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Issue Number 27/28, April 2007
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 27/28, April 2007
GLORIA’S INGLORIOUS REIGN OF
TERROR
Desperate Regime In Crisis Resorts To State Terror &
Mass Murder
- Murray Horton
The Philippines under President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
is a nation enduring a human rights catastrophe on the
same scale, or even worse, than what it suffered during
the long dark night of the martial law dictatorship
(1973-86) of the late, unlamented President Ferdinand
Marcos. Hers is a regime undergoing a political crisis
much deeper than those which afflicted her predecessors
(political crisis is the norm in the Philippines, which
is a “democracy” in name only). Indeed, Gloria
faces a crisis of political legitimacy, meaning that she
is holding onto the country’s highest office
although she is not entitled to it. And she has shown
that she will go to any lengths to hang on to power,
including the full gamut of State terror, such as
disappearances, torture, arbitrary arrests, systematic
mass murder of political activists, imprisoning political
opponents on trumped up charges, the use of emergency
powers to try and suppress popular protest and critical
media, and last, but definitely not least, trying to
change the country’s very Constitution and system of
government in a desperate bid to escape electoral defeat
and stay in power for years longer than her term of
office. The political crisis and the human rights crisis
are cause and effect.
Some background is necessary. To save this becoming of
book length, we need to take it as read that political
crisis is the norm in the Philippines. It is a country
whose tiny ruling class is determined to hang onto, at
all costs, the wealth and power they’ve acquired
through hundreds of years of feudalism. There has never
been any real land reform. The big landowners routinely
use deadly violence, either directly through their own
private armies or through the State forces that are put
at their disposal (because the very same dynastic big
landowners dominate all organs of local and national
political power). The vast majority of Filipinos are
landless peasants, forced to scratch a living from very
basic subsistence agriculture, beholden to their landlord
and his armed goons. Starvation is common in the
countryside. Millions flock to the cities, particularly
Metro Manila, to try and make a better life for
themselves. There they encounter soaring unemployment,
with the stark choice for far too many being a hazardous
living in the “informal” economy or life as a
squatter, at worst ending up in the huge slums, living on
the streets or even in the garbage dumps. There are no
welfare benefits, it is a dog eat dog society. Those that
get jobs in the cities all too often end up in factories
that resemble prisons, working very long hours for very
low pay, with the company’s goons and State forces
violently suppressing union struggles for better pay and
conditions. Ten million Filipinos (out of a population of
around 85 million) are working outside the country and
the money they send home to support their families is the
country’s single biggest source of income.
Getting Rid Of The Kleptocrats, Twice
The Philippine State is weak, providing virtually nothing
by way of services to the people. The only thing that it
is “good” at is oppression, with the military
being afforded the biggest chunk of the budget.
Corruption is endemic, through every level of government,
with the scale of the ripoff increasing to truly
astronomic proportions the higher the office. Corruption
was the theme of the December 2006 issue of New
Internationalist magazine and it listed two Filipino
presidents (Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada) among
the Ten Most Corrupt World Leaders of recent history
– Marcos was second only to Indonesia’s
Suharto; Estrada was forced from office before he could
rip off billions as opposed to the mere high tens of
millions that he got away with in his truncated 1998-01
term. Virtually none of their booty has been recovered
and of the little that has, none of it has gone to their
victims. Despite winning a historic 1990s’ US court
ruling awarding them more than $NZ2 billion from the
Marcos estate, the nearly 10,000 plaintiffs (human rights
victims and their families) who took the class action
suit haven’t seen a cent of it. The Arroyo
government, on the other hand, made sure that it stole
the several hundreds of millions of US dollars
repatriated from Marcos’ Swiss bank accounts, under
the guise of using it for “land reform” (it was
actually spent on Gloria’s 2004 Presidential
election campaign, of which more anon).
Not surprisingly, Filipinos don’t take this
permanently appalling situation lying down. In 1986, they
gave the world People Power, which non-violently got rid
of the tyrant, mass murderer and master kleptocrat,
Ferdinand Marcos. In 2001 they did it all over again and
People Power 2 (Filipinos love sequels) got rid of the
apprentice kleptocrat Estrada, who is still supposedly
“on trial” for plundering the national
Treasury. And even less surprisingly, there is a long
history of armed struggle. December 2006 marked the 38th
anniversary of the re-establishment of the Communist
Party of the Philippines (the old Party became moribund
after an unsuccessful armed struggle in the 1950s), whose
New People’s Army has waged a classic Maoist
guerrilla war in virtually every province for nearly four
decades. The Party and its Army have been through many up
and downs but no President – Marcos, Aquino, Ramos,
Estrada or Arroyo – has succeeded in defeating it.
Currently the CPP/NPA is enjoying a resurgence, as
evidenced by renewed international media interest (Time
devoted several pages to the NPA in its February 5, 2007,
issue).
In the Muslim South (Mindanao and the islands between it
and Borneo) an equally long and brutal war has been waged
to try and defeat Muslim separatists since the mid 1970s.
Unlike the war with the Communists, the war with the
Muslim armies has regularly been a conventional one, not
only a guerrilla one, with large scale battles, major air
attacks and whole towns being flattened by Government
forces. But as with the Communists, no President has
succeeded in defeating the Muslim armies. One of them
(the Moro National Liberation Front – MNLF) gave up
armed struggle in the 1990s in return for a less than
satisfactory autonomy deal, but another one (the Moro
Islamic Liberation Front – MILF) carried on the
fight. These two wars - against the Communists throughout
the whole countryside and against the Muslims in the
South – led President Bush to declare the
Philippines the “Second Front in the ‘War on
Terror’” and President Arroyo has been
Bush’s staunchest ally, both at home and abroad, in
that War. She has gone to any lengths to allow the US
military back into the country from which its 100 year
old bases were so ignominiously expelled in the early
1990s, in a globally significant victory for the
Philippine anti-bases movement.
