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THE WAR THE WORLD FORGOT
They are barely old enough to remember the cold war. Deep in the jungles and mountains of the Philippines, thousands of young communists fight a battle begun by their grandfathers.

By Andrew Marshall   Photographs by Philip Blenkinsop

COMRADE Giegie is getting married. Her wedding will be held in a jungle clearing, which she will enter through an archway of raised assault rifles. The bride and groom will make their vows draped in a red flag bearing the spear and Kalashnikov of the 7,500-strong New People’s Army (NPA). Then they will pledge allegiance to the masses, and promise to raise their children as revolutionaries. There will be no priest, no confetti, no wedding gown. So how will Giegie dress? “Like this,” she smiles. Giegie, 22, is wearing a faded sweatshirt, jogging pants, wellington boots and an Ingram sub-machinegun.

Hidden in mountainous Mindanao in the southern Philippines, Giegie’s platoon is fighting a rebellion older than most of its members. Her late father was an NPA rebel; her mother is a left-wing activist. Most of the platoon have family members or friends in the NPA; some have been branded from an early age and had no choice but to join.

If the army is diminishing, generation by generation (at its peak it had more than 12,000 members); if its raison d’être seems ever more confused in a post-communist world, Giegie seems unaware. There are few prospects for country girls like her and her sister Lenlen, a fellow fighter, other than becoming an overseas maid or sex worker. “There’s no life for my sisters outside the NPA,” she says.

Since 1969, the NPA, the armed wing of the outlawed Communist party of the Philippines, has waged what it calls a “protracted people’s war” in which an estimated 40,000 people have died, and whose aims seem lost in a miasma of revolutionary rhetoric.

Heavy monsoon rains won’t alter Giegie’s wedding plans, but the escalating conflict might. Peace talks ended in 2004 after the government refused to pressure the US to remove the NPA from its terrorist list, where it was placed after the September 11 attacks. Last year, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo – clinging to power amid allegations of election fraud and human-rights abuses – declared an “all-out war” to crush the 37-year-old insurgency. The conflict keeps her military busy, and potentially less interested in toppling her the way it has toppled previous presidents. She has survived three coup attempts. Over 800 government opponents have been murdered or gone missing since Arroyo took power in 2001, reports the Filipino human-rights group Karapatan. These include left-wing activists, lawyers, union leaders, students, farmers and priests. And journalists: 46 have been killed on Arroyo’s watch.

As fighting intensified nationwide, Philip Blenkinsop and I joined an NPA platoon in Mindanao. We travelled north along a road being built by two South Korean firms, both of which pay “revolutionary taxes” to the NPA, or so it claims. Money extorted from companies in rebel areas is an important source of NPA income. At San Francisco, a dreary concrete facsimile of its famous namesake, we are picked up by two NPA men in a two-wheel-drive car with darkened windows, then speed out of town along potholed tracks. In many villages, government troops are dug in behind sandbags and razor wire. Three hours later, we transfer to trail bikes and roar along deserted tracks to a logging shack. Waiting there are five NPA soldiers with M-16s who guide us through the jungle to a camp lit by flickering oil lamps.

“The comrades are very excited you’re here,” says a voice in the gloom. It belongs to Comrade Victor, 39, the political officer assigned to look after us. A handsome man dressed in long shorts and flip-flops, Victor apologises for our circuitous journey: a rebel operation had caused more “bad weather” to the south. “Our people were carrying out a punitive action,” he says, meaning an assassination by an NPA “sparrow unit”, or death squad. The man killed was a farmer, but his role as a police informer had earned him “a blood debt against the revolutionary movement”.

Comrade Victor describes the troops as Marxist-Leninists, dedicated to the overthrow of global capitalism and US hegemony. Giegie and others in the platoon simply want to achieve social justice on a local level – 40% of Filipinos live on less than $2 a day. About one-fifth of NPA fighters are under 18, according to Jane’s Information Group, an authority on defence and terrorism. Many are high-school dropouts with no job prospects. For Joven, 21, joining meant personal salvation. “I was addicted to marijuana and alcohol. I hung out with a neighbourhood gang.”

