Highlights
– Eastern Visayas home to underreported insurgency campaign
– New People’s Army continues to threaten AFP forces in the east
– President Arroyo’s Amnesty program shows few signs of success
Manila has battled an ongoing insurgency in the country’s south for over forty years. Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels, often linked to Abu Sayyaf guerillas, clash with government soldiers on a nearly daily basis throughout the Mindanao region, a predominantly Muslim archipelago bordering Malaysia’s eastern islands.
Less well known is Manila’s other insurgency. The Eastern Visayas region, made up of six provinces in the country’s east, is currently home to a number of communist rebel groups that have waged a violent campaign for greater autonomy for nearly four decades. The difference between the two campaigns comes in the ability of President Arroyo’s apparent success at defeating the latter while only enduring the former.
Seven of eleven major guerilla fronts in Eastern Visayas have been largely dismantled, yet doubts arise whether Manila will live up to its claim that it will eradicate the country’s eastern insurgency by the end of President Arroyo’s term in 2010. While notable arrests will likely be made in the coming year, we believe the insurgency will continue beyond the end of President Arroyo’s current term.
New People’s Army Continues to Lead the Insurgency
There are a number of disparate guerilla groups opposing Filipino forces in the Eastern Visayas region. The National Democratic Front (NDF) acts as an umbrella organization under which many of the smaller communist rebel groups operate. Most groups are fundamentally Maoist, subscribing to continuous guerilla warfare and mass labor in the countryside. The oldest and most notorious group, however, remains the New People’s Army (NPA).
The New People’s Army has been fighting for a communist state in Philippines since 1968, resulting in the deaths of more than 40,000 lives. The Philippines Information Authority, a government-sponsored information bureau, claims that the group’s membership and influence have been significantly reduced since President Arroyo ordered the NPA’s destruction by the time she left office. However, we believe the NPA terrorist group, though down, is not necessarily out.
• At its peak in the 1980s, the NPA had an armed strength of 25,000 men; today that number is closer to 5,000. While the numbers are significantly lower today, we note that the fundamental reasons for the insurgency – lack of economic development and opportunity in the region – remains essentially the same as it has in the Eastern Visayas for the past forty years.
For the time being, we expect AFP efforts to target NPA members, as well as suspected members, to have a two-fold effect: NPA strength will continue to wane as fighters are killed and arrested; the second, is that AFP tactics, often deemed brutal and arbitrary, will correspondingly raise the group’s ability to increase membership in the long-term.
Amnesty Program Shows Few Signs of Success
On September 5, 2007, President Arroyo signed Amnesty Proclamation 1377 directed towards members of the Communist Party of the Philippines. The goal of the program was an attempt to reduce membership in various armed-factions of the NDF, namely the NPA.
Since the president issued the degree, sporadic reports of rebels accepting the conditions of the program surfaced.
• On June 18, the Philippine Information Authority reported that a high-ranking official of the New People’s Army surrendered to the Cordillera Police Intelligence Group in Abra – located in the northern Philippines above Manila.
Apart from the alleged surrender in Abra, we have witnessed few credible surrenders in the Eastern Visayas region since President Arroyo issued the decree. While we note that many low level surrenders may not have been publicly reported, we believe it more likely that the amnesty agreement was written in a way that most rebels found unappealing.
In the near-term, we expect Arroyo to continue to permit AFP soldiers to carryout operations in the region to kill or apprehend suspected NPA members. The campaign will likely be successful due to the free hand Arroyo has given her commanders in the area. Over the long-term, however, without a greater effort to address worsening economic conditions in the area, we expect the NPA to wage a sustained guerilla campaign against AFP forces with modest success.