Neo-Liberal And Litigious
That very briefly sets the scene. Now to the specifics of
the Gloria crisis (as opposed to the overall and
seemingly never ending Philippine crisis). She was
Estrada’s Vice President who was thrust into office
in January 2001 (coincidentally on the same day that her
imperial master, George Bush, was sworn in as US
President). Despite the people’s high hopes for a
new direction in Philippine politics, that was far too
much to expect of such a stereotypical trapo (traditional
politician). Gloria is the daughter of a 1950s’
President, Diosdado Macapagal, she grew up in the
Malacanang Palace that she now occupies as President. An
American-educated economist, she is an enthusiastic
devotee of the ruinous neo-liberal economic policies that
have wrought such havoc in every country where they have
been imposed (including New Zealand and, of course, the
Philippines). She had personally signed the
Philippines’ membership of the World Trade
Organisation in the 90s and, as President, set about
restructuring the country for the benefit of the rich
– the only distinguishing characteristic of each
President is which particular set of dynastic families
and business cronies he or she chooses to favour. It goes
without saying that each President enriches his or her
own family, and Gloria has been no exception. There have
been corruption scandals involving her husband, Mike
Arroyo (who has the official title of First Gentleman)
and son, Mikey. The Philippines is one of the few
countries where libel is still classed as a criminal, not
a civil, offence and Mike Arroyo has made very liberal
use of that law to bring libel charges against literally
dozens of journalists who have written about his
financial affairs rather too critically for his liking.
These journalists are not “scurrilous”
muckrakers either, but include very respectable business
and political reporters for conservative publications,
some of them arrested and taken into custody whilst going
about their job in the Palace or the House of
Representatives (which, like its US model, has two
branches – Congress and the Senate).
Apart from the run of the mill corruption and further
enriching of the rich, every Philippine President
presides over a State terrorist regime. This is separate
from, and additional to, the non stop wars being waged
against the armed Communists and Muslim separatists.
Violence and assassination are central features of
Philippine political and social life, at all levels. At
the bottom of society, death squads made up of off duty
cops and guns for hire murder street kids and alleged
petty criminals in cities like Mindanao’s biggest,
Davao. Not only are there no legal consequences from this
systematic mass murder, it is applauded by the local
business and political elite as “cleaning up” a
social problem. At the top of society, rival dynastic
families routinely conduct their murderous disputes with
guns, ensuring blood feuds that span generations. The
underlying values are much more of a Western than
Western. So, murdering people who are opponents or simply
seen as a nuisance or threat is deeply ingrained into the
political process. All Presidents oversee a regime
whereby legal Leftwing political activists, from the
grassroots up to leaders, are systematically targeted for
murder, disappearance, torture, assault, or trumped up
imprisonment (sometimes a combination of several of
these).
Culture Of Impunity
What distinguishes Gloria’s human rights crisis from
those of her predecessors is the sheer scale and brazen
culture of impunity that accompanies it. By early 2007,
more than 800 legal Left political activists, mostly from
the grassroots and provincial leadership levels, had been
murdered, usually in a singularly brutal fashion, with
torture and mutilation a common feature. Virtually all of
these murders were carried out by identical killers
– gun wielding, motorbike riding men, disguised by
what Filipinos call bonnets (balaclavas to New
Zealanders) or, bizarrely for a snow-free tropical
country, ski masks - and always operating in close
proximity to Army camps. The killers also come from the
ranks of the Police and from the numerous rural
paramilitaries, whereby the Army arms local thugs or
members of fanatical anti-Communist cults, and gives them
carte blanche to terrorise and murder in their villages.
These death squad murders are routinely conducted in
broad daylight, in public, even in the victims’
homes, often in the presence of numerous witnesses (some
of whom have also been murdered).
The victims have largely come from the ranks of the
several legal Left Party List Organisations represented
in Congress, primarily from Bayan Muna and Anakpawis.
Others have been from the very human rights groups that
investigate these killings, such as Karapatan whose
leader, Marie Hilao-Enriquez was hosted by Philippines
Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA) on her 2004 NZ
speaking tour (for extensive coverage of that tour, see
Kapatiran 25/26, December 2005, which can be read online
at
http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/KapNo25n26/kap25list.htm.
The PSNA Website www.converge.org.nz/psna also has a
whole section devoted to Marie and her work, and another
devoted to the Stop The Killings Campaign, including
lengthy reports from Karapatan and Amnesty International,
and a photo gallery of some of the murdered and
abducted).
Journalists, clergy, lawyers and judges have also been
among the victims. In January 2007, Radio New Zealand
National’s Insight programme broadcast a 30 minute
documentary about the murders of journalists in the
Philippines (it has the second highest murder rate in the
world for that profession, topped only by Iraq, which is
racked by outright war). This highlighted the case of a
Mindanao radio journalist who was murdered (shot dead in
her home, in front of her kids, as is very often the
modus operandi in these murders). It is unique in that
the conscience stricken killers confessed and named who
hired them, as did somebody one step higher up in the
chain of command. Despite this, the killers (the actual
gunman testified that he did it to get money for his
mother’s medical bills; hiring a murderer is a very
cheap undertaking in the Philippines) were acquitted by a
judge who then suddenly retired. A lawyer friend of the
victim continued to doggedly campaign for justice and
forced a retrial at which the two were convicted and
sentenced to life imprisonment. Despite them, and their
immediate superior, naming the corrupt central government
officials in Manila who contracted the murder, the judge
in the second trial allowed no testimony about who was
behind the killing. So, the most culpable ones have never
been brought to justice, only the little fish. And this
is the only case in which even that much has happened.
The Secretary of Justice was interviewed and he threw
cold water on the claims that journalists are killed for
political reasons, saying that some of them have been
victims of “love triangles”!
“It’s Communists Killing
Communists” ... Yeah, Right.
Thus far, unlike the Marcos and Aquino years of the
1980s, national leaders have not been targeted but the
current political murders are insidiously creeping up to
the leadership level. In 2006, the most prominent victim
was a Protestant Bishop, the highest ranking leader of
his indigenous Philippine church, murdered in his own
home. Nobody has any doubt about who the killers are
– in one celebrated case, the military murderers
also left behind the corpse of one of their own
(presumably accidentally gunned down in their own
“crossfire”), complete with detailed written
orders from his superiors as to who they were to murder.
And none of these murders are ever solved – the
Police call it solved if they actually get to identify
the killer or killers and record that fact, without ever
actually arresting anyone, let alone convicting and
imprisoning them. To try to explain this never ending
pandemic of murders, the regime has come up with an
explanation that could only have sprung from a seriously
disordered mind. According to the official line (which
first started being spouted in 2006), the victims all
are, or were, Communists who are murdered by their own
“comrades” in an internal Communist purge. Back
in the late 1980s, particularly in Mindanao, the
Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its New
People’s Army (NPA) did undertake a murderous
internal purge which killed, at the very least, several
hundreds of its own members and supporters. Some of that
was due to ideological madness, fuelled by the paranoia
bred by an underground existence. This was cleverly
exploited by military intelligence who planted “deep
penetration agents” (more colourfully known as
“zombies”) into the Communist underground and
let them assume leadership roles and wreak havoc by
sowing distrust, having totally innocent
“spies” tortured and killed, and generally
doing their best to tear apart the Communist movement
from within.
