Unfriendly fire

The other Saturday, I attended an event in honor of the victims – numbering some 2,000 at last count – of the internal purges conducted by the CPP-NPA during the lost decade of the Eighties, in various parts of Southern Luzon and Mindanao.

The commemoration was held on the grassy knoll in front of the faculty center at the UP Diliman campus – an apt choice of site, not only because of the UP-centric history of the student Left, but also because it is such a preternaturally green and peaceful part of the campus.

The participants had lighted large bamboo torches around the perimeter, within which a few hundred people gathered to listen to poems and songs and other oral testimonials to the lives and deaths of all those young men and women who had been so ill-used by their comrades.

The high point of the evening came with what I took to be a native ceremony invoking divine blessings upon the assembly. With the mournful strains of native flute and drums, we raised our arms in turn to each of the four corners of the sky, stamping our right feet in rhythm on the ground, as a young girl called upon Bathala to protect these islands and its people.

A small stone marker was ceremoniously unveiled while 2,000 candles, one for each of the victims, were lit under a giant acacia tree nearby. I thought irreverently about how the university’s fire marshal might object to this display – fortunately for us, the UP president himself graced the occasion and could probably guarantee our good behavior.

* * *

I left midway through the evening, thus missing what must have been some pretty poignant, not to mention hair-raising, testimonials from survivors as well as relatives of the victims. But I probably didn’t miss much at that, having already heard my fill of similar accounts from old friends and former comrades ever since I returned to Manila and caught up with all the history that passed me by.

I’ve heard about the victims of the killing fields whose last dying request to their executioners was that their families not be told at whose hands they had met their fate. Apparently the knowledge of such a betrayal, committed by men and women who must have been adopted by those families as if they were their own, was something the victims could not bear to burden their families with.

I’ve heard about Danny, the urban warrior from Caloocan and allegedly one of the Plaza Miranda bombers, who faced his executioners after a kangaroo trial still defiantly shouting, "Long live the New People’s Army!" And about Beth, the wisp of a girl from UP, who volunteered to put the final bullet in Danny’s head as proof of her revolutionary ardor.

And I’ve heard about a nameless NPA fighter from Laguna who was ordered to shoot his own father and brother for the usual "crimes against the people." After complying with the order, it seems that the man spent the rest of his life looking for the mercy of his own death – killing indiscriminately, hiring himself out to local politicians, until he himself was finally gunned down in another anonymous, unreported incident of rural violence.

* * *

The facts of the killing fields are no longer denied by the organizations complicit, except that their confession is invariably accompanied by apologia that these incidents were simply "grave errors" that have already been "rectified." One wonders though why the perpetrators – not just those who pulled the trigger, but the higher-ups who gave the orders – are still going their merry way, not only in-country but also in the more comfortable precincts of the Netherlands and Germany.

More recently, there are also exasperated admonitions, courtesy of Ka Roger, for former comrades to "get over it," as if the whole thing were some minor misunderstanding that ought to be set aside in the interest of greater causes. In principle this might be an acceptable argument, except that the scale of the "errors" goes well beyond any reasonable construction of what is simply minor.

Look at the body count, for example. Over, say, the 20-year period from 1972 (when martial law was declared) to 1992 (the end of the Cory regime), the total of 2,000 (so far) killing field victims averages to about one hundred a year. I daresay that this number would exceed the rate of battlefield casualties of the armed Left over the same period, certainly as those casualties might be accounted and reported by the Left itself.

In other words, the CPP/NPA may have ended up killing more of its own children than it ever lost to its enemy. This is clearly not a "minor error." Yet even those numbers beg for still another perspective.

If you compare a couple of thousand victims to the tens of millions killed by Stalin (when he wiped out the small-landholder class in Russia) or by Mao (during his disastrous "Great Leap Forward" in China) – or even to the "mere" millions who perished in the original killing fields of Cambodia – then, by comparison, the local numbers are just small potatoes.

* * *

Which brings me to the true barbarity of the crimes newly memorialized on that grassy knoll in Diliman. It is not just a question of scale (it never is), but at its heart an issue of the essential amorality of its accomplices.

During that Saturday evening commemoration, a very old and dear friend of mine from high school (someone who had lost her NPA husband in battle, had repeatedly been jailed, and to this day still works with cause-oriented groups) remonstrated that the truth-telling and healing process could never be completed without a full accounting of the Plaza Miranda bombing.

I reminded her that the alleged complicity of the armed Left in that incident made perfect revolutionary sense, since it directly created the polarized political landscape within which the NPA grew and flourished for years after. If Lenin were still around, he would have been proud.

To which my friend reacted with genuine horror – "Of course not! Lenin couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t have endorsed such a decision!" It was an assertion almost of religious faith.

Alas and alack, indeed. The man’s own writings are there for the reading and verification. It is the legacy of both his words and deeds that bind together so much of the 20th century with the same bloody threads, from Stalin through Mao to the Khmer Rouge and now their Filipino brethren.

Like the Russian and Chinese and Cambodian parties, Filipino communists belong to a Leninist party. They make no bones about this; it is their great source of pride and joy. And as Leninists, it is their article of faith that "errors" like the killing fields are made to be committed, then rectified, then buried in the past – because History cannot tarry, it is impatient to be created, it will leave everything else behind.

The two thousand victims of our own, homegrown killing fields deserve to be remembered, of course. At least in our memories, they may still live on. And yet if their deaths lead to nothing more than a "rectification" process, with no deeper questioning of the amoral circumstances under which they lived as well as died – then I’m afraid that they will end up being just as ill-used by those who would honor them, as by those who killed them.

* * *

On a much lighter note, I would like to close with an open invitation to everyone – but most especially to all alumni of UP High, UP Prep, and UP Elementary Schools – to attend a concert by the popular retro band Spirit of ’67 this Friday evening, June 6, at the Bahay ng Alumni, UP Diliman, at 7:30 p.m.

This event is sponsored by my batchmates of UP High ’68 as a kickoff event for the comprehensive alumni giving-back program dubbed "Handog sa UPIS," about which I wrote in this space some weeks back. Tickets are P500 each and will be available at the gate. For advance orders you can call me at the office, 449-2353.