“War on Terror” Targets Leftists, Muslims
U.S. Troops Out of the Philippines!
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 779, 19 April 2002.
Having already dispatched more than 600 U.S. troops, together with combat aircraft, to the Philippines since January, on April 8 the Pentagon announced that it would send 300 additional troops to that U.S. neocolony. The U.S. intervention force, sent to open a “second front” as part of Washington’s “global war on terror,” is the largest single American troop deployment outside Afghanistan since September 11. It is also the first ongoing American military presence in the Philippines since the U.S. abandoned its Clark and Subic Bay bases there a decade ago.
Under the cover of a “training” exercise named after the annual Balikatan (“shouldering the load”) U.S.-Philippine military maneuvers, the American troops are on a tour of duty of at least six months, primarily in the southern islands of Mindanao, Basilan and Jolo. This is a region torn by struggles by the oppressed Muslim population and peasant insurgents. A 160-strong contingent of American Special Forces “trainers” has been attached to units of the Philippine Army that are pursuing the Muslim secessionist Abu Sayyaf group, which has been responsible for a number of kidnappings and is currently holding an American Christian missionary couple and a Filipino nurse captive in the jungles of Basilan. In fact, the hunt for the unsavory Abu Sayyaf group is a pretext for intensified military repression against insurgent Muslims on these islands.
The arrival of the U.S. military received the blessings of the influential Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines and was hailed by the Makati Business Club bourgeoisie, which together figured prominently in the “People Power” coup that installed Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as president a year ago. Arroyo’s choice of international advisers includes former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Australian prime minister Paul Keating. Her government distinguished itself as one of the more rabid supporters of Washington’s war against Afghanistan, providing access to Philippine airspace and military facilities for U.S. warplanes en route to aircraft carriers and bases in the Indian Ocean. An indication of the upbeat mood among the Philippine rulers is the buoyancy of stock prices following news of the American deployment.
The Philippine oligarchs are hoping that the presence of imperialist troops will help quash social unrest in this country, which is beset by a long-running peasant insurgency, Muslim secessionist rebellion and worsening economic conditions. The American military is reinforcing the Philippine bourgeoisie’s repressive capability by arming and training elite killer units called Light Reaction Companies. The U.S. is also supplying stockpiles of small arms, mortars, night vision and communications equipment, helicopters, transport planes and a naval patrol craft. In return, the Philippines signed the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA). Although its terms are supposedly being renegotiated after it was exposed in the press, the MLSA allows the United States imperialists access to military facilities beyond the period prescribed by the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA).
Washington’s current military adventure in the Philippines is part of a broader shift of forces to the Pacific Rim region, aimed in particular at aiding the drive to overturn the 1949 Chinese Revolution and restore capitalism. The Taiwan bourgeoisie’s offer to provide the dilapidated Philippine Air Force with two F5E jet fighter squadrons in return for Taiwan’s right to access Philippine air space and bases during training maneuvers is a provocation aimed against the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state.
The latest U.S. moves can also be seen in part as enforcing its interests against its traditional imperialist rival in Asia, Japan, which depends on nearby sea lanes for its oil supply. Not least, the deployment in Mindanao puts the United States in a strategic location to crush social unrest in the region, especially in Indonesia, which has remained highly unstable since student-initiated protests ousted the bloody Suharto regime in 1998. Smash the VFA and MLSA! No to U.S. bases! For unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution!
Down With Military Occupation of Mindanao!
Exploiting the fear and genuine outrage resulting from the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center, the Philippine bourgeoisie has used allegations of ties between Abu Sayyaf and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network to turn the screws of repression on Muslims, dissidents and leftists. The number of attacks against leftists increased sharply in the two months after the American troops arrived. The Bayan Muna (Nation First) party, which is politically identified with Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder Jose Maria Sison, said that six of its party workers have been “disappeared” by the army in Luzon. On March 1, paramilitary gunmen assassinated Pedro Trabajador, the 70-year-old local leader of the National Federation of Sugar Workers in Negros. At the same time, the government resumed its vilification campaign in the bourgeois press against the CPP-led New People’s Army (NPA), calling the NPA guerrillas worse than Abu Sayyaf in order to set them up for liquidation by U.S.-backed killer units.
