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September 2008 Mobilize
Workers’
Action to Defend Bangsamoro Peoples’ Struggle!
Drive Out All U.S. Imperialist Troops and Agencies! Philippine army artillery in North Cotabato province August 12 to drive Moro Islamic Liberation Front out of 22 villages it occupied after government cancelled autonomy agreement. (Photo: Jay Directo/AFP) Build a Trotskyist
Party in Philippines!
(Philipino) Panibagong Pakikidigma sa mga Grupong Muslim MANILA,
Philippines, September 13 – War officially came to southern Philippines
again
as the government of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo dissolved the government
peace panel, unilaterally putting an end to
eleven
years of negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF)
September 3. Three days later, as AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines)
task
forces
launched sweeps searching for MILF units in Central Mindanao Region,
rockets
from a helicopter gunship killed fleeing civilians including two
children and a
pregnant newly wed teenager (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 9
September).
While left-wing groups, opposition legislators and Muslim scholars
denounced
the government for calling off peace talks, reports came in of U.S.
Special
Forces soldiers accompanying AFP patrols. From a few hundred American
soldiers
in 2001, the number of U.S. troops in the Philippines grew to over
5,000
participating in the “Balikatan 2006” maneuvers on the southern island
of Jolo.
After the maneuvers were over, they never left. Congressional
committees are
investigating whether this violated the Visiting Forces Agreement. Fighting already broke out
last month when government officials suddenly refused to sign a
Memorandum of
Agreement on Ancestral Domain that had been negotiated with the MILF.
The
agreement was to have set up an autonomous regional “entity” in
traditionally
Bangsamoro areas1. The MOA was
due to be signed at a ceremony on August 5, but at the last minute
Arroyo
called it off citing an injunction by her kept Supreme Court. What
actually
happened was that military hard-liners in the government negotiating
team
leaked the contents of the agreement to the press, touching off an
uproar among
Christian local officials in areas that were to be included in the
Bangsamoro
Judicial Entity (BJE), whereupon the high court issued its injunction.
Angry
commanders of the MILF’s military forces then proceeded to occupy areas
which
would have been included in the BJE, while right-wing local officials
announced
a “Reformed Ilaga Movement” to hunt down rebels. (The dreaded Ilaga
vigilantes
terrorized Muslims and left-wing activists during the dictatorship of
Ferdinand
Marcos.) At least 100 people have
been killed so far in the renewed fighting, hundreds more injured and
500,000
displaced from their homes as a result of clashes between AFP and MILF
forces,
as well as reciprocal burning of Christian and Muslim villages and
communal massacres.
While the press screams about MILF atrocities, it is the capitalist
government
of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo that is responsible for setting Filipino
Christians
and Muslims against each other. The AFP tops calculated on quickly
wiping out
the MILF forces, supposedly lulled into complaisance by eleven years of
ceasefire, in order to then concentrate their forces against the
guerrillas of
the Communist-led New Peoples Army (NPA). Earlier, GMA and her
militarist aides
such as Eduardo Ermita and Norberto Gonzales had sought to use the
Memorandum
of Agreement to sneak through a “charter change” (“cha-cha”) in the
Constitution, allowing her to stay in office after her present term
(won
through rampant election fraud) runs out in 2010. But now that they
have run
into resistance, all their plans have all gone up in the smoke of
battle. Bourgeois liberals and the
petty-bourgeois left lamely call on the government to resume the “peace
process,” which in any case was only intended to wear down the
insurgents. (Talks
with the NPA have been stalled since 2004.) But Arroyo announced that
henceforth any negotiations will only be on the basis of “disarmament,
demobilization and rehabilitation” (DDR) – in other words, abject
surrender. As
opposed to the reformist/liberal pipedreams of “peace,” revolutionaries
would
seek to mobilize Philippine workers to drive out all U.S. forces,
whatever
their legal status; to force the withdrawal of the AFP from the
contested
southern areas; and to defend the Bangsamoro people and their right to
self-determination. Colonization,
Insurgency and
Counterinsurgency The island of Mindanao and
the southern island chains of the Sulu Archipelago have been ethnically
and
linguistically distinct from Luzon and the northern islands for
centuries. They
were Islamicized in the 1400s under the sultanates of Sulu and
Maguindanao. The
region was never really conquered by the Spanish, who eventually
recognized the
independence of the sultan of Sulu. When the United States conquered
the
Philippines in the 1898 Spanish-American War, it carried out bloody
massacres
in the South, notably the first battle of Bud Dajo (1906) where up to
1,000
Moros were slaughtered by U.S. Marines in the crater of a volcano. (The
Moro
Massacre was made infamous by the Anti-Imperialist League in the U.S.