By the often lethargic standards of troops fighting long-running jungle wars, this 30-strong platoon seems hyperactive. At 4am, its soldiers are performing drills and martial arts, then practising grenade-throwing with rocks from a nearby river. Their entire week is plotted out: from Monday to Friday there’s military and medical training, plus basic education and indoctrination sessions; weekends are devoted to food production and cultural activities. Even off duty, the platoon stays on message, gathering to sing rebel songs. There are few diversions. Alcohol is banned.

“There are no ranks in the NPA,” Victor tells me, “only responsibilities.” But some comrades are more equal than others. The platoon leader, Jorex, 41, is a brooding giant with a bandolier of grenades across his chest. As a youth, he was recruited by a government militia to fight the NPA but instead defected to the rebels. A personal tragedy – the death in 1993 of his brother, also an NPA guerrilla, in a firefight with government troops – reaffirmed his commitment to the cause. “He died in my arms,” says Jorex. “It was painful. But I feel the same pain when one of my comrades dies.”

Jorex and his wife, Wendy, 33, have five children under 12, who live with relatives. They see the children twice a year, surreptitiously. An NPA fighter for 15 years, Wendy is tormented by the idea that her children are vulnerable: “It terrifies me to think what the soldiers might do to them.” She claims that on one occasion a government soldier interrupted an NPA radio communication to announce: “If you kill our colleagues, we’ll kill your children.”

Lenlen, 19, Giegie’s sister, has already survived three shoot-outs. She was almost killed in an NPA attack on an army post in 2005. One bullet hit her neck and ripped an exit through her armpit; a second drilled into her thigh. “All I could think was, ‘If I die here, I die for the people,’ ” she recalls. But within months she was able to join a weapons raid on a police headquarters in a nearby town that netted a dozen firearms and killed two policemen. Their deaths don’t bother her. “They tried to fight back,” she shrugs. She is happy to have joined a group “guided by Marxist-Leninism and Maoist thought”. But it’s not clear how much she knows about such matters. The jungle that has shielded the NPA from defeat has also isolated its fighters from a world where their cherished ideology is deader than disco.

Victor believes Arroyo’s “all-out war” is unwinnable. The Filipino army is thinly dispersed, capable of engaging only a quarter of the NPA’s 120 “fronts” nationwide, while remaining vulnerable to hit-and-run tactics. “We’ve learnt a lot about guerrilla warfare in 37 years,” Victor warns. Felipe Miranda, a professor of political science at the University of the Philippines, agrees: “The military does not have the capability, in terms of logistics or manpower, to deal with an insurgency that has been around for close to half a century.”

Then there’s the other war: the murder or disappearance of those government opponents since 2001. Most are left-wing activists for legal political groups such as Bayan Muna (People First) and Anakpawis (Toiling Masses), publicly labelled as rebel sympathisers. The national security adviser Norberto Gonzales has even accused Bayan Muna members of moonlighting as NPA fighters. This practice of “red-labelling”, says Amnesty International, sends a tacit signal to the military that murdering political opponents is okay.

The Filipino military blames the slaughter on the NPA, which the UN special investigator Philip Alston finds “especially unconvincing”; he claims the military itself is committing a “significant number” of these murders. His claims are supported by a commission set up by Arroyo herself, and by human-rights groups. “The body of evidence is now so compelling that it can no longer be ignored,” said Natalie Hill of Amnesty in a statement last month. The armed-forces chief, Gen Hermogenes Esperon, has angrily denied that his troops are involved in the killings. Colonel Eduardo del Rosario, head of a military anti-terrorist unit in Mindanao, admitted to me that “individual commanders” might be responsible for the killings.

President Arroyo has so far refused to implicate the military, despite all the evidence. “She wants to keep the military on her good side,” says Zachary Abuza, a southeast-Asia security analyst at Simmons College in Boston. “She’s always concerned that it will withdraw support for her.”

A resurgent communist rebellion, a Marcos-style “dirty war” – no wonder many Filipinos feel as if their nation is hurtling backwards. The NPA should be just another cold-war relic. Instead – and despite its death squads and defunct ideology – it endures as a symbol of the failure of successive governments to improve the lives of ordinary Filipinos. Comrade Victor has no doubt his “protracted people’s war” will outlast Arroyo’s presidency. But in one sense he will be sad to see her go. Government opponents who now fear for their lives are “being encouraged to take the great leap and join the NPA”, he says. “Arroyo is our greatest recruiter.”

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