Author Topic: 30,000: Number of Filipinos Killed by the NPA  (Read 958 times)

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30,000: Number of Filipinos Killed by the NPA
« on: October 28, 2012, 04:48:33 PM »
AFP-PNP statistics: 29,553 killed in 33 years of communist insurgency war since 1978
By Ben Cal

A total of 29,553 Filipinos, mostly combatants, were killed during a 33-year period covering 1978-2010 in the communist insurgency war in the country, according to military and police statistics.

Jurgette Honculada, a member of the Government of the Philippines (GPH) peace panel negotiating with the Communist Party of the Philippines/New People’s Army/National Democratic Front (CPP/NPA/NDF), based the figure on the statistics released by the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police.

In a paper entitled “The Emotional Calculus of Conflict,” Honculada said that during the insurgency war between government forces and communist rebels from 1978 to 2010, a total of 13,412 NPA fighters were killed.

The AFP/PNP suffered 8,264 dead during the same period, she said.

Honculada lamented that 7,877 civilians caught in the crossfire were also killed.

She said this “translates into 80 deaths daily for the period: 36 communists, 23 soldiers and policemen, and 21 civilians.”

The fatalities did not include the years from 1969 to 1977 when there was also heavy fighting between government forces and NPA rebels.

Furthermore, the number of deaths related to communist insurgency warfare did not include the Muslim rebellion in Mindanao where an estimated 150,000 were killed during 40 years of fighting.

The GPH and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) signed on Oct. 7 this year the historic Framework Agreement as a roadmap to end the armed conflict in southern Philippines.

The signing of the Framework Agreement has drawn praises from the cross section of society here and abroad.

On the other hand, the negotiations between the Philippine government and the CPP/NPA/NDF have been stalled, meeting only once the past two years as the communist rebels insisted of putting pre-conditions such as the release of captured rebels whom they tagged as “consultants” before the talks could resume.

“When the GPH and CPP/NPA/NDF peace panels met in June in Oslo to declog a peace process mired in a contrapuntal word and ground war, both sides raised their bills of particulars. The CPP/NPA/NDF listed over half a dozen issues pertaining to safety and immunity guarantees for their consultants (JASIG) bilateral agreements, the release of political prisoners, terrorist listing of the CPP-NPA and Jose Ma. Sison, and indemnification of human rights victims. (These issues have been, and will be, addressed elsewhere),” Honculada pointed out.

“The GPH panel focused on a demand to 'lower the level of violence on the ground', with particular reference to the use of land mines and child soldiers by the NPA,” the lady peace panel member said.

Honculada added: “There is no meeting of the minds there, Satur Ocampo wrote in his Philippine Star column on Sept. 1, 2012. NDF chair Luis Jalandoni echoed this sentiment when he said, in a forum also on the same day, that peace talks must not be reduced to mere ceasefire negotiations.”

“For GPH, the issues of child soldiers and land mines are not marginal or peripheral to peace negotiations. Children, in the barest sense, are our future; when we imperil them we risk our future,” she said.

“International humanitarian law and Philippine law prohibit the use of child soldiers, a practice staunchly denied by the CPP-NPA but belied by regular news reports, among the latest that on a 17-year-old (recruited when he was 13) among NPA casualties in an Aug. 31, 2012 Davao encounter,” Honculada said.

Honculada added that “the CPP/NPA/NDF takes pains to point out that the NPA uses ‘command-detonated’ land mines (as against ‘pressure-activated’ ones which kill anyone) whose use is allowed by international conventions.”

“But land mines do not always obey instructions, time and again killing and maiming hapless civilians. (Recently a grenade targeted at a military site landed on merry- making barangay folk in a Davao fair in Paquibato district, injuring 47; the NPA has belatedly owned up to the deed),” she said.

“Unlearning war must begin here and now, not who knows when, or with the inking of the final pact. Violence has taken too high a toll on our families and villages and communities, rending them asunder. In the poem 'Brave Woman' by Grace Monte de Ramos, a village woman (perhaps widow?) soliloquizes about her two sons, unschooled and unskilled, joining the army “when they were young;” and her third and youngest son, abducted at 17 -- by soldiers or rebels? She cannot say. As she seeks his bones, she laments that perhaps her older sons have “given other mothers sorrow … Perhaps my (youngest) son had to pay for what they borrowed,” Honculada continued.

“And violence has taken too high a toll on our psyches, most especially those who have come within arm’s length of it,” Honculada said, adding that “the former pastor of a campus Protestant church was one of three children in the 1970s serving the NPA as errand boys. His peasant father was jailed by the military, his mother was in the U.S. to earn money somehow, he had to survive by his wits, thus ending up with the NPA in Isabela, his home province. Decades later, by dint of hard work, struggle and sacrifice, and luck, he became a pastor, as did one of his fellow errand boys. The third took his own life.”

Honculada stressed that “the inner wounds inflicted by violence take a lifetime (and amazing grace) to heal. The inner demons one cannot always slay.”

She quoted King Badouin I of Belgium when the latter said: “Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace. It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him.”

“This is where GPH is coming from. This is the emotional calculus that compels the GPH panel to raise the issues of land mines and child soldiers and press for reduced levels of violence during negotiations,” Honculada said.

Honculada further stressed that “these do not negate the GPH’s commitment to socioeconomic-political reforms. For GPH, seeking peace in the here-and-now is a foretaste or token of the just and enduring peace that we all want. Muting the gunfire during peace talks, keeping children and civilians out of harm’s way, will mean one life, or two or three or more saved, and that will have been worth it.”

In her paper, Honculada also quoted American peace mentor John Paul Lederach, who once said: ”When we choose gunfire as the modality by which we communicate, it becomes difficult to go back to words.”

“Herein lies the challenge: of finding a common ground, of finding the right words to cut through the crap and the gunfire, of matching word with deed, resolve with will, of restoring integrity to words so that we do not engage in wordplay (and verbal sleight-of-hand) but mean what we say and say what we mean, of unlearning war in order to wage peace,” Honculada said.

The question is: Will the CPP/NPA/NDF listen to the multitude of the Filipino people crying for peace now? (PNA)

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