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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Jose Maria Stalin By Antonio C. Abaya Written July 05, 2006 For the Standard Today, July 06 issue As part of its �all-out war� against the communist insurgency, the Arroyo administration is set to file murder charges against Jose Ma. Sison, founding chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and �consultant� to the National Democratic Front (NDF) that has been endlessly negotiating for �peace� with the Philippine government since the time of President Cory Aquino. The bases for the murder charges are the affidavits of two widows filed with the Department of Justice, accusing Sison of the murders of their husbands. According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer (June. 16) Gloria-Jopson-Kintanar �said that the Jan. 23, 2003 killing of her husband, Romulo Kintanar, was part of a �predetermined plan� by local communist groups �in compliance with a directive� from Sison who considered Kintanar a �threat� to the CPP and NPA.� Rolly Kintanar was shot dead by a lone gunman inside a restaurant at the Quezon Memorial Circle. Wrote Mrs. Kintanar in her affidavit, as quoted in the Inquirer: �I have personal knowledge in (sic) the tactical operation of the CPP/NPA through its Special Operation Group and their modes of operation to eliminate/neutralize the uncooperative government officials and private individuals, including the killing of my husband who was wrongly, maliciously and unjustly judged as a counter-revolutionary. �My husband was one of those who questioned the assumption of Sison as the chairman of the CPP/NPA/NDF even after he (Sison) left the country.� She said Sison was �jealous� of Kintanar who propelled the NPA to a peak strength of 25,000 members in the late 1980s while Sison chose to stay abroad. �This jealousy did not cease with my husband out of the party. Sison might have feared that my husband, because of his following and credibility as a good leader/cadre, had the capability to attract dissenters or �rejectionists� of the CPP/NPA/NDF into a parallel organization that could challenge the CPP/NPA/NDF.� For her part, Veronica Tabara said she was �certain� that Sison and other communist leaders were �responsible� for the murder of her husband Arturo whose policy differences with Joma resulted in a schism in the CPP/NPA in 1991/1992, which I have often referred to in this column. Mrs. Tabara said that Sison�s anger toward her husband, who was shot dead, together with their son-in-law, in the parking lot of SM Fairview on Sept.. 26, 2004, was rooted in an �internal debate� on strategy and tactics within the CPP in 1992. In her affidavit, Mrs. Tabara said that the internal debates led to a split between pro-Sison �reaffirmists� and anti-Sison �rejectionists� which included her husband Arturo, Kintanar and Popoy Lagman, who was killed earlier, sometime in February 2001.. According to the Inquirer, Tabara was �one of the leading organizers of the Rebolusyonaryong Partido ng Manggagawa sa Pilipinas, which later coalesced with the Revolutionary Proletarian Army and the Manila-based Alex Boncayao Brigade. �The split of the rejectionists group angered Joma and other leaders who remained with the CPP/NPA/NDF and even branded the rejectionists as counter-revolutionaries,� said Mrs. Tabara. Those who are not familiar with the internal politics in the communist movement should know that the �internal debates� that the two widows are referring to was on how best to wage the socialist revolution against the bourgeois state. Lagman, the leading rejectionist, criticized Joma�s Maoist strategy of waging the revolution in the countryside, using a politicized peasantry. Lagman pointed out that when the Edsa 1 People Power uprising against Marcos broke out in Metro Manila in February 1986, the communist movement was not able to take a leadership position because most of Joma�s cadres were in the provinces. Lagman publicly rejected Joma�s Maoist strategy and pulled the communist movement�s Metro Manila and Rizal cadres, plus the Alex Boncayao assassination brigade, out of Sison�s chain of command into a breakaway group led by him (Lagman). Lagman said that the correct revolutionary strategy should be to politicize the urban squatters and labor unions so that when another urban insurrection occurs, he would be able to take command of it and turn it into a socialist revolution that will lead to the long awaited, historically inevitable victory of Communism. Lagman chose as his model the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. So, let us have no illusions about this split. Both the reaffirmists of Joma and the rejctionists of Lagman were/are communist revolutionaries working towards the same goal � the establishment of a Marxist-Leninist one-party police state, but using different methodologies. Lagman�s main political formation was/is Sanlakas, his version of the NDF. In response to the murder charges being filed against him, Joma has been quoted that Kintanar and Tabara were meted �revolutionary justice.� This is as close to an admission as anyone will ever get from him that his people executed Kintanar and Tabara on his orders. But that admission will not hold up in court, in the Philippines or in the Netherlands, where the liberal judicial culture demands �proof beyond reasonable doubt.