The capitalist rulers are trying to sell the lie that the imperialist military presence will bring progress to the masses of Mindanao. This resource-rich region, which is a prize for further imperialist exploitation, is noted for the highest incidence of poverty and illiteracy in the Philippines. Meanwhile, the longstanding terror campaign against oppressed Muslims continues unabated. Scores were recently rounded up on mere suspicion of being Abu Sayyaf sympathizers, and hundreds were driven from rural villages by artillery and aerial bombardment. On January 15, at least 17 people were killed and dozens wounded when a rally in Jolo ended in a clash with Philippine Marines. The protesters were demanding the release of imprisoned Moro National Liberation Front leader Nur Misuari, who had been ousted as governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao and faces charges of rebellion.
Bloody repression in Mindanao and the displacement of its Moro (Muslim) population dates back to the early years of the American colonial occupation of the Philippines, which began with U.S. imperialism’s seizure of the islands in the 1898 Spanish-American War. In 1906, troops under General Leonard Wood, commander of the U.S. occupation force, carried out the methodical slaughter of some 900 Moro men, women and children who were trapped in the crater of an extinct volcano. Mark Twain denounced this imperialist butchery in a scathing essay titled “Grief and Mourning for the Night.” The expropriation and marginalization of the Muslim population intensified in the post-colonial era, escalating particularly under the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos. We say: Down with right-wing and anti-Muslim state terror! Down with the military occupation of Mindanao! U.S. and Philippine troops out now!
Filipino Left Pushes Nationalism, Class Collaboration
The presence of United States troops has not gone unchallenged. Marches and rallies continue to erupt in several cities, with protesters calling Arroyo a lapdog of the imperialists. On several occasions, protesters have scuffled with cops. With restiveness over layoffs, the high cost of food and utilities and other austerity measures dictated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund bloodsuckers, the Philippine bourgeoisie has all the reason to fear the outburst of protest. Terrified that these could ignite a plebeian explosion similar to the bloody May Day unrest last year, Arroyo has publicly baited opponents of the Balikatan war games as “terrorist lovers.” She even banned AKBAYAN and BISIG, two fake-left outfits that supported her rise to power, from the government-sponsored rally commemorating the 16th anniversary of the first “People Power” revolt, which led to the downfall of Marcos in 1986.
Arroyo’s determination to strengthen military ties with U.S. imperialism was known well before she came to power. Yet the alphabet soup of organizations that make up the Philippine left—from Sison’s CPP to its breakaway groups, including the Socialist Party of Labor (SPP)—hailed “People Power Two” as a “victory for the people” (see WV No. 763, 31 August 2001). Bayan Muna even campaigned for Arroyo’s senatorial ticket during last year’s ballot.
Now such groups are channeling protests against the American military into a tug-of-war for the red, white and blue mantle of Filipino nationalism instead of a class-struggle challenge to the Philippine bourgeoisie and its imperialist backers. This is evident in the position taken by the Sisonite-influenced Junk VFA Movement. In a 19 January Junk VFA Movement press release, its spokesman, a retired Philippine Navy officer, decries the U.S. military deployment as “an insult to the fighting capability and competence of the Filipino soldier”—the same troops that are hunting down leftists and Muslims! A subsequent press release dated 26 January raised the call for withdrawal of all U.S. forces and demanded instead that “non-commissioned officers be allowed to conduct unimpeded combat operations against the Abu Sayyaf in Basilan.” It is also significant that no Philippine left group raised the call to oppose the 500-strong Philippine contingent that is taking part in the imperialist occupation of East Timor.
