Join the NPA

Theres The Rub
by Conrado de Quiros
from Philippine Daily Inquirer

The AFP is the best recruiter of the NPA.

That’s what people used to say during martial law. Or, “Marcos is the best recruiter of the NPA.” What it meant of course was that Marcos’ and/or the AFP’s oppressive and abusive ways were driving the poor in particular, who were their prime victims, into the arms of the rebels.

That’s still pretty much true today, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo simply having replaced Marcos. The only difference is not that GMA is less oppressive and abusive than Marcos but that the NPA has become less of an attractive thing to run to.

But not if today’s AFP can help it. Over the last several years, it has been resolutely, if quite unwittingly, advertising the NPA. It has done so by arresting doctors and health workers who have been tending to the sick among the poor in places God and government forgot, accusing them of being members of the NPA. If not indeed gunning them down presumably for trading shots with them. With what, polio shots?

Its latest caper ups the ante on it. Earlier this month, it arrested 43 people who were holding a health seminar in Morong, Rizal, charging them with being members of the NPA. Despite an order from the Supreme Court for them to produce the arrested people, they have not done so. Citing all sorts of excuses, from the sheer number of the detained, which they say entails security risks, to Romeo Capulong being their lawyer, which they say is proof they are truly NPA members.

You can understand why Capulong is fit to be tied. It was Lt. Col. Noel Detoyato, spokesperson of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, who supplied the logic about Capulong’s lawyering for the 43 being proof of their guilt. That is like saying that the Ampatuans are engaged in a conspiracy with Erap because a Fortun is their lawyer, and the Fortuns defended Erap in his impeachment trial. When in fact the only logic you can draw from it is that they deserve one another, being united in a common pursuit of fortune, whatever (mayhem) it takes.

But to go back to what I was saying: The AFP’s logic has always been that even if the people they arrest, or abduct or kill, are doctors or health workers, they are also NPA, who are merely using health care to advance their cause in far-flung areas. Well, if so, then that is not a good reason to arrest them, or abduct them, or kill them. That is a hell of a good reason to join them. If their cause brings them to heroically risk life and limb and forgo the conveniences of city life, particularly Metro Manila life, many of the suspects being professionals or NGO members, to bring life to the dying, then we can do worse than support that cause. If, on the other hand, the cause causes the people who are responsible for health care, among other cares, to not provide it because of greed, and cause them to order the military to arrest, abduct or kill the people who do because they make them look bad, then we ought to stop paying taxes to that cause.

Easy enough for the military to refute the claims of the 43 that they are health workers or people who have something to do with health care. All they have to do is produce them, and prove they have no such credentials, they only have credentials for wrecking health by turning far-flung places into war zones. The military says the huge number of the detainees poses a huge security risk. Well, we only have its word they are a risk. If they are in fact health workers, then they pose a risk only to swine flu, which they threaten to eradicate. Indeed, if they are in fact both health workers and NPA or remotely related to the NPA, then by their sheer number they pose the risk only of convincing the public about the justness of their cause.

In the end, from a broader viewpoint, the iniquity of all this lies in the policy of waging war against the NPA, which has taken the form in Arroyo’s time of massacring political activists, who are largely peasant and youth, and making peace with the warlords, which has taken the form in Arroyo’s time of coddling thugs like the Ampatuans. When the wisdom that has arisen over the ages says we should make peace with honorable enemies and wage war against dishonorable ones.

The NPA’s opposition to government is based on principle. Call those principles archaic, call those principles atavistic, call those principles misguided, they are still principles. And they still have the power to drive people to risk life and limb and forgo the conveniences of city life to help others. It is no small irony that the one who pursued a policy of peace with the rebels, thereby ushering a period of relative tranquility and prosperity, was a general, Fidel Ramos. And the one who waged a war of attrition against them, thereby ushering a period of mind-boggling destitution and bloodletting, was a usurper, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

The warlords’ opposition is not just to government, it is to society. No, more than that, it is to sanity. They do not just defy authority, they defy decency. The warlords have taken up arms, or maintain private armies, for reasons that have nothing to do with the principle, other than the principle, which their patron in Malacañang has made the ruling principle of this country, of ruling forever. Or until such time as they are overthrown or dislodged by another thug. It is medieval, it is atavistic, it is barbaric. And yet we exterminate the first, or at least the public has not howled angrily at the wholesale massacre of political activists, while we perpetuate the second, even after the public has howled wrathfully at their wholesale, and unbelievably savage, massacring of their enemies.

Death to our enemies? In this upside down world, by all means let us shout that.

And join the NPA.