They failed but that whole 80s’ purge era did great
damage to the CPP/NPA, which has publicly confessed its
mistake and taken steps to ensure that such crimes are
never again committed in its name. The military and the
regime still try to exploit it, regularly pulling stunts
such as saying that they have dug up a fresh “mass
grave of Communist purge victims”. Needless to say
this current murder pandemic does not fit any pattern of
a “Communist purge” (the CPP/NPA does still
kill its enemies, such as traitors and abusive military
men, police officers and death squad thugs) but it is
entirely consistent with previous waves of military death
squad killings, including the giveaway clue of nearly all
the killings being carried out by masked men on
motorbikes operating near military camps, men who always,
always manage to escape unhindered and remain undetected.
In other words, they operate with impunity.
The sheer scale and seemingly endless succession of
political murders are not the only things that make the
particular Gloria crisis more dangerous and serious than
the crises which accompanied all her recent predecessors
as President. There have been attempts to overthrow her,
firstly by Estrada loyalists on May Day 2001, just months
after she replaced Estrada, in what was labelled People
Power 3 (but, in contrast to the other events of that
name, this was a violent riot in which several people
were killed, including cops). That was basically the last
hurrah for Estrada loyalists, although they have been
swept up in the net of the ongoing crackdown which
started in February 2006.
Unrest In The Military; Crisis Of Legitimacy
Because the military is the key institution of the State
(some would say the only one), the prospect of military
coups, real or imagined, is a constant feature of
Philippine political life. For instance, Cory Aquino, the
first post-Marcos dictatorship President, was plagued by
seven coup attempts, of varying degrees of seriousness
and deadliness. Gloria’s coup attempt, the July 2003
Oakwood mutiny (named after the shopping complex in Metro
Manila’s Makati city where it took place, right on
the home turf of the rich and powerful) was a semi-comic
affair, with no casualties but it rang alarm bells at the
highest levels of the military and the regime because the
idealistic mutineers weren’t trying to grab power or
booty. They wanted to draw attention to massive
corruption among their generals and to protest against
soldiers being used to commit terrorist acts (murderous
bombings of civilians, etc) in Mindanao which were then
blamed on Muslim separatists and used to justify further
warfare on the restive Muslim South of the country. The
prosecution and punishment of those mutineers is still
current, with dozens having been imprisoned (and some
having escaped, to further alarm the regime) and kicked
out of the military. Unrest in the military is something
that Gloria and her generals take very seriously indeed.
The extra ingredient in the Gloria crisis is that of her
very legitimacy as President. When she was thrust into
office in 2001, she was not elected but simply
Estrada’s Vice President who took over his job as
mandated by the Constitution when People Power 2
overthrew him. After a couple of years in the job, she
had basically had enough (and the country had had enough
of a President for whom they’d never been given the
opportunity to vote) and she said that she wouldn’t
run in the 2004 Presidential election. Power is a funny
thing however - the link between it and its old bed mate,
corruption, is very close indeed, in the Philippines -
and by the end of 2003 she reversed that decision and
announced she would run for President in her own right.
Philippine traditional politics are not for the shy and
retiring and name and face recognition are a major factor
in a candidate’s chances. Film and TV and singing
stars quite often make the transition into politics.
Estrada was a former nationally famous action movie star
who tried to project his “one of the common
people” character into real life (unfortunately, he
was just another monumental thief and warmonger). In
2004, Gloria’s Presidential opponent was the famous
film star Fernando Poe Junior, who met all name and face
recognition criteria but had absolutely nothing to offer
by way of policies and didn’t take kindly to being
asked any questions about what he would actually do as
President (beyond presiding, one assumes). So, he was a
dream opponent from her point of view. But she
didn’t take any chances and wasn’t prepared to
beat him in an actual fair fight. Nope, she went down the
path well trodden in Philippine politics, that of the
rigged election (it was Marcos’ flagrant rigging of
the 1986 election, the first for 14 years, which proved
the last straw and led to People Power 1 which swept Cory
Aquino into office, whom Marcos had “defeated”
in that election).
How To Steal An Election With One Little Phone
Call
Gloria duly won the 2004 election (the fact that Poe died
shortly afterwards, of natural causes, would have made
for a very interesting situation if he had won). But it
soon emerged that she certainly didn’t do it fair
and square. A tape was leaked to the media and public of
a call she made, during the very slow vote counting
process, to a senior electoral official, whom she
addressed by his nickname Garci. The “Hello
Garci” call has become a modern classic of
Philippine popular culture, let alone politics. Millions
of copies have been distributed, it has been set to
music, even turned into a mobile phone ring tone. In it,
Gloria asks Garci to ensure that he rigs the count to
give her another million votes. Such incontrovertible
evidence of electoral fraud is rare, even in the
Philippines. Gloria decided to brazen it out, and for
good measure, Garci vanished without trace, until long
after the event. There was uproar, not only on the street
but in Congress (where the trapos are grouped by shifting
personality and dynastic alliances; the party system is
weak, except for the legal Left Party List Organisations,
which is one of the reasons why their members are
relentlessly targeted for murder). There was a concerted
drive, in both the lower and upper House, to impeach
Gloria but it met the same fate as had the earlier
attempt to impeach her predecessor Estrada (it was the
trapos’ refusal to impeach him, in the face of
overwhelming evidence of massive corruption that led to
People Power 2, in 2001). Indeed there have been
subsequent attempts to impeach Gloria but the President
commands the biggest pork barrel of the lot when it comes
to buying allegiance among her fellow members of the
political ruling class.
For those who couldn’t be bought off, the response
was physical brutality. Tens of thousands marched
throughout 2004 and 05 (although never achieving the same
critical mass as that which overthrew Estrada, let alone
Marcos). Gloria’s response was to apply CPR, which
in this case did not stand for cardio-pulmonary
resuscitation but calibrated pre-emptive response, a CPR
aimed at stopping the beating heart of the people.
