OF AMERICAN IMPERIALISM AND THE REDS

There is still a part of me that would want to lash at America for its arrogance. Especially when it really defied the collective wish of the United Nations Security Council regarding the possible war against Iraq. Just because they happen to be the superpower, would that give them the right to threaten other countries who do not follow to their whims and caprices? There is a part of me that would like to shout "Down with the imperialist America!"

Why shouldn't I? Reading through history, we would know that America was never apologetic to the mistakes they have created and some of today's terror is a problem of their own making.

America supported the Taliban because they want to get rid of the government in Afghanistan who was supported by the then communist Soviet Union.

America supported and tolerated the tyrannical rule of the Shah in Iran and no wonder believers if Islam and followers of Ayatollah Khomeni have this deep-seated hate against Uncle Sam.

And who can't forget? America supported the Marcos dictatorship and countless other tyrants/dictator in other countries.

This would pose a dilemma for me as I have a number of American friends (great friends at that!) whom I totally respect, some are even officers of the US Embassy in the Philippines.

* * *

It would be safe to assume that I am one of those activist who would shout "Down with the administration who supported the imperialist America!"

Well, I almost became one of them. Back in High School I was the only few student who believed that tour Senate should no longer ratify the treaty that would extend the stay of the US Bases in the Philippines. In College, I raised my left arms with the other campus writer who joined the convention of the College Editor's Guild of the Philippines.

I was, however, enlightened and before I could be swallowed by their rhetorics of the US-Aquino, US-Ramos, US-Macapagal regime, I receive my own share of the truth. First, I could not swallow their ideology. Second, I could not support a leadership of hypocrisy.

Let me explain the second, while these people would shout at the very threat human rights violations the government has committed, they themselves are also violators. How many people were killed in the 80s in their paranoia that their ranks were infiltrated by government spies? How many innocent lives they have sacrificed just to advance their ideology? Many people, even up to this time, believed that the bombing of the Plaza Miranda was mastermined by Marcos. But a friend and teacher (a former member of the underground) said it was ordered by Joma Sizon, the exiled founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines. This was later confirmed with the publication of a book by former Senator Jovito Salonga, who was one of the victims of the Plaza Miranda bombing.

Now, with the murder of Rolly Kintanar, former chief and founder of the New People's Army, a lot of issues regarding the atrocities of the Reds have surfaced. Here's one article of the written by Nathan Gilbert Quimpo, former member of the Mindanao Commission and International Department of the Communist Party of the Philippines. This article is taken from today's issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

Red leaders afraid Kintanar knew too much
Posted:1:08 AM (Manila Time) | Jan. 28, 2003
By Nathan Gilbert Quimpo
Inquirer News Service
(Editor's note: The author is a former member of the Mindanao Commission and International Department of the Communist Party of the Philippines. He wrote this commentary from Australia where he is finishing his doctorate.)

THE COMMUNIST Party of the Philippines has acknowledged killing former New People's Army chief Romulo "Rolly" Kintanar, claiming he deserved capital punishment for his "criminal and counterrevolutionary acts."

Was that the real reason for his assassination?

It is true that the NPA under Kintanar did engage in kidnapping, armed bank robberies and holdups. But such activities went on for a long stretch of time--even during the periods when Kintanar was behind bars. This would indicate that these activities were (or still are) part of CPP policy and not just a manifestation of Kintanar's adventurism.

If CPP leaders had indeed been aghast and appalled by the kidnapping of businessman Noboyuki Wakaoji in 1986, why did they not speak out then? Why didn't they remove Kintanar then? And what has the CPP-NPA to say about its wholesale extortion during elections through so-called "permits-to-campaign"?

The claim that Kintanar was conniving with the military and police in counterinsurgency operations is speculative. The CPP has not presented any evidence. Same with the so-called assassination plot on CPP founding chair Jose Ma. Sison.

Besides, if Kintanar had really wanted to hit the CPP-NPA, he would not have done so through "surveillance operations, psy-ops and sabotage operations and attacking and attempting to destroy NPA units and guerrilla zones" as claimed, but through other means, as will soon be illustrated.