and in
particular by its vice-president, Mark Twain, who fought for Philippine
independence.) As American colonial rulers established their authority
over the
next several decades, major U.S. corporations took over much of
Mindanao,
including Firestone (rubber); Dole, Del Monte and United Fruit
(pineapples);
and the timber and paper giants Weyerhauser and Boise Cascade. It was
only with
independence in 1946 that the region was formally integrated into the
Philippines. During
the 1920s and ’30s,
Christian settlers began moving into the region. In the 1950s, as part
of its
anti-Communist counterinsurgency program against the People’s
Liberation Army
(HMB), the government combined mass assassinations of “guerrilla
suspects” with
a “land reform” that sent peasants to militarized colonies in Mindanao.
But the
real surge in migration came later: “The movement speeded up
dramatically under
the Marcos regime – more than three million Christians are estimated to
have
settled in Mindanao between 1966 and 1976, Marcos’ first decade. The
consequences have been devastating” (Ajiz Ahmad, “Class and Colony in
Mindanao,” in Rebels, Warlords and Ulama: A Reader on Muslim
Separatism and
the War in Southern Philippines (Institute for Popular Democracy,
2000). By
1976, the Muslim population of Mindanao had fallen to 40 percent of the
total,
compared to 98 percent at the start of U.S. colonization, and Moros
owned less
than 17 percent of the land, mostly in remote infertile mountain areas.
With
the native population having become a minority due to colonization, the
question of ancestral lands became a key issue. In the early 1970s, an
insurgency arose in the Muslim population leading to the founding of
the Moro
National Liberation Front (MNLF). The Front received backing from the
Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the Qaddafi regime in
Libya.
Initially landing blows against the AFP, the MNLF suffered military
reverses as
the government resorted to indiscriminate bombing, mass rape, burning
of whole
villages and massacres. When the OIC put pressure on for negotiations,
a
Tripoli Agreement was reached in 1976 for a southern autonomous region.
But as
the government dragged out negotiations and then called for a
plebiscite in the
13 provinces affected (nine of which now had a Christian majority),
talks
collapsed. In 1984 the insurgency split and the Moro Islamic Liberation
Front
(MILF) was formed, more religious than ethnic nationalist in
orientation, which
argued that negotiations for autonomy were a trap and instead there
must be
armed struggle for independence. After a resurgence of guerrilla
struggle in
the early 1990s, the MNLF signed a Memorandum of Agreement in 1996
setting up
an Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). MNLF chief Nur Misauri
was
elected governor. With the MNLF leaders
effectively bought off by the perks of office, the mantle of militant
opposition passed to the MILF. But by 1997 the Islamic Front, too, was
negotiating with Manila. In 2000-01, another splinter group surfaced,
the
shadowy Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), originating in contacts with jihadi
(holy war) groups from Indonesia to Afghanistan. Rather than a mass
insurgency,
the ASG specialized in kidnappings for ransom and indiscriminate terror
against
mass transportation and Christian communities. As part of their ongoing
negotiations, the MILF reportedly coordinated with the government in
isolating
the ASG and driving it from its original base (International Crisis
Group, “The
Philippines: Counter-Insurgency vs. Counter-Terrorism in Mindanao,” May
2008).
The MILF expected to be rewarded with control of the Bangsamoro
Judicial
Entity, covering much of the same area as the earlier Autonomous Region
in
Muslim Mindanao negotiated with the MNLF. But the generals evidently
decided it
no longer needed the services of either the MNLF or MILF. Beginning
last year
there were clashes between the AFP and units of both Moro fronts, and
after
months of back-and-forth, the negotiations came to an abrupt halt on
August 4. Under the Memorandum of
Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) that had been initialed and was
to be
signed at a ceremony in Malaysia, the BJE would supposedly enjoy self
government, as well as management of natural resources. In addition to
the
territory of the now moribund ARMM, the BJE would include other
predominantly
Muslim baranggays (districts) scattered around the islands. But when
the MOA-AD
was leaked, local officials launched protests and even liberal media in
Manila
objected to provisions allowing economic cooperation and trade
relations with
foreign countries (“Don’t Sign – Yet,” editorial in Philippines
Daily
Inquirer, 4 August). The Supreme Court issued its injunction
against
implementation of the agreement and ordered “further review” by the
government.
