| Home Kapatiran
Links
Contact Us
Archive
Issue Number 24, August 2004
|
Kapatiran Issue
No. 24, August 2004
BOOK REVIEW
- Murray Horton
"US
TERRORISM AND WAR IN THE PHILIPPINES"
Jose Maria Sison. Papieren Tijger, Netherlands, 2003. 15
euros.
Jose Maria Sison
(universally known as Joma) is the face of the Philippine
revolution. One of the country's top Left intellectuals
and activists in his youth, he was one of the founders of
the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its New
Peoples Army (NPA) at the end of the 1960s. As detailed
in the editorial introduction to his keynote speech to
the Canadian conference (see above), he was the Marcos
dictatorship's most high profile political prisoner for
nine years, until he was freed after the 1986 People
Power 1 which removed Ferdinand Marcos and brought Cory
Aquino to office. He enjoyed a very brief respite before
leaving the Philippines that same year for international
speaking engagements (including in New Zealand) and he
has never returned home, living in exile as a political
refugee in The Netherlands. The international
headquarters of the National Democratic Front of the
Philippines (NDFP), the coalition of groups waging the
armed struggle, is in Utrecht, where he lives. He is the
Chief Political Consultant to the NDFP.
Joma, who is 65, has led a fascinating life, and has been
a prolific writer of articles, political polemics and
analysis, and several books. The best account of his life
and the influences on his political development can be
found in his 1989 book "The Philippine Revolution:
The Leader's View" (written with Rainer Werning).
Nor is he a dour old Commo. Filipinos, regardless of
their political orientation, love music, dancing and fun.
Joma is no exception, with a wellknown passion for those
very things and is not averse to using up to the minute
popular means of communicating his message. Most
recently, he has released a CD of him singing and
reciting poetry (he is a renowned poet in his own right),
including his remake of Frank Sinatra's individualistic
classic, retitled "I Did It Mao's Way".
"US Terrorism And War In The Philippines" is a
much shorter book (134 pages), made up of a whole series
of short statements from Joma (it's not a book of
essays), analysing the Philippine and global situation
from 2001-03 inclusive. The title is self-explanatory.
The book is in three parts, with the first giving details
about Joma himself (it's a compilation from several
leading figures in the campaign to defend him against the
designation of being a "foreign terrorist").
Part 2 is Sison's analysis of the long history of US
imperialism in the Philippines (dating back to when it
forcibly colonised that country, at the end of the 19th
Century) and throughout the world. He points out the
obvious - that "terrorism" has replaced
"Communism" in the American demonology, and
that, in the case of both himself and the CPP/NPA, the US
has conveniently lumped the two together. Part 3 covers
the international campaign to defend him (see his keynote
speech to the Canadian conference, above, for a much more
detailed account of this). His being designated a
"foreign terrorist" by several governments
(including his Dutch hosts), in the hysterical hubris
following the September 11, 2001, Islamic fundamentalist
atrocities in the US, has caused a whole series of
practical difficulties in the daily life of him and his
family and left him in a legal limbo. exposed to the very
real risk of being "disappeared' into the US gulag
of secret prisons and torture chambers scattered around
the world.
But that hasn't happened and he remains free, if
constrained. It would appear that even the
neo-conservative boneheads currently running the Bush
Administration (and aren't they doing a good job of it)
realise that the CPP/NPA is engaged in a strictly civil
war in the Philippines, one with a long running series of
peace talks being conducted parallel to the classic
guerilla war (the current talks are in Norway). Even when
the Philippines hosted huge and vital US military bases
(they were kicked out by a massive popular campaign,
which culminated in their departure in 1992), the
Communists never made the tactical error of attacking
them and thus giving the Americans the excuse to get
directly involved in the war. The Philippines never
became another Vietnam. And so, even the neo-cons realise
that it is a total absurdity to lump Sison and the
CPP/NPA in with the likes of al Qaeda and the Abu Sayyaf
bandits who terrorise the southernmost parts of the
Philippines. The facts speak for themselves - Joma Sison
has attracted the support of a very well organised
international campaign, including from leading figures of
all political shades in the Philippines. There is no such
campaign on behalf of Osama bin Laden.
The US Is The Real Terrorist
This book makes crystal clear just who are the terrorists
in the world today. And it's not the likes of Sison or a
peasant army fighting for a more equitable society in the
Philippines. Nope, it's the US and its local cronies in
the Philippines and countries like it throughout the
world. US imperialism since Bush came to power has become
nakedly obvious to the world at large but it has been
always thus for people in the Third World, where the US
has bombed, killed, invaded, plotted, overthrown and
exploited for the past century or so. It was the US which
propped up the terrorist Ferdinand Marcos, who murdered,
tortured, imprisoned and stole on a truly heroic scale.
And it is the US which has propped up every Philippine
President since he was deemed to have outlived his
usefulness and could no longer suppress the wrath of the
long-suffering Filipino people.
Joma has been paid the ultimate "compliment" of
being designated a "terrorist" (just as South
Africa's Nelson Mandela and East Timor's Xanana Gusmao
were previously, by the very same Western governments).
It is currently politically convenient for anyone who is
an opponent of those in power to be labelled a
"terrorist". Sison has been a leading figure in
an armed struggle for decades - just as Mandela and
Gusmao were. And, like them, he has suffered lengthy
imprisonment, torture, demonisation and attempts to be
sidelined. None of it has worked. Joma Sison has been a
key figure in Philippine politics and history since at
least the 1960s, and remains so today. It is important
that the world at large learns the truth about him, about
the struggle that he has headed for decades, and about
the reality of the political situation in the Philippines
and the world at large. For that reason, this book is
part of the process of learning that truth.
Go to top
|
