary tasks of implementing the rebels’ own brand of ‘agrarian revolution’ and building their mass base, they have not lost sight of their principal function and that is engaging in guerrilla warfare.

Ka Efren later addressed their supporters, numbering about 1,000, and laid down their ‘tasks’ in the next few years to include building organs of political power – a euphemism for their “shadow government.”

NPA strength

After 45 years of guerrilla warfare, the CPP-NPA-NDF is the oldest ongoing communist-led insurgency in Asia.

It is nowhere near the strategic stalemate stage – a stage where they are supposed to be in parity with the Philippine government in warfare capability. They are not necessarily at parity in arms and strength but at the point when the government cannot defeat it while the communist is not yet capable of overthrowing the existing order.

In a statement, the Central Committee of the CPP however said it has reached a point where the military cannot sustain offensive operations “for six months to one year on more than 10% of the guerrilla fronts.”

The communist rebels said they now have a total of 110 guerrilla fronts in substantial portions in 71 of the country’s 81 provinces.  Forty-six (46) of these guerrilla fronts are in the Mindanao mainland where the NPAs are strongest.  A typical guerrilla front has at least a NPA-level company size formation which include two regular platoons and a detach unit.

The CPP said it needs to increase its armed regulars to 25,000 and its party membership to 250,000 in order to advance its ‘revolution’ to the next stage.

Ka Oris said there are now 10,000 party members in Mindanao.

But in an unprecedented admission, the CPP also conceded the communist movement throughout the world is “in a period of temporary defeat and strategic retreat…because of the sabotage and betrayal carried out by the modern revisionists.”

It took China and Russia to task for joining the world ‘capitalist order’ in full – a reality that is not lost to the military.

The NPAs claim they are getting even stronger despite military claim to the contrary.

Belittled

Maj. Gen. Rainer Cruz, head of the Mindanao Eastern Command of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, however belittled the anniversary celebrations of the communists,

“Are they still there?” he said in jest.

The Philippine military said the NPAs are now down to less than 4,000 nationwide and no more than 1,500 in Mindanao.  

Cruz said the rebels are no longer getting fresh recruits and have reduced themselves to thugs and extortionists.

Incidentally for the general, it is in his area of responsibility where the communists and the NPAs are at their strongest nationwide.  

The guerilla fronts of the Northeastern, Southern, Northcentral and Far South Mindanao commands of the NPAs are among the resilient and most active in the country today.

“From only 250 TOs (tactical offensives) in 2010, this has increased to 350 in 2011, to 400 in 2012 and to more than 400 in the entire year of 2013,” Ka Oris said in a statement read before members of the press in Agusan del Sur.

December 26 also marked the first time in the history of Mindanao’s communist movement that these regions – Northeast, Southern and Far South –  held simultaneous press conferences.

In 2010, Ka Oris said they have almost reached the 1980s level of armed strength when the CPP-NPA-NDF were at their strongest.  At that time, during the Marcos dictatorship, the military placed their armed strength at 25,000.

CPP statements however said, their armed regulars at that time were less than 10,000.

The communists defined the stages of their armed struggle in three – strategic defensive, strategic stalemate and strategic offensive.

But on its 45^th anniversary, the CPP said it is still on the verge of completing the requisites to advance its ‘armed struggle’ to the strategic stalemate.

Looking for democracy in Thailand’s Democrat Party | Asian Correspondent

Looking for democracy in Thailand’s Democrat Party | Asian Correspondent
AP News Dec 12, 2013

BANGKOK (AP) — The Democrat Party has seen the enemy.

The Democrats, whose veterans are at the forefront of the anti-government protests that have shaken Bangkok for the past six weeks, say the enemy is a brutal system that has allowed their political nemesis to remain politically powerful, even from far away in Dubai, in exile. The system has driven them to launch angry protests that have left at least five people dead and littered a few streets with the carcasses of burned-out police trucks. It has kept the party from winning a national election for two decades.

The enemy of the Democrat Party? It’s democracy.

Or as protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban calls it, “the tyranny of the parliamentary majority.”
When Thailand’s elected prime minister refused an opposition demand to step aside, Suthep’s answer this week was to effectively declare a new government, in the form of a self-appointed “People’s Democratic Reform Committee.” He ordered civil servants to answer to the committee, called for a shadow system of volunteers to replace the police and issued an order that Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra be prosecuted for insurrection.

“Today will be a historic day,” Suthep roared Monday to tens of thousands of protesters crowding streets around the prime minister’s office. Suthep was a Democrat Party leader until he symbolically resigned shortly before the protests began, though he remains strongly identified with the party.

“This will be the first time that the people, the owners of the country, stood up to take back their sovereign power.”

On Wednesday, most civil servants appeared to defy Suthep’s order to report to the Reform Committee, but the move represents an uncertain and potentially dangerous division in Thai politics, which has been convulsed by repeated, often-violent protests since a 2006 coup ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Yingluck’s brother.

The coup exposed a deep division in Thai society. Thaksin’s supporters are mostly poor, rural people from the country’s north and northeast, drawn to him by government programs he created offering everything from nearly free medical care to guaranteed crop prices.
The traditional elite, meanwhile — high-level civil servants and military officers, aristocrats, professionals and businessmen — remain with the Democrat Party.