By taunting Arroyo as “anti-Filipino” and engaging in cheap anti-Yankee potshots, the Sisonites and others are merely pitching for an “anti-imperialist united front” with those members of the bourgeoisie who are uncomfortable with Arroyo’s hawkish posture and the government’s closeness to Washington. Teofisto Guingona, Arroyo’s vice president and secretary for foreign affairs, has been bickering with her and her generals over the U.S. military involvement in Mindanao and the signing of the MLSA. Sison, in his role as “chief political consultant” of the National Democratic Front—which is engaged in on-and-off peace negotiations with the government—has made a clear overture to Guingona. From his exile in the Netherlands, Sison predicted Arroyo’s “peaceful removal” from power within a year on the basis of a broad united front—provided the vice president is willing to succeed her.
Sison’s followers have launched the OUT NOW! Coalition with mainstream Protestant and Philippine Independent churches, while their rivals have grouped themselves in the Gathering for Peace. The latter melange includes SANLAKAS —which is aligned with the politics of Felimon Lagman, the Philippine Workers Party (PMP) leader assassinated last year —as well as the SPP, AKBAYAN, various social democrats and the rump Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas-1930. The common thread that runs through these fake lefts is their bent for class collaboration on the basis of Filipino nationalism.
The Lagmanites and SPP (who have announced plans to merge) and others seek to “unify different pluralist forces in the country” and to “forge the broadest unity,” including with bourgeois Liberal Party politicians Jovito Salonga and Wigberto Tañada, Catholic religious organizations and the anti-abortion bigots of Pro-Life Philippines. The SPP et al. joined with Pro-Life Philippines in co-signing a Gathering for Peace declaration that opposed the U.S. military presence and worried about “driving away in the process thousands of potential tourists and investors.”
In this 80 percent Catholic country, the woman question is a central and explosive issue. The 1987 constitution includes one of the most severe anti-abortion laws in the world, and a bill to legalize divorce last year provoked howls from the Catholic hierarchy and Arroyo. Religious backwardness—whether Catholic, Muslim or any other—serves to bolster the family, the key institution for the oppression of women in class society. Marxists call for free abortion on demand and strict separation of church and state, opposing every manifestation of discrimination against women, homosexuals and ethnic, national and religious minorities. But to even begin to emancipate women from domestic slavery and all-sided oppression, the system of capitalist exploitation must be swept away through socialist revolution.
This perspective is counterposed to the Menshevik-Stalinist dogma of “two-stage revolution” put forward by the SPP, as was made clear at a conference in Sydney in late March sponsored by the SPP’s Australian co-thinkers, the Democratic Socialist Party. A Spartacist League/ Australia comrade challenged SPP leader Sonny Melencio over the SPP’s support for the Gathering for Peace declaration—with its concern over imperialist investment—and argued instead for a program of workers revolution to expropriate the capitalists. In response, Melencio avowed a two-stage program and talked of the need for tactical alliances. But what the SPP leader describes as a tactic is in fact a program that subordinates the proletariat to a mythical “progressive” or “anti-imperialist” wing of the bourgeoisie in the fight for “democratic” capitalism, leading to a second “stage” not of “socialism” but of the slaughter of workers and leftists.
By chaining the working class and the oppressed masses to one or another wing of the Philippine bourgeoisie, these fake leftists will not and cannot lead the masses to break free from imperialist enslavement. And history has proven this, one lesson being Indonesia in 1965, where the capitalist rulers massacred a million Communists, workers and ethnic Chinese. As Leon Trotsky outlined in the theory of permanent revolution, the bourgeoisies in countries of belated capitalist development are more fearful of the super-exploited masses than they are of the imperialists, on whom they depend to secure their class rule. Democracy, freedom from the imperialist yoke and emancipation of the oppressed can only be realized through a socialist revolution that overthrows bourgeois rule and is based on a perspective of proletarian revolution internationally, particularly in the imperialist centers. The key to victory lies in the forging of an internationalist Leninist-Trotskyist party against all variants of nationalism and class collaboration.
Workers and oppressed in the Philippines should look to the multiracial American proletariat for a powerful ally. The United States and Philippine bourgeoisies have enjoyed a neocolonial “special relationship” spanning decades. The special relationship that the Philippine and American workers must have is one of internationalist working-class solidarity. Led by a revolutionary workers party, the American working class will fulfill its task of aiding the enslaved masses of the semicolonies by carrying out a proletarian revolution in the bastion of world imperialism.