Widening war

I have always suspected that Gregorio "Ka Roger" Rosal was constantly high on something. But that might merely be the opiate effects of a completely bankrupt ideology.

Each time he manages to get himself interviewed, Ka Roger says something totally hilarious. He alternately threatens everybody in sight with liquidation by NPA death squads and goes into a frenzy about the omnipotence of his half-starved guerrilla units.

Everything about Ka Roger is expressively theatrical.

He is meticulous about that. For television interviews, he sets himself up with the bright red communist flag and thick foliage behind him. He strikes a Che Guevarra pose sans the lush moustache and then, invariably, proceeds to desecrate the martyr’s memory by muttering something absurd in his funny squeaky voice.

Military intelligence, however, assures us that the NPA spokesman is never exposed to the elements. He is almost always in the comfort of some well-appointed safehouse.

When laptops became fashionable, Ka Roger made sure he had one as a prop. One wonders what he does with that machine. In a jungle setting, that laptop could not possibly be networked. In all likelihood he underutilizes that machine by playing solitaire on it.

That prop notwithstanding, he lacked Abu Sabaya’s aplomb. The late unlamented bandit spokesman wore Oakley’s to cover his eyes and had a satellite phone strapped on his ammo belt. He had the bulk and the growl to be truly threatening and had this tremendous sense of irony about his own fate.

Abu Sabaya desperately wanted to be funny and entertaining. All Ka Roger could convey is his peasant’s sense of constant despair.

I am truly sorry that I once compared Ka Roger to Saddam spokesman Mohammad Sayeed al-Sahaf.

Al-Sahaf had flair, class and a robust vocabulary that Ka Roger will be too old to acquire. The Mouth of Baghdad was naturally poetic and used hyperbolic metaphors to embroider his otherwise blatant lying.

Ka Roger is drab and his vocabulary is as malnourished as he is. When he weaves lies, it is totally unexciting.

When he tried to be threatening, the effort shows. Although he never tried to be funny, his utterance somehow comes off unintentionally comical.

The last few days, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo repeatedly accused the NPA of involvement in the illegal drug trade. This is not funny at all.

We have known for years that the NPA harbored marijuana plantations. These plantations have been raided and burned many times over. But the weed grows back quickly and as quickly produces financial yields for cultivators capable of protecting their crop.

Marijuana cultivators, especially if they could nurture a crop as large as the NPA could in the inaccessible places they inhabit, have to link up with distribution networks at some point. Otherwise cultivating large quantities of the weed would be pointless.

Marijuana is bulky and cheap. I imagine the profit rate in this trade is slim. If the guys peddling this crop are after raising funds to keep a large armed movement going, they will soon stray into the manufactured drugs such as shabu where the profit rate is astounding.

If the NPA is, indeed, involved in drug dealing, this should not be surprising.

In other countries, stagnant rebellious groups have discovered that their heavily armed guerrilla fronts and clandestine urban networks could easily double up as production and distribution centers for illicit trades that could finance politically isolated movements. The economic law of comparative advantages works here.

In Colombia, the leftwing rebellious group FARC coexists profitably with the Medellin drug cartels. In Burma, armed ethnic secessionist movements are engaged in opium cultivation to support themselves financially.We saw the same thing happen in Afghanistan where warlords transformed into opium cultivators.

Over time, the lords of rebellion metamorphose into drug lords.

Rebellion and criminality often exist in symbiosis. Before the Russian revolution, Bolsheviks financed themselves by robbing banks. The best guy in this sort of operation was a man named Josef Stalin.

The CPP-NPA, too, has long been involved in criminal activities to raise finances. Communist armed units have engaged in kidnap-for-ransom and bank robbery. They regularly extort money and call the effort revolutionary taxation. The other day, a large NPA unit was intercepted in Pampanga while extorting money from fishpond owners. In order to make extortion more effective, the NPA indulges in such other parallel criminal activities as arson and murder.

Such involvement is justified by the Leninist maxim, taken from Machiavelli, that revolutionary ends justify criminal means.

There are, of course, clear moral hazards in this maxim. Soon, the profitability of illicit activities overshadows the unprofitable dimensions of revolutionary work and begins to dictate on the priorities of an ideological movement. In our case today, rebel involvement in the illicit drug trade aggravates what has already become a devastating plague on our society.

The President has launched a war against the scourge of illegal drug use. The involvement of the communist rebels in the illegal drugs trade widens the scope of this war, causing it to overlap with the earlier declared war against terror.

Today there is mounting evidence that the terrorists and the drug syndicates are melding into only one network. In which case, the Republic is really engaged in just one war.

As the evidence mounts, it will be increasingly difficult for government to entertain overtures for a resumption of peace talks. As the evidence mounts, the prospects for a peaceful settlement of an anachronistic rebellion decline.

Besides, Ka Roger, mouthpiece of the Utrecht-based gang led by Jose Ma. Sison, diminishes our own enthusiasm for peace each time he makes and appearance.

He might not be literally drugged. But he definitely speaks from a mindset that may justifiably be described as opiate of the people.