When several local MILF commanders decided to implement the MOA on
their own,
the government dispatched combined AFP units on “punitive actions”
against the
guerrillas and bombed MILF strongholds. In addition, it placed bounties
on the
heads of the rebel commanders, and handed out guns to the Ilaga
vigilantes who
are burning Muslim homes and fanning anti-Moro chauvinism in North
Cotabato.
The slaughter has begun. For Permanent
Revolution in
Southeast Asia! Strutting martinet Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
reviews honor guard at change of command ceremony, May 12. Arroyo and
her militarist clique seek to crush insurgents and prolong her regime.
(Photo: Bullit Marquez/AP) In justifying her policy of
“disarmament, demobilization and rehabilitation” as henceforth the only
basis
for talks, the president said that she would not negotiate the MOA-AD
“at
gunpoint.” But that, of course, is exactly what she is proposing: to
talk
“peace” only under the guns of the AFP. The terms dictated by
“General”
Arroyo have never worked as a basis for a peaceful agreement between
opposing
armed groups, and how could they? “DDR” can only mean surrender and
capitulation, which no insurgent group would do unless it was facing
imminent
defeat. The government’s real policy was summed up in its Oplan
Bantay Laya
(Operational Plan Freedom Watch), announced in January 2002 as part of
the U.S.
“global war on terror” (GWOT in the Pentagonese dialect). The aim of
this
“final solution” to rebellion was “to decisively defeat insurgents
armed
groups,” particularly the NPA, and to “degrade the military capability
of the
SPSGs” (Southern Philippines Secessionist Groups). For this it has
received
more than $4.6 billion in military aid from the U.S. Treasury. According to a September 3
statement by Amirah Ali Lidasan, president of Suara Bangsamoro, the
scrapping
of negotiations with the MILF shows that the Arroyo regime was never
serious
about forging peace with the insurgents. So, too, does the fact that
the terms
of the MOA-AD were kept secret. GMA now seeks to end the decades-old
rebellion
of the Bangsamoro people by setting Christian settlers and Lumad hill
tribes
against the Moros. Noting that the Moros were forcibly evicted from
their lands
in endless military operations, SB points out: “The settlers and the
Lumads in
Mindanao lost their lands for these same reasons. We were made to fight
over
what was left of the land, ravaged by multinationals and landed elite.”
Yet
Suara Bangsamoro seeks to unite the different oppressed sectors on a
(bourgeois) democratic basis, rather than a program of united class
struggle. And it calls in vain for Arroyo to “keep the atmosphere
of peace
in Mindanao”! How likely is that? Same theme from the MILF
leadership, which countered by issuing statements that it has not
abandoned
peace talks and will continue to ask the Philippine government to
comply with
the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domains. The MILF added that
it will
wait for the formal notice from the Malaysian facilitators of the
Philippines
government’s unilateral decision to end the negotiations! Such impotent
legalistic appeals will not stay the hand of a regime that is out for
blood.
Meanwhile, Representative Satur Ocampo of Bayan Muna (People First)
party-list
said he had long suspected that the government had no intention of
signing the
MOA-AD, and noted that DDR is the government's policy in the stalled
“peace
talks” with the National Democratic Front. Some left groups have
launched
protests against the war in Mindanao, calling for the immediate
resumptions of
peace talks. But all the efforts of the MILF and the NPA to negotiate
and
renegotiate seem doomed to fail: such talks cannot resolve the issues
that have
led to decades of rebellion throughout the Philippines. Rebel troops at MILF press conference in
their
Camp Darapanan in Maguindanao province, August 23.
MILF leader Murad called on government to abandon military offensive.
(Photo: Pat
Roque/AP) No bourgeois government in
Manila will provide land to the impoverished peasantry or genuine
autonomy to
the myriad oppressed peoples of the archipelago. Such measures would
mean the
downfall of the government and a body blow to Philippine capitalism,
which is
based on superexploitation and heavy-handed repression. The policy of
the GMA
regime is no different than that of all the governments that preceded
hers.