While Thaksin’s supporters are relative newcomers in Thai politics, they wield the power of numbers. Thaksin or his loyalists have won every national election since 2001.

Thaksin, a billionaire who made his first fortune in telecommunications and has been dogged for years by accusations of shady dealings, has lived in exile since 2008, fleeing a corruption conviction he insists is politically motivated.

His sister Yingluck, who is widely seen as a proxy for her brother — even by many of her own supporters — took power after a landslide victory in 2011.

On Monday, hours before Suthep announced the powers of the new Reform Committee, Yingluck dissolved Parliament and called new elections for Feb. 2. Suthep dismissed the vote a political ploy.

He also knew, however, that there was no way his party would win.

In many ways, the Democrats want a democracy that would have looked at home in 18th-century America or ancient Rome, a democracy where the uneducated masses are kept out of mainstream politics and a small corps of rotating elites sit at the top of the political pyramid.

Protesters believe in Suthep’s vision of what he sometimes calls a “perfect democracy,” where one man can simply claim the power to anoint a new government if there are enough protesters in the streets.

“Please tell people in your country that we are not crazy,” Nuanchan Poonpatana, 50-year-old Bangkok resident dressed in a pink jacket and pink shoes, said at a recent morning as she walked to an anti-Thaksin protest.

Like many of Thaksin’s opponents, she sees his government aid programs as national bribery schemes to buy votes.

“The farmers and poor people receive money from him,” she said, adding that new elections would change nothing. Yingluck would simply win again.

Suthep’s announcement of the Reform Committee was warmly welcomed among the protesters.

Ekgarin Khunchaiprasert, a thin, 27-year-old airport worker, was in the crowds at Suthep’s Monday speech. Asked if the self-appointed committee represented the abandonment of democracy, he shook his head.

“Democracy has just begun here today.”

Why are more than 250 activists facing trial in Burma? | Asian Correspondent

Why are more than 250 activists facing trial in Burma? | Asian Correspondent
Francis Wade, Dec 06, 2013

The New York Times released a timely op-ed this week warning that investment in Burma could aid the military, whose power the reform drive is ostensibly aimed at diluting. “A central policy of the regime is to attract foreign investment into the impoverished country,” it said. “At issue now is whether Myanmar’s transition will be more than a ploy to draw in foreign money to fatten the military.”

It’s a pertinent question to ask now as increasing numbers of western firms eye ventures in the country. The army still wields great clout over the economy through military-owned outfits like the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings (UMEH), a vast and shady conglomerate with its roots in junta-era Burma. A quarter of the annual state budget goes to the military – any investment in Burma will inevitably contribute to this.

Seemingly being overlooked is an ancillary story to the debate over responsible business practice. In the past few weeks, courts in Burma have found more than a dozen people guilty of breaking Article 18, the bill enacted last year (to some loud clapping from abroad) to allow, and govern, peaceful protest. Some have been given months-long jail terms with labour, others have been fined. A number of the people were protesting sensitive economic ventures, like the Letpadaung copper mine in northern Burma, or criticising delicate matters like the arrest of a land rights activist, or poor workplace standards.

Increasing numbers of these stories are emerging – the woman who has been threatened with arrest for refusing to leave her land, on which a huge Japan-backed industrial zone is to be developed; the seven-month sentences yesterday given to activists peacefully protesting the Kachin conflict.  What seems to have gone largely unnoticed is that despite Article 18 and the government’s accompanying pledge to allow space for activism, protestors continue to be criminalized – in fact we’re in the thick of a major but silent crackdown on activists, with 253 people currently awaiting trial on politically-motivated charges, according to data compiled by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. The specific charge pinned on many of them is that they did not consult with the government prior to protesting.

When Article 18 was enacted last year, it was this point that critics highlighted as a cause for concern. The clause essentially gives the government ultimate control over freedom of speech, which is antithetical to the main purpose of protests – to hold the state to account. A government that curtails that right cannot be considered democratic.

The key commonality here is that many of these charges have targeted individuals and groups whose protests threaten to spotlight highly sensitive issues like the extractives industry, the Kachin conflict, meager salaries and workplace abuse of factory employees, etc – in short, the issues that are most sensitive to the government and military and its close network of business tycoons and prized foreign investors. As the brutal crackdown on the Letpadaung mine protestors showed last year, the government is willing to allow reforms to move forward until they begin to eat into the interests of this nexus. Protection of their interests currently appears to override what should be key elements of the transition.

Some will argue that things have improved for activists – what would have been decades-long sentences three years ago are now far shorter. Yet that position neglects to acknowledge the implications of the continued criminalization of protest, something that statistics prove is still happening on a worrying scale. This has important consequences, particularly if, as the New York Times warns, it stops a light being shone on the military’s continued clout over the economy and political arena. This however is evidently the precise aim of the crackdown.

