“Our people are oppressed”. This is an impact statement habitually used by communist and secessionist fronts to tell the world that they are forced to launch armed struggles to redeem their people from oppressions.
There are rebels and there are rebels. Not a few of those who have waged a so-called armed rebellion are in fact incorrigible radicals who cannot live in peace for in peace they cannot rob and extort and they lose their enchantment of leadership and power.
The reign of oppressive regime is long gone. What remains are vestiges of domineering leaders who want to preserve and create fiefdoms to sustain their existence even as age is catching up on them and their causes have become utterly irrelevant. New Peoples Army Chieftain Jose Maria Sison and his allies have mastered the art of persuasion using “oppression and persecution” as the main focus of their party line. Most recently, an aging Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) commander used the same line to spring himself back to the limelight. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) of course is not wanting in discourse to win adherence to its cause promising independence with a guarantee of an ideal, almost utopian, life.
While we have misgivings about the present dispensation there is a legitimate apparatus to settle grievance and disputes. Whatever are its defects, the system allows for an overhaul, not by belligerence, terrorism and the barrel of the gun but through a legal process.
In a fiefdom, like those clans in Central Mindanao, the subjects are at the mercy of the ruling warlords. The brutal massacre in Maguindanao have revealed to us how the warlords control their subjects to the point where those who are allowed to bear arms have become virtual human automatons bereft of any spiritual sense and values. The rest of the members are silenced to obeisance to demigods that the rulers have become. This exemplifies the “oppression” that the MNLF and the MILF complain of and we see this multiplied, maybe with a lesser degree of viciousness but just the same is pervasive in the region where autonomy and independence are demanded by the armed fronts.
The communist fronts are no different from the secessionists. The din of their street demonstrations and protests have not departed from the banal theme of oppression and repression coupled with the usual sloganeering. The government leaned back to hear and listen and decreed to decriminalized communism. So that they can participate in the legal process people voted their representatives to the legislative body where they can legitimately bring their issues and grievances to an open and free deliberative body. The expectation was that the communists will lay down their arms. They did not. The NPAs have more arms today than when their fronts were in hiding as they do. Maybe it was a mistake to decriminalize communism after all for it is not farfetched that part of the countryside development fund must have been diverted to fund arsenals of insurgents.
The Islamic fundamentalist Al Qaeda and its notorious clones and disciples like Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf are using the same refrain in addition to the condemnation of “unbelievers” and yet every act of brutality that they do are patently un-Islamic.
Hearing propaganda catchwords can tire the mind. We are living in an era where we see beyond the curtain of silence. When voices are muffled in Central Mindanao and those who dwell in the hinterlands of Surigao, Compostela Valley and Davao del Sur are harassed to acquiescence then there is indeed oppression.
Beyond the catchword “oppression” lies the ugly truth of repression and murder.