www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, June 2002
Lead article
Struggles in the Philippines face U.S. troops, repression
by R. Russell Manila, Philippines—In the early days of the
Philippines summer, the year-old administration of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was
forced to reverse its edict that would have switched the May 1 workers holiday
to April 29. Arroyo was convinced by a very credible threat of a welgang
bayan (general strike) if she had not backed down. Her government's excuse
for trying to water down the historic holiday was to create a three-day weekend
in order to increase tourism from Manila to the provinces. The revolutionary women's group Gabriela, along with
Bayan which represents an important section of the above-ground Left, then
organized the real May 1 rally at the presidential Malacanang Palace. This was
achieved under difficult and dangerous circumstances. Massive security
preparations were justified by Arroyo's government by citing terrorist threats
and its response to last year's rally. At that earlier rally, forces backing deposed president
Joseph Estrada stormed Malacanang. He had been charged with plundering the
Philippine people and was overthrown in People Power II, which brought Arroyo to
power. The ensuing violence and deaths nearly succeeded in drowning out the
voices of workers and supporters who had planned the May Day rally at Malacanang
to mark the resurgence of labor militancy. It was to begin a new stage after a several years of
setbacks due to plant closings and movement of jobs to even lower-wage
countries, union-busting, and the intensifying pressures on Filipino workers to
move abroad. According to activist organizations who track it, there are
currently 7.5 million Filipinos working overseas, including Japan, Hong Kong,
the Middle East and the U.S. Their remittances back home constitute the
Philippines’s second largest source of foreign exchange. In response to the Arroyo government's attempt to change
the date of the international workers day, Gabriela's Manila secretary general
Emmi de Jesus, quoted in the PHLIPPINE STAR, pointed out that May 1 commemorates
the general strike by thousands of workers in Chicago in 1886 to push for an
eight-hour work day. She declared, "Clearly she [Arroyo] does not respect
the historical value of the militancy of workers not only in the Philippines but
also in the international arena. The fact is she is totally alienated from the
working class." These events unfolded during our discussions the
Philippines with human rights, women and labor activists. During our visit the
U.S.-led balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) military exercises were in
their fifth month. During that time, the bloody fist of the armed forces came
down hard in the provinces. DEEPENING RELATIONSHIPS In an atrocity reported in the back pages of the Manila
dailies, Benjaline Hernandez, Vivian Andrade, Crisanto Amora and Labaon Sinunday
were executed by the armed forces, shot in the face at point-blank range.
Hernandez was the 22-year-old Davao, Mindanao leader of the well-known human
rights alliance, Karapatan. When attacked, she was meeting with her three
companions, community residents in the Arakan valley region of Mindanao,
following up on a massacre of indigenous people in the same area a year earlier.
Ms. Andrade, 18, and Mr. Amora, 23, were farmers. Mr. Sinunday was a Lumad
(member of a non-Muslim indigenous community). Karapatan, in a flier distributed at a press conference
we attended in Manila, quoted Arakan valley community members who witnessed the
killings of Hernandez and her companions. One of the soldiers told the
residents, “They are all extinguished. They have all gone to another world. It
is all peaceful now. Go and get them.” Another soldier boasted, “You should have seen how the
women cried!” These comments suggested a concerted terror campaign on the part
of government forces, including its local vigilante auxiliary forces. An armed
forces spokesman accused the group of “associating” with the New People’s
Army (NPA). Barely a week later Expidito and Manuela Albarrio were slain
execution-style by military forces as well. The two were leaders of Bayan Muna,
the electoral party of Bayan in Mindoro Oriental, an island near Luzon. They
were the parents of eight children. At the Manila press conference called by Karapatan, we
learned that at least 28 members of activist organizations have been killed
during the Arroyo administration alone. The military campaigns reflect a
political response to many new relationships being formed between growing youth
and other activist groups and indigenous communities throughout the country,
most crucially in the southern Philippines where the U.S. is set to establish a
permanent military presence. A recent article included in a pamphlet honoring the
activists recently killed in the Philippines discusses AnakBayan, a nationwide
militant organization of both in-school and out-of-school youth. According to
Jeppie Ramada, AnakBayan chair for the Southern Mindanao region, the group was
founded in 1998 with only about 6,000 members. Today, less than four years
later, the group has grown to some 20,000 members with chapters being formed in
practically every city in the country, including some remote ones in Southern
Mindanao. Two fact-finding missions in March and April, the first
composed mostly of international observers, the second involving Philippine
organizations like Karapatan with many youth activists involved, investigated
human rights conditions. The first visited the island of Basilan, while the
second focused on Sulu province, both just to the south of the main island of
Mindanao. The heightened militarization of both areas, ostensibly
in pursuit of the Abu Sayaaf (a once highly ideological Islamic fundamentalist
group now committed to little more than kidnapping and banditry) was well under
way two years before the U.S. sent its troops. In addition, virtually the entire
southern Philippines has been deeply affected by three decades of fighting the
central government over the issues of separation or autonomy. The new American military presence has only exacerbated
the crises. The mayor of Isabella, the capital city of Basilan, told the
fact-finding mission, “We welcome the American troops with open arms, open
legs, with open everything.” In addition to recording revealing statements from local
leaders, the mission documented a “climate of fear” among Basilan’s
majority Muslim population, exacerbated by the joining of American military
technology and equipment with the bloody tactics of the Philippine military and
Abu Sayaaf. It discovered as well that the armed forces had carved its
50-hectare Jungle Training Base for the balikatan in Zamboanga (in the part of
Mindanao closest to Basilan) from the 90-hectare ancestral lands of the Lumad
Subanen tribe. Elsewhere in Mindanao, the still unresolved late April
series of bombings in General Santos City, on the southern-most tip of the
island, resulted in the arrest and continued detention of three ethnic minority
men, all active in Bayan and other left groups. Jehohn Macalinsal, a 19-year old
Muslim detainee from the Sangil ethnic group, was active in the Progressive
Organization of Gays in the Philippines, PROGAY. Armed forces personnel broke into the Moro Women Day
Care Center where he was working, and forced him to make a telephone call
warning of a bombing in General Santos City. Caller ID was then used to frame
him and the others for conspiring to bomb department stores and other sites in
the city. While increasing the desperation of many indigenous
communities in Mindanao and other areas, the government’s use of the balikatan
to wipe out revolutionary forces is evolving into a principal strategy. Some reports maintain that the Arroyo administration
really views confrontation with the Abu Sayyaf terrorist and kidnapping group as
an internal national priority and that the Philippine people are unable to
handle the threat on their own. Others hold that the U.S. is simply and
unilaterally using the Philippine situation to further its global supremacist
aims. In fact, the counter-revolutionary intentions at the
core of the balikatan are quickly expanding. It now appears that
repression is aimed at all dissident forces whether urban or rural. Targets
range from youth activists joining above-ground dissident groups in large
numbers to indigenous peoples defending their communities. ARROYO'S DECLINING SUPPORT Arroyo has tried to create a welcoming environment for balikatan,
utilizing the 60th anniversary in April of the World War II Bataan death march.