When they “negotiate” it is only to wear down the rebellious
insurgents, or to
avoid being toppled by mass revolt. It is no accident that all the
Philippine
governments since “independence” have essentially been bonapartist,
military-based
regimes. Whoever sits in the president’s chair in
Malacañang
Palace – whether GMA or General Fidel Ramos, the “democrat” Cory Aquino
or the
dictator Ferdinand Marcos – it is the AFP that calls the shots on
behalf of the
Filipino capitalists and their Yankee imperialist overlords. Nor is
this a
peculiarity of the Philippines: it is a confirmation of Leon Trotsky’s
theory
and program of permanent revolution. Basing himself on an
analysis of the defeated Russian Revolution of 1905, and then the
victorious
October Revolution of 1917, Trotsky wrote that in the imperialist epoch
the
weak bourgeoisies in the countries of belated capitalist development
(whether
semi-feudal, colonial or semi-colonial) are incapable of realizing the
tasks of
the bourgeois revolution. Only the working class can achieve national
liberation, agrarian revolution and democracy by seizing power at the
head of
the poor peasants and all the oppressed, under the leadership of a
communist
party, and then proceeding to undertake socialist measures while
extending the
revolution internationally to the imperialist centers. This program was
diametrically opposed to the Stalinist-nationalist delusion of building
“socialism in one country.” The illusory character of that anti-Marxist
dogma
was demonstrated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
Stalinist-ruled,
bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe. And it is
tacitly
confirmed by the Filipino Stalinists of the PCP, who today are not even
fighting for a nationally limited revolution. Trotskyists stand on the
side of the NPA peasant guerrillas and the Bangsamoro insurgents
against the
murderous Philippine capitalist regime, but without supporting their
reformist
and bourgeois-nationalist politics. The “armed struggle” of
Filipino
Stalinists is in fact “armed reformism”: like the MNLF and MILF, the
PCP/NPA
and NDF want to use their military units as bargaining chips to
negotiate their
way into office. Their dream is not to replicate Stalin’s Russia or
Mao’s
China, but to imitate on a smaller scale their Nepalese comrades who
are now
administering the bourgeois state (and repressing Nepalese workers).
Even if by
some twist of fate they were to be moderately successful, it will not
liberate
the urban and rural working people or the oppressed Bangsamoro people
but only
shore up the capitalist status quo. Mobilize Working-Class
Action
to Defend the Bangsamoro Peoples! The League for the Fourth
International, calls on the Filipino working class to unite – whether
they are
Christians, Muslims, Lumads or other indigenous peoples – and fight to
sweep
away the regime through revolutionary class struggle. Rallies
for peace
by various left-wing and cause-oriented groups will at most demonstrate
their
indignation, but cannot bring down or seriously shake the capitalist
order. The
reformists’ perspective is to form a popular front, tying the
working
class to the feeble bourgeois “opposition.” They would like to
replicate the
mass protests that ousted Marcos (with the permission of the U.S.) and
installed Cory Aquino as a figurehead for AFP chiefs Ramos and Enrile –
but
they are far from even that. Meanwhile, Arroyo and her generals
continue to
deliver death blows to the Moro peoples and others who have taken up
arms
against the Filipino ruling class. On the other hand, mobilizing the
Filipino
workers in concrete actions against the war in the South, including
strike
action at key locations where possible, demanding withdrawal of the AFP
and
expulsion of the U.S. forces, could land a real blow on behalf of the
beleaguered Bangsamoro population. Student protest in Manila, August 14.
Popular-front peace demos cannot bring down or even shake the
capitalist order. It is necessary to mobilize the power of the working
class against the war. (Photo: Romeo
Ranoco/Reuters) Today, working-class
organizations in the Philippines are reeling. The unions are shadows of
their
former selves. A recent report by the Ecumenical Institute for Labor
Education
notes that in 1995 some 14.5 percent of the workforce was unionized,
while
today the official figure is 5.6 percent, and actual union contracts
only cover
222,000 workers in the entire country (Bulatlat, 31 August). The
vast
majority of new hiring is for short-term contracts of a few months, and
the
official minimum wage (P382, or $8.50 a day) doesn’t even cover half
the cost
of basic expenses for a family of six (P894 or $19.50 a day in Metro
Manila).
So traditional business unionism, which seeks a stable role mediating
between
labor and capital, is moribund. Yet the potential power of the workers
has not
diminished. Tens of thousands of workers are concentrated in more than
50
special economic zones, harbors and central business districts.