Kintanar has also been held as one of those responsible for the anti-infiltration purge in Mindanao in 1985-86 that claimed the lives of hundreds of cadres suspected of being government spies. The charge is false--Kintanar had left Mindanao more than a year before the purge.

If it wasn't for criminal and counterinsurgency activities, why then did the CPP have Kintanar killed?

For one, he knew too much.


Kintanar was at the helm of the NPA at a time when the CPP-NPA was at its peak. The CPP's Maoist precepts dictated that to achieve revolutionary victory, the CPP-NPA had to move from guerrilla warfare to regular warfare.

Thus, Kintanar boldly embarked on "regularization," building larger NPA formations and launching bigger "tactical offensives." Soon enough, however, Kintanar realized that regular warfare required a steady stream of arms and ammunition. This meant that the CPP-NPA would somehow have to find a reliable and stable arms source and also a way of getting the arms into the country.

China, too busy building "market socialism" (read: capitalism), was no longer willing to export revolution as before. (In the early 1970s, the CPP had botched two attempts at procuring arms from China.) Thus, in the latter half of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, Kintanar and his deputies traveled to various parts of the globe, searching for possible sources of arms.

Using Yugoslavia as their international base, Kintanar and his group linked up with many revolutionary or "anti-imperialist" governments (like Libya, North Korea and Iraq) and movements (like the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Sandinistas and even the Japanese Red Army). Kintanar and company were able to secure promises of arms but they were never able to solve the problem of smuggling the arms into the Philippines.

One of the "anti-imperialist" governments with which Kintanar and his group developed close ties provided them with hard-to-detect counterfeit US dollars. The NPA widely used these fake dollars in both its international and domestic operations in the late 1980s. The fake dollar racket was busted in 1990, forcing the CPP-NPA to close certain accounts in international banks.


The tagging of the CPP-NPA as a "terrorist organization" by the Philippines and Western governments has been very much in the news lately. The US Central Intelligence Agency, Interpol, other Western intelligence agencies and the Philippine military intelligence service are all well aware of the CPP-NPA's connections and activities, but they have never been able to convincingly prove its being a "terrorist" organization before a court of law.

Nonetheless, the CPP-NPA has been put on the political defensive. Note all the outcry against its being labeled "terrorist."

In a cheap and desperate bid to show that it is a respectable organization, the CPP-NPA is now trying to pin the blame on Kintanar for actions that could be deemed "terrorist" or "criminal"-kidnappings, fake dollars, etc.--and claiming that these were undertaken without the CPP leadership's authorization. Kintanar has become a convenient-and silenced-scapegoat.

When US military advisor Col. James Rowe was ambushed and killed by NPA gunmen in 1989, CPP leaders were all in ecstasy. Now, however, Sison, apparently fearful of being extradited or spirited away to the United States or Guantanamo, has issued a statement, crying: Kintanar's to blame, not me.

As a seasoned and shrewd politico-military cadre, Kintanar knew only too well that the CPP-NPA could not be defeated simply through military means. Assisting the military in such efforts as surveillance and attacking NPA units would not have had much effect.

It was in the political sphere that the CPP-NPA was most vulnerable.

Had he wanted to, Kintanar could very well have spilled the beans publicly on the CPP-NPA's links with governments allegedly promoting or coddling "terrorism" (especially those in Bush's "Axis of Evil") and with movements still considered "terrorist" like the JRA; on the counterfeit dollars; or on NPA "special operations."

As a former member of the CPP Politburo, Kintanar also had access to inside information on the party's discussions and assessments of the anti-infiltration purges not just in Mindanao but also in the Southern Tagalog region, Metro Manila, Northern Luzon in the 1980s.

And, of course, access too to information regarding the Plaza Miranda bombing of 1971. His personal testimony as former NPA leader and former CPP Politburo member on any of these activities would have been damning to the CPP-NPA.

Kintanar did not tattle. In fact, perhaps out of his faithfulness to the revolutionary cause, he had expressly advised those who remained loyal or friendly to him to keep mum. He did not want to risk the revolutionary movement, or the Left in general, being put in too negative a light.

If he wasn't talking, why would the CPP still do him in then? Well, there was always the possibility that he would talk someday.


But there is another factor to consider, a deeper reason. It has to do with the very frame of mind of at least some people in the CPP leadership.