Ex-PM Thaksin a saintly figure in rural Thailand | Asian Correspondent

Ex-PM Thaksin a saintly figure in rural Thailand  | Asian Correspondent
AP News Dec 06, 2013

KAMBON, Thailand (AP) — Here, in a village where electricity is still a novelty, they’ll quickly tell you who was responsible for bringing change to this long-neglected corner of Thailand.
Thaksin Shinawatra is a former prime minister, a billionaire businessman and the brother of the current prime minister. He has lived for years in luxurious, self-imposed exile in Dubai, but is still widely seen as Thailand’s most powerful politician. He is despised by his opponents among Thailand’s traditional elite, who disdain him as a corrupt leader who spent billions of the government’s dollars to amass a huge following among the poor and uneducated.

But around here he is a saint.

“Ten years ago, the road you drove on to get here was dirt. There was no electricity, there was no irrigation,” said Pichai Poltaklang, a retired primary schoolteacher and local organizer for Thaksin’s political movement, commonly known as the “Red Shirts.” He ticks off government programs: the virtually free health care, the low-cost education loans, the old-age pension. “Before Thaksin came to power we were left out.”

As Thailand faces an immense social and political divide, a schism pitting the rural poor against a traditional urban elite that has again ignited bloody protests in the streets of Bangkok, places like Kambon are at the heart of Thaksin’s power.

There are tens of thousands of villages like this scattered across Thailand’s north and northeast, and millions of villagers who Thaksin can call upon if the scattered protests of recent weeks descend into full-scale street violence and his sister’s government is threatened.

If no one here is calling for bloodshed, a quiet threat is always implicit. Occasionally, it’s explicit.

“Across the northeast we can seize every government office in every town, in every city, in every province,” said Thongplean Boonphunga, a middle-aged rice farmer. The elite may deride Thaksin’s followers as uneducated bumpkins, but, she notes, the country people have numbers on their side.

“They can’t control the whole country. We can,” he said.

Kambon is in Thailand’s northeast, a sprawling, populous region of rice paddies and small farms that was long ignored by successive governments in Bangkok. As Thailand’s economy boomed, and the country became one of Southeast Asia’s financial powerhouses, millions of farmers struggled in villages that had barely changed since the days of their grandparents.
But that changed under Thaksin, who was born in the north, and who used millions made as a telecommunications magnate to vault himself into politics. He became prime minister in 2001.

To his rural followers, Thaksin is a man who understands their plight and looked for ways to improve their lives.

To his many critics, he took a cold look at Thailand’s demographics, focusing on populous but poor regions where he knew government spending would make an immediate impact and bring followers.

The followers came in droves.

“The Thaksin government gave them concrete moments in their lives” where they saw real change, said David Streckfuss, an American scholar based in Thailand. “They also realized their power” in electing him over and over, he said.

Thaksin quickly became Thailand’s most popular politician, with that popularity holding on tightly after he was ousted in a 2006 military coup, and then after he went into exile to avoid a corruption conviction he says was politically motivated. He has not been back to Thailand since 2008.

The 2006 coup split Thailand’s social divisions wide open, and set the stage for years of on-and-off political turmoil. Since then, elections have been interspersed with carefully orchestrated chaos, weather by Thaksin’s “Red Shirts” or by the “Yellow Shirts” of the traditional elite.

The most recent trouble began in November, when the ruling party — led by Thaksin’s younger sister, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra — tried to push an amnesty bill through Parliament. Critics said it was designed to allow Thaksin back into Thailand.

Even though the government backed down on the amnesty bill, protesters flooded into government buildings, trying to force the collapse of Yingluck’s government. The protesters, led by former Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban, say Thaksin voters are easily swayed by his populist policies, and they are demanding the creation of an unelected “people’s council” to administer the country.

The political standoff resulted in three days of intense clashes between protesters and police. But the clashes abruptly ended Tuesday and both both sides called an informal truce to celebrate the revered king’s 86th birthday on Thursday.

While he used his annual birthday speech to call for stability, King Bhumibol Adulyadej made no direct comments on the political crisis.

In Kambon, like everywhere else in Thailand, they’re waiting to see what will happen Friday, when the enforced unity of the royal birthday is over and politics will again rule. The autumn harvest is underway, and in the fields the air is sweet with the smell of freshly cut rice stalks.

No one here is eager for protests now, when there is so much work to do — major Red Shirt protests tend to coincide with the spring hot season, when farmers have more free time — but protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban has vowed that “our battle” will resume on Friday.

So they are closely watching what is happening in Bangkok.

Noothuan Wongthong, a 52-year-old farmer with a lilting voice and wool gloves to protect her hands from the dried rice stalks she hacked with a hand-made sickle, was working for a neighbor on a recent morning.

Like her neighbors, she can quickly list programs that have benefited her: the guaranteed price for rice, the loans, the medical care that has paid for repeated blood tests after she began to grow strangely tired. She worries what will happen if protesters drive Yingluck from power.

She’s got a new Yamaha scooter, and a 27-inch TV. She gets more money when she sells her own rice, and is paid more when she works for other farmers. She doesn’t want to lose her grip on the lower rungs of Thailand’s middle-class life.

“Before Thaksin, the money never reached us here,” she said. “Now it does.”