Protests were banned unless they had a permit (and none
were issued); those that went ahead and held protests
anyway, particularly in the fortified presence of the
Presidential Malacanang Palace were attacked by squads of
cops wielding clubs and high pressure hoses. The threat
of being shot was ever present (protesters have been
massacred outside the Palace in the recent past, by cops
and soldiers). This State violence was applied
indiscriminately, and high profile progressive movement
leaders were both assaulted and arrested (when she toured
New Zealand in late 2004, national human rights leader
Marie Hilao-Enriquez was facing criminal charges from one
such violently dispersed protest and required the
court’s permission to be able to come here). To show
how much Gloria mimics Bush, note the use of the word
“pre-emptive”, a word which was all the rage
when Bush launched his “pre-emptive” invasion
of Iraq (it must have seemed like a good idea at the
time). Like so much else of Gloria’s attacks on
human rights, CPR was eventually ruled illegal by the
Supreme Court.
The President’s Favourite Dance? The Cha
Cha!
Gloria is taking no chances that she would be defeated in
an election or impeached, so she has revived that
favourite plaything of all recent Philippine Presidents,
namely Charter Change (inevitably rendered as Cha Cha by
Filipinos, who love diminutives and nicknames). Meaning,
an attempt to change the 1987 post-Marcos Constitution to
make her grip on power all the firmer. Cha Cha has always
been a constant threat through previous regimes but
Gloria, in her desperation to stay in office, has made a
concerted attempt to actually see it happen. The proposed
changes have varied, but she finally settled on a
proposal to move from the American bicameral system to a
unicameral Parliament, with a Prime Minister. This all
sounds just like the New Zealand system, with one
important difference – the office of President would
remain unchanged and would have far greater powers than
under the present system (where the Senate can block
measures approved by the lower House of Representatives).
Gloria has already secured a further six year term (from
2004-10) by dint of the stolen election; her Cha Cha
proposal would have scrapped the planned May 2007
mid-term elections for a number of the Senators,
Congressmen, governors and mayors, leaving all incumbents
in place until a rescheduled election in 2010,
frustrating the Opposition’s realistic hopes of
taking control of Congress in 2007 (and probably having
another go at impeaching her, soon after). Her Cha Cha
would also remove present Constitutional restrictions on
transnational corporations operating in the Philippines,
particularly in key sectors such as mining, and remove
the prohibition on foreigners owning land (presently they
can only lease it). All of this is hugely controversial,
and widely seen for what it is – a naked attempt to
hold onto power by whatever means possible. Some of it
has been in place before – for instance, Marcos
created the office of Prime Minister, but it didn’t
survive his dictatorship and the subsequent
“democratic” governments have had to adhere to
the system of checks and balances built into the 1987
Constitution. Throughout 2005 and 06, Gloria went full
speed ahead to try to ram through her Cha Cha, getting
her supporters to sign up to a People’s Initiative
petition calling for it, and taking that to the Supreme
Court for ratification (there’s no Constitutional
requirement for an actual referendum or election on Cha
Cha).
So all this was going on simultaneously throughout 2005
and into 06 – the never ending wars with Communists
and Muslims, a reign of terror against the legal Left,
disaffection within the all-important military, a crisis
of legitimacy for the President, both because of the
stolen election and the proposed Cha Cha, with massive
opposition in the streets and several moves to impeach
her, and corruption scandals swirling around her
immediate family. Add in the factor that as soon as the
September 11, 2001 terrorist atrocities happened in the
US, Gloria proclaimed herself to be President Bush’s
most fervent ally and put the Philippines at the disposal
of the US military. This has been hugely controversial,
because the anti-bases campaign had succeeded in driving
out the huge US bases in the early 1990s and they’ve
never been allowed back in. But the “War On
Terror”, specifically on the tiny Abu Sayyaf bandit
gang in the southernmost islands (who have carried out
some spectacularly lucrative kidnappings of Westerners)
has given Bush and Gloria the excuse to permanently
return the US military to the Philippines (although, to
preserve the niceties, they don’t have any actual US
bases there) by a series of joint “exercises”
that seamlessly merge into one continuous presence (in
the Muslim far South, US Special Forces have maintained a
covert permanent presence post-9/11. See the article
elsewhere in this issue for details).
There is a great cynical irony in Bush and Gloria using
Abu Sayyaf as their excuse for the renewed US military
presence. This bona fide terrorist group (they are not
Muslim separatists, but the latest in a long line of
pirates and bandits who have terrorised their fellow
countrymen and neighbours in the far South for centuries)
is a classic example of “blowback” – a
Frankenstein monster of armed Filipino mujahedin created
by the US Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s to
fight America’s proxy jihad against the Russians
then occupying Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is the most
famous of those Muslim terrorists who have “blown
back” into the faces of their 1980s’ American
creators. This tiny band of criminals, confined to the
southernmost islands and the southernmost part of
Mindanao, are now the flimsy reason for the Americans to
get a foothold back in their old colony and for Bush to
have proclaimed the Philippines to be the “Second
Front in the ‘War on Terror’”.
State Of Emergency; Ka Bel Becomes Highest
Profile Political Prisoner
This was an explosive mix, more so than the usual heady
brew of Philippine political and economic crisis.
Something had to blow and it was Gloria. She burst her
foofoo valve in February 2006, right smack bang in the
middle of the massive popular celebrations of the 20th
anniversary of People Power 1, which overthrew Marcos.
What more appropriate time than the celebration of the
demise of one dictatorship to proclaim a new one? She
declared a State of Emergency (one step below
Marcos’ martial law), claiming as justification the
discovery of a “plot” uniting the far Right and
the far Left in one vast conspiracy to overthrow her.
This fantasy meant that the Philippine people were
supposed to believe that the Communist Party and its
legal Left allies had suddenly joined forces with
mutineers in the military and hard core far Right coup
plotters. Specifically, Gloria claimed that she had
intelligence that elite units of the Army were about to
withdraw their support of her (which had happened to
President Estrada, in 2001) and allow their troops to
join the mass rallies taking place that week.
Gloria banned all political rallies, effective
immediately (which meant that cops and troops attacked
the People Power commemoration marches which were taking
place when the State of Emergency was declared). The
media was attacked, with some journalists arrested, and
soldiers sent to threaten newspapers and radio stations
critical of Gloria. Explicitly declaring the legal Left
parties and progressive movement to be agents of the
Communist Party (and therefore fair game for her death
squads), she ordered the military to “defeat”
the New People’s Army within two years and poured
more money into the already bloated military budget.