� Joma has never admitted any association with the murder of Lagman. But if Joma�s people really meted out revolutionary justice on Kintanar and Tabara, as Joma has explained, all the more would they have done so on Lagman, who was the original apostate, the first to challenge the leadership and wisdom of Joma Sison inside the Party. It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that Joma DID order the execution of Lagman, in much the same way that Josef Stalin, after assuming the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party upon the death of Lenin in 1924, purged the Party of all actual, imagined and potential rivals. His arch-rival in the politburo was Leon Trotsky, whose skull was split with an axe by an assassin in Mexico in 1940. But that assumption will not hold up in court. The same caution must apply to the affidavits of the two widows. I am not a lawyer, but I doubt if Mrs. Kintanar�s claim that she had �personal knowledge� of the tactical operations of the CPP/NPA/NDF, and Mrs. Tabara�s statement that she was �certain� Joma�s people killed her husband, would be given much weight in a liberal court. Under Malaysia�s and Singapore�s ISA, the widows� affidavits would probably be legally damning to Joma and his reaffirmists, but not in the liberal judicial culture of the Philippines or the Netherlands. The legal eagles of the Arroyo administration should realize this and reconsider their moves to formally charge Joma with these murders, if their strongest suit is only the affidavits of the two widows. If Joma were formally charged, tried in a Philippine or Dutch court, and then acquitted because of weakness or insufficiency of evidence, it would be a major victory for him and the communist movement and a major defeat and embarrassment for President Arroyo and her government.. Some of the editors, reporters and columnists of the Philippine Daily Inquirer would be apoplectic with ecstasy and would predictably turn him into our biggest national hero since Andres Bonifacio. Joma would reap a propaganda windfall and could be made by the complicit media into the (currently absent) rallying figure of the lackluster anti-Arroyo opposition. The only thing more powerful than a dead martyr is a living and triumphant one. Corollary to the claim of Joma Sison that Kintanar and Tabara were meted �revolutionary justice,� presumably by his reaffirmists cadres, and my extrapolation that Popoy Lagman was done in by the same people for the same reason, the possibility is strong that some � though not all � of the 200+ �leftist� militants reported killed since 2001 were Sison�s reaffirmists killed by rejectionists in revenge for the murder of rejectionist leaders Lagman, Kintanar and Tabara. A check of the affiliation of these murdered activists show most of them belonged to organizations that remain loyal to Sison: Bayan, Bayan Muna, KMU, Gabriela. The fact that the Alex Boncayao assassination brigade belonged to the rejectionist camp of Lagman, etc � confirmed in the above widows� affidavits - supports the suspicion that many or most of these reaffirmists were killed by rejectionists, as I speculated in my article Who�s Killing Whom? (May 30, 2006). I do not discount the possibility that some of them were killed by military death squads, but these squads are not the only suspects. I don�t know how it can be done, through diplomatic channels, but the best comeuppance for Joma Sison would be to be expelled from the Netherlands and forced to spend his sunset years in the warm embrace of a communist society. It is only fair and just that he whose life�s work has been to try to force the rest of us to live in his vision of Paradise, should spend the rest of his life in that Paradise. Bringing Sison back to Manila, to face these murder charges, is fraught with dangers that it could boomerang, given the naivete of Filipinos in their American-style liberal Disneyland. But this has to be done fast because Joma�s options are down to only two: North Korea and Cuba. Fidel Castro has just celebrated his 80th birthday. It won�t be long now before he ascends to the communist heaven. When that happens, his presumed heir, brother Raul, will not likely be able to hold on to power as half a million Cuban exiles in Miami return to reclaim their confiscated properties. Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang would have a longer staying power. He is only 64, but he is already training his son, Kim Jong Nam, to take over. The hereditary monarchy in Cuba and North Korea demolishes communists� pretensions that they are �progressives.� More important, there is no Miami nearby from which disaffected North Korean refugees can launch an invasion. South Korea is not interested in absorbing the North, knowing fully well of the tens of billions of dollars it has cost, and is still costing, West Germany to absorb the pauperized East since 1989.. . But there is a little problem in Pyongyang: a nagging food shortage for the past 10 or 12 years.. When Joma announced four years ago that he had turned vegetarian because his stipend from the capitalist Dutch government had been reduced, I wrote in my article Joma Beats a Retreat (Aug.08, 2002) that �Joma, have I got the place for you!� North Korea, where a few million people have starved to death, and other millions are subsisting on grass and tree bark whenever food aid from South Korea, Japan and the US is late or insufficient. A vegetarian paradise! What�s a little starvation between comrades? It is good for the socialist soul. Perhaps Sen. Jamby Madrigal can volunteer to hold Joma�s hand while they feast on carabao grass salad and cream of tree bark soup. ***** Reactions to [email protected]. Other articles since 2001 in www.tapatt.org. Current articles also in tonyabaya.multiply.com and tapatt.yahoogroups.com OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |