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.

Impostor

By: Alex Magno
The Philippine Star
September 11, 2007

Unlike the National Security Adviser, I cannot say I am “excited” by the arrest and detention of Jose Ma. Sison in the Netherlands. This is an old, sick man has ceased to resonate with his time.

His megalomania might be incurable. But he is more pathetic than despicable.
He imagines himself coming home a returning hero; is the next President of the Republic; is, by his own enumeration, Reynato Puno, Loren Legarda or Jamby Madrigal. That can only be the musing of a cardiac patient totally alienated from the dynamics of politics in his homeland.

I suspect that if he ever musters the common courage to return home, it will be as a disgraced ex-convict rejected by his generation, hated by the victims of his cruel political enterprise and laughable to a new generation of Filipinos nurtured in a more cosmopolitan mentality.

But what really gets my goat is the manner his local flunkeys- like Teddy Casiño of Bayan Muna –so self- consciously refer to him as “Professor Sison”. And they commit that fraud with such theatrical veneration.

The honorific “professor” is sacred to full-time academics like I am. One works hard to earn that title, mastering a field of expertise and impressing one’s peers.

By addressing Sison “professor”, Casino and his ilk are not humoring the deluded old man desperately wants to be called “professor”- because it reinforces his self- appointed role as the ultimate bearer of wisdom for the revolution he still imagines to be forthcoming.
Casino and his ilk are humoring us. He wants us to subscribe to Sison’s delusional self-image, to buy into his atrocious vanity and to be part of his megalomania.

For the record, Sison is not a professor. He did serve, for a brief period, as an instructor of English literature at the UP decades ago. For that short stint, he has nothing to show in terms of academic production. He is not considered an authority in English literature, much less an important contributor to Filipino literature in the English language.

When he was already a fugitive from the law, his ideological sympathizers did put out a slim volume of mediocre poetry Sison supposedly wrote. That, apart from a few polemical essays, is the only thing he has published under his own name.

Those were, as I remember them, poems of self-promotion-something no true poet does. He guises himself as a warrior who writes poetry, as a poet who bravely conducts war.

That guise has no relationship to reality. There is no memory of him ever carrying a gun, slithering through the jungle and engaging in a real skirmish. His whole life he was huddled in secret meetings speaking ill of other people and decimating his rivals to maintain control of a political movement he always treated as his property, as an extension of his grandiose estimation of his place in our nation’s unfolding history.

That bizarre self-image is reflected in the aliases he chose for himself.

In the early sixties, he plagiarized the work of an Indonesian Maoist who, in turn, simplistically applied Mao’s elementary analysis of Chinese society to explain Indonesian society. By simply changing names and places, he put out Philippine Society and Revolution under penname “Amado Guerrero” (Beloved Warrior).

That truly lame-brained analysis of Philippine society was imposed on young militants who did not know any better as some sort of gospel truth that is beyond question. When that analysis was subsequently questioned by many bright minds in a movement that had, by the eighties, gained some ideological and political sophistication, Sison ordered a “reaffirmation” campaign. That meant, “reaffirming” the simplistic analysis he had offered two decades earlier.

The “reaffirmation” campaign produced a gory purge within the Philippine communist movement. In that purge, thousands of party cadres and brave guerillas were tortured and killed by their own comrades from the late eighties to the early nineties. To this day, the authorities are still discovering one mass grave after another containing the skeletal remains of the victims of that purge.

Long after that insane purge had subsided, Sison’s rivals for leadership of the leftist movement continued to be assassinated. Among them, senior communist leaders like Felimon Lagman (who once headed the powerful Manila- Rizal regional committee of the CPP), Arturo Tabara (who once headed the CPP’s Visayas Commission) and Romulo Kintanar (who commanded the NPA during its height, when sison was in prison).

It is for those assassinations, conducted while Sison was in self-exile in Holland, that the Dutch police is now indicting the man for conspiracy to commit murder. The complaints against Sison were filed by the widows of Tabara and Kintanar.

From the comforts of exile in Holland, Sison continued to shape the idiosyncratic orthodoxies of the local communist movement under the penname “Armando Liwanag”—which sounds like “armadong liwanag”(armed light). Shades of the Peruvian Maoist movement Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) that dissipated after its food-addicted leader was captured and forced to eat normally.

He continues to deny, with tongue obviously in cheek, that he is Armando Liwanag-mainly to maintain the thin veneer that he is merely a “consultant” to the NDF peace panel, a cowardly ploy to maintain his comfortable status as a political refugee.

There are many just reasons to call Sison an impostor. Of those, what aggravates me most is thisvain-glorious attempt to present himself as a “professor.”
Here is a quack who insists on being called “doctor”.

Betraying the Dutch treat

Over the weekend I listened intently on the radio as Luis Jalandoni, a citizen of Holland (if I remember correctly) lambasting the Dutch government for placing Jose Maria Sison a.k.a Joma Sison in solitary confinement.

In the course of the interview, Jalandoni drew a picture of how the Dutch authorities arrested Joma Sison, raided his office, threw Joma in the same prison facility that was used by Nazi soldiers as a prison for captured Dutch resistance fighters, he also made mention that it was in the same prison where Serbian President Slobodan Milosovich was imprisoned (for war crimes) and died awaiting judgment.

Jalandoni also talked of protesters in front of the prison demanding for justice for Joma and condemning the US-RP alliance behind the incarceration of Joma.

I’m sure many ignorant and gullible people would have been mesmerized by Jalandoni’s story, but not all Filipinos are ignorant and not all Journalists or Broadcasters are gullible either. Regardless of our political leanings, the truth must never be allowed to be twisted. Not even once and certainly never repeatedly just to draw sympathy or to distract from the facts.
Jalandoni’s interview on radio was very disturbing because it painted the Dutch government as an oppressive state, violating the human rights of Joma Sison, casting suspicion related to the natural death of Milosovich and suggesting that the Dutch government could be manipulated by the US-RP leadership.

To begin with let us set the record straight. Joma Sison and Jalandoni are at war against the Philippines and are proponents of Communism by way of armed struggle. Joma & Jalandoni moved the leadership of the National Democratic Front or NDF to Europe first to save their necks from a government set on letting them rot in jail and second to generate political and financial support.

To legitimize and prolong their stay in Europe, Joma sought political asylum in Holland. Jalandoni who started out as a Roman Catholic priest, shed his priestly vows and subsequently shed his Filipino citizenship and became a citizen of Holland. He is currently the alter ego of Joma Sison and long time spokesman of the NDF.
For more than 20 years, the two have benefited from the protection of the Dutch legal system. Even when the Dutch government felt that Sison was no longer in need of political asylum, his right to contest the matter was respected and he remained free from threat or harassment.

This is a reflection of how the Dutch government honors and abides by its laws, to a fault even when their “guests” turn into ingrates, they still respect their rights.

In the same breath, The Dutch government is duty bound to accept and act on any formal complaint brought to them especially against someone whose stay is no longer welcome and now accused of murder. Dutch authorities study charges and evidence seriously and don’t simply place the accused before Kangaroo courts nor do they exercise extra-judicial killings.
Now that Joma Sison is on the other side of the fence, Jalandoni must do no less than respect the Dutch legal system which respected their rights for more than 20 years.

Unfortunately for Sison and contrary to the insinuations of Jalandoni, The Dutch government has evolved certain laws to cope with international terrorists.

The law gives authorities the right to detain you for several days without having to tell you why. The NDF as we all know has been labeled by US authorities as a “Terrorist” organization. As the Americans are fond of saying: “What goes around, comes around”.

Since my wife is from Holland, I have had many opportunities to drive by, walk past the prison facility that has held many interesting guests. The place which is walking distance from my brother-in-law’s house is a very drab, unassuming place which looks more like a factory than a prison.

Dutch citizens make a joke for a short tern imprisonment because the living standards in prison are so high you could shoot a high-class version of “Big Brother” (which is originally from Holland) or ‘Bahay ni Kuya’ and people might think it’s in a condo. On my last visit, the law required that every prisoner has a bed, if not he goes home. Serious!

When Milosovich died in the same facility, it was not because of poor care. He simply died. Nothing has ever pointed to the contrary. The prison was used to detain Dutch freedom fighters, the same way Rizal memorial was used to imprisoned Filipino fighters and rape Filipinas. That’s the ugliness of war that has no bearing on Joma and the charges against him.
I have always been against the misuse and abuse of media and its facilities. Whether its Jalandoni, a politician, an actress or even a false prophet, we cannot and we should not allow any misuse and misinterpretation of facts through media.

How many times have reporters talked about a “Big” group of protesters marching here or there only for us to find out that there were no more than fifty? In Burma or in China, two or ten protesters would be a significant number, but in the Philippines that’s nothing but a group of Jaywalkers.

Unfortunately it happens because of “One Upmanships” or media bosses demanding NEWS when there is none. So the reporters turn a none-event into a flash report or a scoop. Of course it would be a scoop the scoop group was so insignificant no one noticed it.
Sadly the more experienced are so jaded that they lose sight of the fundamentals. I remember when I was a Radio host for DZMM and was hooked up with a guy called Father Luis Jalandoni launched his standard “isms” and tirade at the government
I quickly asked Jalandoni about his citizenship. I guess he realized where I was headed and dismissed the question as irrelevant. I politely pointed out that a Dutch Citizen certainly had no business interfering in a purely Philippine matter and hung up.

Once again the same “foreigner” as well as an enemy of the state has been given access to Philippine Media and allowed to attack the Dutch government which is never good for diplomacy. The matter concerns the legitimate and legal exercise of a Filipino against a Filipino and not the NDF.