The State of Emergency was lifted after a week but the
ban remained in place for several months, during which
time any rallies were attacked and violently dispersed
(the ban was eventually overruled by the courts).
So-called “plotters” from the Right and Left
were either arrested immediately or warrants issued for
them (so warrants were solemnly issued for the leadership
of the Communist Party, either in the Philippine
underground or European exile). Those rounded up in this
pre-emptive dragnet ranged from Army officers to, most
controversially, legal Left Congressman Crispin Beltran
(universally known as Ka Bel, the veteran former head of
the Kilusang Mayo Uno [KMU] trade union confederation is
well known to New Zealanders, having been hosted by PSNA
during his 1999 speaking tour of this country. See
Kapatiran 16, December 1999). Ludicrously he was
initially arrested on a 1985 warrant dating from the
Marcos dictatorship – when it was established that
he had defeated that charge in court decades ago, the
regime laid the new, non-bailable, charge of rebellion
against him, a charge that carries a sentence of life
imprisonment.
Attempts were made to arrest his five legal Left
Congressional colleagues (representing three Party List
Organisations, which have a guaranteed number of seats in
Congress, to ensure representation for the previously
unrepresented), but they were all able to evade arrest
and reach sanctuary in the Congress Building, under the
protection of the Speaker. This set off a major
constitutional row in its own right, but the President
backed off from sending in troops or cops to arrest them.
All five, who faced the same charge of rebellion, spent a
couple of months living in their workplace until a deal
was stuck whereby they could triumphantly march out,
without fear of arrest or imprisonment, to appear in
court. They were among nearly 50 “rebels” from
Right and Left, plus an unannounced number of anonymous
defendants, to face that charge. In a major defeat for
Gloria, the charges against all of them were dismissed by
a judge very early on in what is usually a tortuously
slow judicial process. So the five Congresspeople, plus
their fellow “rebels” remain free, although
subject to the constant threat of the charge being
re-laid. However, Ka Bel remains in custody, more than a
year after his arrest, with no trial date in sight.
Because he is 74 and has multiple health problems, he has
spent most of that time in hospital, as opposed to
prison.
Lobbying Helen Clark
Normally, there is little that a solidarity movement in
far off New Zealand can do to help the long suffering
Filipino people when they have yet another outrage
inflicted upon them. Our two countries don’t have
close ties or a shared history. So, the usual ineffectual
NZ response to something like Gloria’s declaration
of a State of Emergency or the ongoing systematic murder
of legal Left political activists would be to write some
protest letters to the President and other regime
figureheads. We certainly directed our outrage against
the Philippine government - in Wellington PSNA members
who are unionists organised a picket of the Philippine
Embassy and a protest delegation led by Ross Wilson, the
head of the NZ Council of Trade Unions. And we helped
financially, with what little we could. PSNA ran an
online appeal for the Free Ka Bel Campaign, and we raised
nearly $NZ2,500.
But there was an extra factor which gave the NZ
solidarity movement’s action extra zing. By an
improbable coincidence, Gloria declared her 2006 State of
Emergency just weeks before the Prime Minister, Helen
Clark, was due to make the first official visit by a NZ
PM to the Philippines in 20 years (her Labour
predecessor, the late David Lange, is fondly remembered
in the Philippines as the first leader to visit there, in
1986, shortly after People Power 1 swept Cory Aquino into
office. And Clark herself is fondly remembered by the
Philippine progressive movement for her championing of
Filipino democracy in the 1980s. She took an active
interest in that country 20 years ago – for example,
when Joma Sison, the founder of the Communist Party of
the Philippines and the most high profile political
prisoner of the Marcos dictatorship, toured NZ in 1986,
Helen Clark was in the audience at his Wellington public
meeting). In March 2006, Clark was going to the
Philippines because New Zealand and the Philippines are
the co-sponsors of an Interfaith Dialogue between
Christianity and Islam (the “hearts and minds”
part of the “War On Terror”), which is a
decidedly odd thing for NZ’s publicly professed
agnostic PM to be promoting.
So PSNA seized the opportunity and called on our members
and supporters to bombard our Prime Minister with
messages demanding that she personally raise the issue,
woman to woman, with Gloria during their summit meeting.
The response we received was heartening and Clark was
lobbied by a whole range of individuals and
organisations, including ones she couldn’t ignore,
such as churches and major unions (including those with
close ties to Labour). She was urged to tell Gloria that
New Zealand, from the highest level of government,
strongly disapproved of Gloria’s full frontal attack
on the human rights of the Philippine people, and
specifically to demand Ka Bel’s release. It worked,
in that both Clark and the NZ media (which normally never
report on the Philippines, unless it involves yet another
natural disaster or Imelda Marcos, who falls into a
similar category) had to publicly acknowledge that she
had been subjected to a concerted and broadbased campaign
demanding that NZ condemn what Gloria had done and demand
action to rectify it. Clark stated that the human rights
crisis took up 20 minutes of her one hour summit with
Gloria. As far as Ka Bel was concerned, all that Clark
would say was that Gloria assured her that he’ll get
a fair trial in accordance with Philippine law.
Now this mightn’t seem like much, but it was more
than any other world leader was prepared to say at that
stage, let alone publicly and in person to Gloria, while
her guest in the Philippines. I can’t imagine George
Bush or John Howard waxing lyrical about their much
vaunted crusade for democracy when it comes to the
Philippines – “democracy” is a stick with
which to belabour their enemies (read, “the Islamic
world”), not their strategic allies in Asia. For
this small campaign, greatly aided by the coincidence of
NZ’s PM being the first world leader to visit the
Philippines after the crisis erupted, PSNA earned the
gratitude of our friends in the Philippine progressive
movement and kindred groups in Australia. Nor did we
leave it as a one off – we urged our members and
supporters to write to NZ’s Ambassador to the
Philippines, telling him to keep the pressure up on
Gloria, both on the human rights issue in general and Ka
Bel’s imprisonment in particular.