Kintanar was killed because, at certain period at least, he dared to oppose.

In 1986, for instance, there was a Politburo discussion on who should replace the newly resigned Rodolfo Salas as party chair.

Kintanar, newly promoted to the Politburo, pushed for an internal party investigation of the Plaza Miranda bombing. He was overruled, however. (Back in 1972, Kintanar was present when Danny Cordero, an able NPA commander, made an astounding confession just before he was executed by the party for insubordination: That he had lobbed the grenades at Plaza Miranda in 1971 and that Sison himself had ordered the bombing.)

The differences between Sison and Kintanar widened. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Kintanar resisted efforts of pro-Sison forces to break up large NPA formations. In Europe, Sison also tried to wrest command of the NPA's international machinery. But Kintanar's operatives still basically followed the orders of their NPA chief.

In 1992-93, the internal party struggle spilled out into the open when Sison faxed press statements from Utrecht, accusing Kintanar and two other Politburo members of being "renegades," "enemy agents" and "gangsters."

In turn, the three lambasted Sison for being a "dictator" and for being "Stalinist" and "dogmatist." A few months later, the CPP announced to the media that Kintanar, Filemon Lagman and other "rejectionist" leaders would be tried by "people's courts" and meted out death sentences.

After his expulsion from the CPP, Kintanar gradually drew away from the intense polemics and character assassinations that continued between the "reaffirmists" and "rejectionists." These were not his cup of tea. He pursued his new life as a security consultant for various government agencies, which involved mainly going after criminal syndicates.

He maintained links with old comrades, but these were largely of a social nature. He did give advice to those still politically active when they sought him out.

With Kintanar out of revolutionary politics, why couldn't the CPP let him be? For the powers that be in the CPP, however, expulsion was not enough.

Kintanar must have had the prescience--but apparently did not take precautions--in his abhorrence of Stalinists. Even when he was already the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union, the megalomaniac Stalin did not stop at expelling dissenters from the Communist Party. He put them to death, whether they remained politically active or not.

It is all so clear now that within the CPP, there are leading members of the same mold. They brook no opposition, no challenge, no criticism. They view those who oppose them as being counterrevolutionaries, renegades, and enemies of the people.

Kintanar? How dare he oppose! How dare he challenge and defy! How dare he put to public scorn the party leadership to public scorn! The Party--the vanguard of the Philippine proletariat! NPA chief at that!


The vindictiveness, viciousness and long memories of at least a number of those in the CPP leadership should not be underestimated. I distinctly remember an account narrated to me by Charlie (pseudonym), one of Kintanar's closest deputies.

Sometime in the mid-80s, the NPA General Command received from the CPP leadership an "order of battle," i.e., a list of persons to be executed. The list, the GC was told, had originated from prison.

One of the names near the top of the list was an unfamiliar one. When the GC asked for clarification, they were told that the person concerned was a "Lavaite" (one belonging to the pro-Soviet Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, from which Sison and company had broken away before reestablishing the CPP along the Maoist line in 1968).

In preparation for the kill, the GC sent an operative to Central Luzon to check the "Lavaite's" whereabouts. That proved easy. Neighbors simply pointed to his house, and said, "That's him, in the yard."

The operative drew near but soon stopped dead in his tracks. He was shocked to find an old man, sweeping fallen leaves, doing so very slowly. Reporting back to the GC, he asked, "Why him? He's so old. 'Uugod-ugod na!' (Already doddering!)" Kintanar and company quietly "demoted" the old man to the bottom of the list, thereby saving him from the gunman.

When the story was told to me, I recalled something I had read some time ago: that the intense ideological struggle of the young Maoists in the PKP with the "Lavaite" leadership had been in the 1960s. This meant that someone or some persons in the CPP leadership had not forgotten--or forgiven--those who had opposed and criticized them even after twenty years!

The former NPA chief was tried in absentia by a kangaroo or possibly even fictitious "people's court" purportedly in 1993. Kintanar's executioners certainly took their time in meting out the death sentence, but they did not have to wait for Kintanar to get to be an old, doddering man.

If the perpetrators, especially the mastermind, of the Kintanar murder are not apprehended and punished, then the foremost question now can only be: Who's next in the order of battle?