Class-struggle
action to shut down industrial parks from Clark, Subic, Batanga and
Cavite to
Zamboanga and Davao; clogging the streets and bringing business in
Makati to a
standstill; pulling the plug on the call centers – all this is
possible, but
it requires a revolutionary, not a reformist leadership. Even partial actions by the
workers can show to the Moro peoples and other indigenous peoples of
the
Philippines that the Filipino working class supports their struggle for
self-determination. Many leftists understand instinctively that the GMA
regime
will never grant genuine autonomy, much less independence to the
Bangsamoro
peoples. But they believe that somehow this can be won under a
“democratic”
capitalist regime. Thus the Cordillera People’s Democratic Front stated,
in
an August 25 declaration: “genuine autonomy can only be achieved
within a
truly free and democratic state, free from imperialist control,
domestic
feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism.” But that can only come about
under the
rule of the working class – there is no non-bureaucratic capitalism or
“national” bourgeoisie free of imperialist control. And while the
Stalinist
and
social-democratic reformist left they may talk of
self-determination,
they call only for autonomy within the Philippines, never accepting the
possibility of independence
for
Bangsamoro. Trotskyists recognize the right of independence for
the Moro peoples while fighting for a socialist federation of
Southeast Asia. The League for the Fourth
International along with comrades in the Philippines has called to
“recognize
the right of oppressed nationalities to independence
(self-determination) from
colonial-like rule of the bourgeois states of Indonesia and the
Philippines”
and for “defense of the insurgents and defeat of the military
offensives
against the Aceh, Moro, and Papuan peoples” while fighting for “equal
rights of
national and ethnic minorities under a revolutionary workers state”
(see “The
Class War in Southeast Asia,” The Internationalist No. 17,
October-November 2003). Filipino Trotskyists fight for international
proletarian revolution, and hail the action of U.S. dock workers who
shut down
West Coast ports on May Day. A struggle for workers action to sweep
away George
W. Bush’s puppet Arroyo will have an impact far beyond the Philippines.
They aren’t singing Kumbaya. U.S.
ambassador Kristie Kenney and then AFP chief Gen. Hermogenes Esperon at
opening of Balikatan 2008 military exercises in February. U.S. forces are certainly
participating in the current AFP offensive, while all the while denying
it.
Despite the ban on foreign military bases in the Philippines
constitution, U.S.
Special Forces have a HQ at the Joint Special Operations Task
Force-Philippines
in the AFP’s Western Mindanao Command at Camp Navarro, in Zamboanga
City (Business
World, 12-13 September). But the U.S. also was intimately involved
in the
previous negotiations – so much so that some Filipino nationalists
wondered if
they were an American plot to take over Mindanao. The Center for People
Empowerment in Governance notes that U.S. military had “direct access
to the
MILF including its military camps” through the Philippine Facilitation
Project
of the U.S. Institute of Peace. And it points out that the Memorandum
of Agreement
“binds the MILF to honor private landholdings, corporate plantations,
foreign
investments particularly in energy resources, as well as the presence
of
foreign forces in Bangsamoro” (Bulatlat, 31 August). Even
right-wing
senator Panfilo Lacson questioned the frequent visits of U.S.
ambassador
Kristie Kenney, who spends “out of 365 days at least 120 days in
Mindanao” (Philippines
Daily Inquirer, 9 September). Thus
in explaining the abrupt shift in the government’s attitude on the
peace
negotiations with Moro insurgents, one has to consider the U.S.
interest. For one thing, there is
ExxonMobil’s recent interest in exploring for oil in the Sulu Sea. Also, the Philippines was the fourth-largest
recipient of U.S. military aid – after Israel, Egypt and Colombia –
until it
was recently surpassed by Georgia. It can hardly be coincidence that in
the
last six months, the U.S. client regimes in Colombia, Georgia and the
Philippines have launched military attacks against local adversaries
(Colombian
attack on FARC guerrillas in March, a failed Georgian attack on
Russian-backed
Ossetia in early August, the Philippines military offensive against
Moro areas
in late August). Word has evidently gone out from the Pentagon and the
White
House to strike now, whether the aim is to distract attention from the
morass
in which the U.S. finds itself in Iraq and Afghanistan, to bolster the
presidential chances of Republican “warrior” John McCain, or as a last
gasp
from the Bush-Cheney administration. A U.S./Israeli nuclear attack on
Iran
could be next. But in any case, action by the Filipino working class to
thwart
Arroyo’s military plans could throw a wrench into Washington’s war
plans. For the indigenous peoples’
struggle for self-determination and independence to lead them out of
the
terrible poverty and oppression to which capitalism has condemned them,
the key
is to build the nucleus of a genuine Filipino Leninist-Trotskyist party
to
fight for workers revolution in the Philippines and throughout
Southeast Asia,
in the struggle to reforge the Fourth International as the world party
of
socialist revolution. ■ 1 Land of the Moro (Muslim in Spanish) people (Bangsa in Malay), the southern Philippines areas historically including the Sulu Archipelago, much of the large island of Mindanao, and Palawan (see map, above). To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com |
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