Calling For NZ’s Actions To Match The
Rhetoric
There is a history to this. Under Clark, New Zealand has
publicly declared itself to be concerned about human
rights in the Philippines. In 2005, NZAID (the
Government’s overseas development agency)
co-sponsored the United Nations Development
Programme’s Report on human rights in the
Philippines, complete with an Introduction by the NZ
Ambassador. That same year, the NZ Embassy was
represented at the official launch of the annual human
rights report by Karapatan (the Alliance for the
Advancement of Human Rights), the leading human rights
non-government organisation, headed by Marie
Hilao-Enriquez. So PSNA called on Clark and her
representatives in the Philippines to match fine words
with actions.
Having become the first NZ PM to make an official visit
to the Philippines in 20 years, Clark was back there nine
months later, in January 2007 to attend the East Asian
Summit which was held in conjunction with the Summit of
the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Once
again PSNA electronically mobilised our members and
supporters to urge Clark to personally raise the human
rights crisis with Gloria, particularly the case of Ka
Bel. And once again pressure from New Zealanders forced
the subject onto her agenda. Most unusually, real news
from the Philippines made a brief appearance in the NZ
media (for example, Press, 15/1/07, “Clark raises
killings in Philippines discussion”, the only time
that Christchurch’s journal of record has ever
mentioned either Ka Bel or Marie Hilao-Enriquez, having
ignored their presence in Christchurch when they toured
New Zealand, in 1999 and 2004 respectively).
Auckland University’s Professor Jane Kelsey is a
world renowned activist and writer in the
anti-globalisation movement. She has also been a staunch
friend of the Philippine people since the Marcos
dictatorship years. In 2006, Jane responded to
PSNA’s call to action with her customary total
commitment and boundless energy. For the past year Jane
has tirelessly lobbied Clark on this subject, for example
requesting that the PM meet human rights victims whilst
in the Philippines (Clark declined, saying they should go
to the Embassy). And Jane was among the international
delegates who attended a series of conferences in Cebu
City timed to coincide with the ASEAN Summit (it was
originally scheduled for December 06 but, at the very
last minute and with a very spurious excuse, Gloria
postponed it until January 07. The conferences went ahead
regardless). Whilst in Manila Jane became the first New
Zealander to visit Ka Bel, in his hospital confinement,
where he expressed his gratitude to New Zealanders for
their efforts to get him freed (he also thanked Helen
Clark as the only “Asian” leader to have
publicly raised the human rights issue with Gloria). When
Tony Tujan, a Filipino leader of the anti-globalisation
movement, made a flying 24 hour visit to Christchurch in
October 06 (he was in the country to speak at a
Wellington conference) and spoke at a well attended
public meeting – considering it was held on a
Saturday night – he singled out Jane and PSNA for
thanks.
Gloria Is Coming To NZ In 07
Clark and Gloria are scheduled to have their third
meeting in just over a year, when NZ takes its turn in
hosting the May 2007 Interfaith Dialogue, making Gloria
only the second Philippine President (after Fidel Ramos)
to make a State visit to NZ (I’m not counting the
Presidents and Prime Ministers attending meetings such as
the Leaders’ Summits of the Asia Pacific Economic
Community – APEC – in each other’s
countries. Jim Bolger went to APEC in the Philippines in
1996; Joseph Estrada came to APEC in NZ in 1999). So that
will present an opportunity for New Zealanders to urge
Clark once again to demand action to end Gloria’s
appalling human rights crisis.
For the record, here is the most recent expression of
NZ’s official opinion, from a February 07 letter
from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, to
Whangarei PSNA member, Tim Howard: “New Zealand
continues to be concerned by reports of human rights
abuses in the Philippines, including the repression of
free speech. The Prime Minister raised these issues with
President Arroyo when she visited the Philippines…,
and was given assurances that the Philippines is
committed to improving its record in this area. Our
Ambassador in Manila will also continue to raise New
Zealand's concerns at senior levels in the Philippines'
Government. You can also be assured that the New Zealand
Government will continue to encourage the Philippines,
wherever the opportunity arises, to work towards fully
protecting the fundamental human rights of all its
peoples, which includes the right to freedom of
speech”.
Of course, the rest of the world has not been idly
standing by. Gloria set off on what she fondly imagined
would be a triumphal tour of Europe in 2006 –
instead she was berated on her human rights record by
virtually every leader that she met, and had to endure a
personal lecture from the Secretary-General of Amnesty
International when they met in London. Possibly the most
extraordinary criticism came from the various
International Chambers of Commerce in the Philippines
(including that of New Zealand), who demanded that the
wave of political murders be stopped and the crimes
solved. The international capitalists, including those
who own the innumerable garment sweatshops in the
Philippines, declared the situation to be bad for foreign
investment and bad for business itself. No such criticism
was ever uttered when Marcos was in power, showing that
things have got so bad under Gloria that even her natural
backers, the transnational corporations which profit
mightily from her regime, have turned against her and her
one and only policy, which is to murder and terrorise all
those perceived as enemies.
Official Whitewash Fingers Military In General
& Butcher Palparan In Particular
Unlike her domestic critics, who can be ignored,
silenced, imprisoned, terrorised or murdered, the
international critics, particularly the influential
foreign investors and friendly governments, require some
sort of a response (or, at minimum, the appearance of
one). So Gloria set up a Commission of Inquiry (known as
the Melo Commission, after the retired Supreme Court
Judge who headed it). This Commission’s brief was to
find out who was committing all these political murders
– the answer is glaringly obvious (which is why the
progressive movement denounced the Commission as a
whitewash and boycotted its proceedings). However, in
early 2007, it presented its Report to the President and,
ahead of its reluctant official release, Justice Melo let
it be known that “most of them” (the murders)
were committed by the military, thus refuting the cynical
lie spread by the regime and the military that the 800+
dead were all victims of an internal Communist purge.
Furthermore, Justice Melo singled out retired General
Jovito Palparan as one senior officer who could be held
personally responsible for a goodly number of those
murders, based on Palparan’s own public bloodthirsty
braggadocio. Jovito Palparan, dubbed the
“berdugo” (butcher) by the progressive
movement, is one particular military murderer well known
to readers of Kapatiran (see number 25/26, December
2005). Wherever he was in command, his presence was
accompanied by a series of brutal murders of political
activists. He made no secret of his advocacy of
extrajudicial murder, declaring the victims to be agents
of the Communist Party and therefore legitimate targets
to be killed in a war (he never succeeded in killing too
many actual Communists, as they’re armed and can
fight back. It’s much easier torturing and murdering
unarmed civilians). Palparan’s one man travelling
carnival of death was criticised for years, because it
was so blatant, but Gloria staunchly defended him and
promoted him at every opportunity (even sending him to
Iraq to head the Philippines’ shortlived contingent
to that war, which proved too much like the real thing
for a military only used to killing its own civilians).
