Joma Sison unmasked

By Honesto General
Inquirer


JOSE MARIA SISON ORGAnized the Communist Party of the Philippines along Maoist lines.
Sison believed that, if he controlled the countryside, the cities would fall like overripe fruit, as what happened in China.

Funded by communist groups abroad, Sison organized the New People’s Army (NPA) under the command of Dante Buscayno.

Sison also organized communist cells in the cities. He later boasted that the NPA was already spread over 100 guerrilla fronts, and party membership had swelled to 2 million all over the archipelago.

Marcos jailed Sison for rebellion. But, Cory Aquino, in the worst decision of her presidency, released Sison and allowed him to go to Holland where he asked for, and was granted, political asylum.

From Holland, Sison regularly sent his opinions on what was going on in the Philippines. While the NPA struggled in the mountains, and the front organizations mounted protest rallies in city streets, Sison rambled on from the safety of his comparatively luxurious life in Holland.
Even when the Communist world had collapsed around him, Sison bragged that he had the secret formula (without giving any details) for leading the masses to paradise.

Today, except for an occasional raid on an isolated AFP outpost, or an ambush of an Army patrol, the job of the NPA is now restricted to collecting the 10 percent revolutionary tax on everything that moves and grows in the far distant barrios.
The tax is also applied on public school teachers’ salaries and sari-sari store sales. If the priest or pastor would allow it, the NPA takes a bite out of church collections.

The NPA has deteriorated into an extortionist gang preying on the poorest of the poor in the far-flung barrios.

But after all these years, the Armed Forces can go to any area that the NPA claims it controls. And none of the cities have fallen. The Maoist/Sison strategy is a complete failure in the Philippines.

The AFP estimates the NPA collects P200 million a year. This is probably an exaggeration. But the real figure still makes the Communist party the richest in the country.
Where does the money go? It surely does not stay in the barrios. There is nothing there to spend it on. The money ends up with front organizations in the cities to fund protest rallies, the media offensive, and finally, the candidacies in the party-list system.

The US and the European Community have tagged the NPA and the Communist party as terrorist organizations. As a result, the flow of money across national borders has been stanched.

The front organizations in the cities have splintered. When the communist party-list representative Satur Ocampo and four of his cohorts holed up in the House of Representatives to avoid arrest, nobody came to storm the place to liberate them. The vaunted mass base had vanished.

The arrest of Sison in Holland on two counts of murder has hardly created a ripple among Filipino communists. There was a pitifully small crowd of hard-core communists in front of the Dutch Embassy in Makati that nobody noticed. The provinces have been silent. To Sison, this silence must be deafening.

Sison has been unmasked as a leader without followers, a chief with no Indians. The local communists have sent him a clear message: You are on your own, comrade.
Sison’s biggest problem now is that he is caught in a criminal justice system that no amount of his money can buy.