Thousands of Filipinos and U.S. captive forces died at the hands of the hated
Japanese invaders in 1942 during the march. The hukbalahap, a civilian
anti-fascist guerrilla force, continued to inflict heavy losses on the Japanese
after U.S. military leaders pulled out their troops. When the U.S. returned to
the Philippines near the end of the war, it focused on disarming the hukbalahap,
which threatened to turn the imperialist war into social revolution in the
Philippines. Filipinos' fondness for their own guerrilla history may be why,
rather than widening support for a return of U.S. forces, the Arroyo government
has been losing backing. A poll conducted by Social Weather Stations indicated
that in the last six months, support for the Arroyo administration declined from
28% to 16% among workers, and from 26% to 10% among the urban poor. Following widespread publication of these results, a
possible explanation emerged. The department of labor announced that merely 43%
of Metro Manila businesses comply with the $5-per-day minimum wage law. With an
unemployment rate of at least 30%, the "triple whammy" of price
increases in power, fuel and water charges is sure to drive the already massive
numbers of urban poor even deeper into desperation. This hasn't gone without resistance. Gabriela took the
lead in organizing protests against the triple whammy. At the same time, they
celebrated unprecedented court rulings favoring working women in fights against
pervasive discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as rape
and murder. FUNDAMENTALISM OR REVOLUTION? State repression, combined with ruthless local vigilante
forces, has been unremitting in the 15 years since the People Power triumph over
the Marcos dictatorship. This has, in part, led to the recent rapid growth of
the NPA in certain rural regions. That growth, however, is certainly less
significant than the rapid advance of religious fundamentalism, especially in
the southern Philippines. For example, throughout the 1990s the secular Moro
National Liberation Front was eclipsed in political importance by a break-away
faction, the fundamentalist Moro Islamic Liberation Front. It is true that the U.S. includes the NPA on its list of
terrorist groups along with Abu Sayaff. Communist Party of the Philippines
leader Jose Maria Sison recently called on the NPA to attack the U.S. military
presence in the Philippines. But the basically unmodified Maoist ideology of the
CP is not taken seriously by masses of people striving for liberation. Most
significantly, it finds little resonance among the new generation of student and
youth activists. A philosophic void which has plagued the world's Left
for decades has become even more apparent with the emergence of the U.S. as the
sole superpower and the politicization of fundamentalist religion as its new
nemesis. Such a total crisis has brought new attention to the power of ideas.
While the presence of such a void is recognized in everyday life, a significant
new focus may be occurring among students and intellectuals. For example, a recent book by the philosopher Florentino
Timbreza details the work of Erich Fromm on the relationship of religion,
philosophy and practical life from the perspective of Philippine history,
indigenous values, and religious beliefs. Timbreza writes that many students
have become “allergic to the once sacred word 'God',” and declares, “man
is already dying and nothing happens.” Timbreza writes, “Hegel wrote that
the spirit (or the human mind) is at war with itself. As a result, it has to
overcome itself as its most dreadful object.” Timbreza critically examines Fromm's approach to the
Hegelian-Marxian dialectic, including the meaning of absolute in the German
idealist tradition. He assesses the significance of Fromm's concepts of
alienation and humanism for current trends in Philippine life. We saw the passion for new beginnings in thought in the
enthusiasm of students and faculty for the presentation we gave at one
university on Hegel in Critical Theory and in Marxist-Humanism. Afterwards
philosophy and political science faculty and students concisely discussed
Hegel's categories and the new society, and posed questions about the conceptual
differences between Hegel and Marx in terms of social classes. The discussions, along with the new relationships being forged among revolutionary forces, show that the Philippines is alive and vital with desperate struggles and widespread desire for radical social transformations. However, it is abundantly clear that there is no strictly political entry into the heart of this ongoing process. The search for genuine social revolution in the Philippines, in thought as much as in practice, is rich in historical lessons, and it has become increasingly so with each passing decade. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