When he retired in 2006, Gloria retained him as a
security adviser, proving the truth of the old saying
that a man – or woman – can be judged by the
company that he or she keeps.
… But Does Nothing About It
OK, so even an official whitewash like the Melo
Commission blamed the military for these murders, but
what has it recommended to be done about that? Well,
basically nothing. Its line is that the soldiers
concerned were acting on their own initiative, that it
wasn’t a military policy, so the military per se
should not be blamed (nor did it recommend that anything
be done to identify, let alone punish, the soldiers who
apparently all decided of their own individual volition
to go out and murder hundreds of people, all in
strikingly similar circumstances). Complete and utter
nonsense is the phrase that comes to mind. And what about
Palparan (who agreed that he may have
“inspired” some of the killings)? The military
says that it is too difficult to take any action against
him, because he is now retired and no longer subject to
military jurisdiction. Naturally, the Police say that
they can’t take any action, because his crimes
occurred when he was a serving officer and therefore they
have to defer to military law. This perfectly illustrates
the contempt that both the military and the Police (who
supply the great bulk of Gloria’s death squads) have
for the rule of law in this nominal
“democracy’, and it encapsulates the arrogant
culture of impunity that is at the heart of every
Philippine President’s approach to human rights, one
which has only got immeasurably worse under Gloria. To
sum up, nobody has been arrested, let alone charged,
convicted or imprisoned for any of these murders. The
guilty party – the military, including a specific
general, in the case of Palparan - has been named but
nothing is going to be done about it. And the murders
continue uninterrupted.
In the meantime, Gloria still tries desperately to
appease her foreign critics, most recently by inviting
the European Union to provide observers for ongoing
“investigations” into the reign of terror. What
is there to investigate? Gloria is the woman who runs
around the house looking for her glasses, whilst all the
time they are on the end of her nose. Ultimately, she is
the guilty party; she is responsible for this policy of
mass murder and State terrorism.
And this policy of inviting in foreign experts in order
to be seen to be doing something about the crescendo of
foreign criticism has a nasty habit of blowing up in
Gloria’s face. In February 2007, Philip Alston, the
United Nations Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions,
made an official ten day inspection tour of the
Philippines. Despite the Government’s frantic
attempts to fill up his visit with courtesy calls on the
President, etc, and the military’s feeble attempts
to bamboozle him with their latest bullshit explanation
of who is killing all these Leftwing activists, Alston
had no problem arriving at the truth. He blamed the
military for the vast majority of the murders and said
that it is in deep denial on the whole subject. He urged
the President to release the Melo Commission’s
Report to the Philippine people (Gloria had shown no
inclination to make it public and only did so very
reluctantly). He urged a proper process of trial and
punishment for the murderers, pointing out that the
military’s own “investigation” of Palparan
consisted of him being rung up to ask if he was guilty
(guess what his answer was?). For its part, the military
and the most culpable regime officials came out with a
furious rejection of Alston’s findings, claiming
that he’d been “brainwashed” by Leftwing
human rights groups, and stuck to their nonsensical story
of an internal Communist purge being responsible for the
murders (a story which Alston specifically rejected).
Still, nothing has been done about those publicly named
as mass murderers, and reliable sources predicted that
Palparan would be given immunity from prosecution by
being conveniently put into Congress as a Party List
Representative of an anti-Communist Party List
Organisation (the immunity from arrest and prosecution
afforded to Congresspeople doesn’t apply, of course,
to Leftwing ones such as Crispin Beltran). And the
passing of the 2007 Anti-Terrorism Law, which greatly
widens the definitions of “terrorist” and
“terrorism” (conveniently encompassing groups
such as unions and striking workers), shows Gloria’s
true intentions on the subject of human rights. This new
law criminalises dissent to a greater degree than ever
before (outside of outright martial law).
Trying To Hijack The Constitution Before The May
07 Mid-Term Elections
Gloria, of course, has more than one crisis to deal with
at any one time. For example, as already detailed, in her
obsession to hang onto power at all costs, there is the
small matter of Charter Change (ChaCha), namely her
desire to alter the Constitution to suit her own ends. I
have mentioned the spurious and last minute December 06
postponement of the ASEAN Summit in Cebu City which the
Philippines was hosting. The reason given was that a
tropical storm was approaching (as the brand new Summit
venue proved to be a leaky building in even the gentlest
rain, there could have been a smidgen of credence in
this) but nobody bought that. The real reason was
explained by New Zealand’s Jane Kelsey, who was in
Cebu City for the conferences and protest activities. The
following is an extract from an article that Jane
submitted to the New Zealand Herald (but which
wasn’t published by the Auckland paper or any other
in NZ):
“…The real reason is a political typhoon known
as charter change or ‘Cha-cha’. On December 6,
days before the ASEAN Summit, the President’s
political allies in the House of Representatives pushed
through a resolution to reconstitute the House as a
constitutional assembly, a ‘Con-Ass’,
completely bypassing the Senate. The end goal was a
radical new constitution that would abolish the Senate
and create a unicameral parliamentary system. This would
transform the President and Congressmen into Prime
Minister and MPs, removing current limits on their number
of terms. Nationalist and pro-poor provisions in the 1987
post-Marcos Constitution would also go. These include
restrictions on foreign ownership, easing the way for
Arroyo’s neo-liberal programme and the Philippine US
free trade agreement. If all went to plan the
‘Con-Ass’ would have convened on Tuesday 12
December, as the ASEAN Summit concluded and the day
before the East Asian Leaders’ Meeting (the one
originally scheduled to be attended by Helen Clark. Ed.).
But all hell broke loose. Anti-riot police and military
were deployed to the capital as street protests against
the ‘rape of the constitution’ began. The
Supreme Court was asked to declare the move
unconstitutional. The House Speaker, Jose de Venecia, an
old business partner of Marcos, gave the Senate 72 hours
to endorse an alternative Constitutional Convention,
dubbed a ‘Con-Con’. That ultimatum fuelled the
furore in Manila and protests by activists who had
gathered in Cebu to oppose the ASEAN Summit’s
neoliberal-cum-militarisation platform. The Catholic and
Protestant churches and the evangelicals announced an
‘anti Con-Ass’ prayer rally for Manila the
following Sunday that was predicted to attract half a
million people. By December 12, Arroyo had withdrawn her
support and de Venecia had backed down. This
self-inflicted crisis was set to dominate the regional
summits, hence the unilateral decision to defer the
meetings until January...”.
