While the national government had better fortune concluding its peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) as evidenced by the signing of the peace agreement, it still has to sit down with the other rebel group, the Communist Party of the Philippines-National Democratic Front-New People’s Army (CPP-NDF-NPA).
The arrest of Benito Tiamzon and Wilma Tiamzon, two top leaders of the CPP, point to what the military claims is a major victory against the communist rebels, whose ideology had long been antiquated by the transformation of communist countries adopting capitalist policies like China.
Not so, says political analysts and those familiar with and those engaged in the underground communist movement.
If anything, they say, the local communist movement broke into two factions namely the hard-liners and the reformists.
So what does the arrest of the Tiamzon couple, who were revealed to be staying in a compound with every amenity available to upper middle class families—including a slew of pets whose daily dietary requirements could easily feed an indigent family of four—bode for the communist movement whose sole goal is the capitulation of the existing political system and its replacement with their own hard-line socialist ideology?
Nothing that we haven’t seen before which are the occasional forays into plantations and companies that dare to refuse to pay their underground taxes which are mostly located in the countryside.
And of course, the continuing visibility and campaign of their “allies” in Congress which have landed in the mainstream in order to participate in the national discourse as what former president Fidel V. Ramos opened up when he called on the CPP-NDF-NPA to lay down their arms and join in the democratic process instead.
The military wasn’t being naïve or narrow-sighted when it pronounced that the Tiamzon couple’s arrest in Cebu was a resounding victory for the government and for the country’s democracy. As the country’s primary protector, it is confined to warfare and thus its chief objective for existence is to repel and eliminate the armed threat once and for all.
It leaves politics to the politicians and the politicians in turn assure the public that the communist insurgency is practically on its last legs at least as far as their armed threat is concerned. The spread of lobbyists, adherents and sympathizers, however, isn’t factored in because they represent a political rather than an armed threat.
Which isn’t to say that the military is slacking off in that department as evidenced by their campaign to discourage students from joining activist groups that they identified to be with the communists.
In Cebu at least, the CPP-NDF-NPA is more a social and political movement rather than an armed one which the province’s officials are only too dismissive of for now.
Still, despite their rebel status, they enjoy the same rights as all of us who continue to believe in real democracy and as such the military should tread carefully in its prosecution of the Tiamzon couple who are guaranteed protection of their rights under the Constitution.
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