The ASEAN and East Asian Leader’s Summits went ahead
in Cebu City in January 07, complete with Helen Clark.
And Gloria backed off pushing her ChaCha agenda for a few
months. But that is only a temporary respite. She had
hoped to have her unconstitutional Constitution in place
before the May 07 mid-term elections, to render the
result irrelevant (the traditional Opposition is
predicted to do well against her allies this time). The
Philippines is modelled on the American system, with
mid-term elections every six years, mid-way through the
six year Presidential term. Thus, the last Presidential
election was in 2004 and the last mid-term elections were
in 2001. Some but not all of the Senators and
Congresspeople are up for re-election, including the
Party List Representatives. In 2001, the legal Left Party
List Organisations did extremely well, topping the polls,
and returning three Representatives, including Crispin
Beltran (Ka Bel). At the 2004 elections, held in
conjunction with the Presidential election, those groups
were subject to a systematic campaign of murder and
intimidation (the same one that has continued unabated
since Gloria came to power in 2001) and did not do as
well as they had hoped. But they still succeeded in
increasing their numbers to six Representatives. As a
result, the murderous campaign against them has reached a
crescendo in the past three years, to try to prevent them
forming an effective Left bloc in the Congress.
Gloria’s henchmen have concentrated on murdering the
provincial level leaders and activists of these parties:
Gloria, wielding the 2006 State of Emergency as a blunt
instrument, attempted to have all six of their
Representatives arrested on the non-bailable charge of
rebellion. In the end she succeeded only in having Ka Bel
taken out of circulation indefinitely. Her intention is
obvious – to nullify her opponents on the Left by
any means possible, including imprisonment on trumped up
charges, and murder.
Aiding And Abetting A US Military Rapist
Gloria’s determinedly servile relationship with
George Bush is another major cause of crisis. Her
throwing the Philippines wide open to the US military as
the “Second Front in the ‘War on
Terror’”, only a decade after a massively
popular movement kicked out the US bases, has provoked
heated broadbased opposition. This reached fever pitch in
late 2005 when several US soldiers, in the country for
one of the permanent series of “exercises” that
provides the flimsy justification for the renewed US
military presence, went out for some “rest and
recreation” in the Americans’ old stamping
ground of Olongapo (former home to the Subic Bay US Navy
Base). They ended up being arrested and charged with
raping a Filipina, identified only as “Nicole”.
Flagrant abuse of Filipino women and children used to be
par for the course when Olongapo was just one big brothel
for the Yanks. But times have changed, the bases are
gone, GIs are expected to behave themselves and
“Nicole” was not a prostitute.
So, an unprecedented situation arose with American
soldiers charged with a very serious, non bailable crime.
The US immediately invoked the Visiting Forces Agreement
(passed in 1999, during Estrada’s Presidency) and
demanded custody of the accused. Gloria’s government
acquiesced, and they awaited trial in the comfortable
surrounds of the US Embassy. The judge-only trial - there
are no jury trials in the Philippines - was eventually
held in late 2006 and, despite the obstructive approach
of the Philippine government (which was supposedly
“prosecuting” the GIs but made it very clear
that it greatly preferred the whole thing to go away) one
of the defendants, Lance Corporal Daniel Smith, was
convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison. The US
immediately whisked the other, acquitted, defendants out
of the country, back to their bases on the Japanese
island of Okinawa. US agents also tried to snatch Smith
in the actual courtroom, following his conviction, but
Philippine cops got him locked up in a local prison.
There he sat for all of a fortnight, while a huge row
raged about where he should be held. This was a historic
situation – Smith is the first American GI to have
ever been convicted of anything in the Philippines. The
US government demanded him back in its custody and the
Philippine government agreed, both citing the Visiting
Forces Agreement. But Philippine courts showed a stubborn
independence and ruled that Smith must be detained in a
Philippine prison. The US then upped the ante and
cancelled the high profile Balikatan joint military
exercise in the Philippines until they got their
soldier/rapist back. Gloria didn’t take much
convincing – she issued an Executive Order
transferring Smith to US custody (back to the Embassy)
while his appeal is heard and he was clandestinely
removed from prison in the dead of night in the holiday
period between Christmas and New Year. The US promptly
uncancelled Balikatan. This whole squalid business
greatly inflamed nationalist fervour across the whole
Filipino population and the Smith case and the broader
issue of the Philippine/American relationship still has a
long way yet to run.
Abject grovelling to the Philippines’ former
colonisers is a hallmark of the Arroyo regime. In 2006,
it signed its first bilateral free trade deal, with
Japan. There was national outrage when it was revealed
that Gloria had exercised her Presidential powers to
allow Japan to dump toxic waste in the Philippines,
including stuff expressly forbidden by an international
agreement to which the Philippines is a signatory. In
return the Philippines is still prohibited from exporting
its products to Japan for years. All that it immediately
got out of the agreement was the right for a very small
number of Filipino nurses to be allowed to work in Japan.
Courtesy of World War 2, the whole Japanese/Philippine
relationship is still a very touchy subject, and deals
like this simply reinforce Filipinos’ belief that
Japan is still hell bent on creating its euphemistically
named “Greater East Co-Prosperity Sphere “,
without the bother of having to go to war and run an
empire.
“Arroyo Is Our Greatest Recruiter”
To conclude, not only is there the usual Philippine
crisis of power, wealth and lawless violence under this
President. The rich hog a disproportionate share of the
first two and dish out a disproportionate share of the
third onto the poor. In addition, Gloria is a special
crisis all by herself. Let the last, prescient word come
from a transnational American magazine which is no friend
of the Philippine Left, legal or underground, quoting a
spokesperson for the Communist Party’s New
People’s Army: “Government opponents who now
fear for their lives ‘are being encouraged to take
the great leap to join the NPA.’ he says.
‘Arroyo is our greatest recruiter’” (Time,
5/2/07, “The Philippines’ Unending Guerrilla
War, Andrew Marshall).
Murray Horton is Editor of Kapatiran and Secretary of
PSNA. He has visited and lived in the Philippines several
times in the 1980s and 90s.
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