Catanduanes Forum

By Juan Mercado / September 12, 2006
Gold Star Daily
http://gsd9000.tripod.com/id9.html

FRAMED by bamboo crosses and tagged with numbers, the 67 skulls mouldered in the dappled sunlight. The British Broadcasting Corp. TV camera focused on the young priest who sprinkled holy water at the skeletal remains. The camera then panned faces of weeping women who identified half-rotten clothes, recovered from the mass grave, as belonging to relatives.

These were not the killing fields of Choeung Ek, 14.5 kilometers from Phnom Penh. That was where most of 1.7 million Cambodians were executed by paranoid Khmer Rouge.

This grisly scene played out in a Southern Leyte jungle, BBC’s Sarah Tom reported. Forensic experts pointed to cracked skulls, broken ribs, tied hands: grisly evidence of torture and violent deaths.

"Villager Domingo Eras recognized remains of his brother, abducted by the rebels, by his clothes," Associated Press reported. A woman identified clothes worn by three cousins when they disappeared..

The Leyte graves could "hold remains of up to 300 people killed by communists in the 1980s purge of suspected spies," Lt. Col. Bartolome Bacarros said. The Armed Forces spokesman referred to pogroms, including: "Kadena de Amor" in the Quezon-Bicol zone ( 1982), "Operations Missing Link" in Southern Tagalog (1988), "Kampanyang Ahos" in Mindanao (1985-86), "Olympia" in Metro Manila (1998-99).

How many were ‘‘salvaged’’ in the paranoia over military infiltrators? CPP chair Rodolfo Salas admitted to 1,800 executions in a 2003 Inquirer interview. UP professor Walden Bello claims 700 were executed in purges that netted five agents. No one knows for sure.

In his book "To Suffer Thy Comrades: How the Revolution Decimated It’s Own," former UP student Robert Francis Garcia gives chilling eye-witness accounts. "The pen-pen, a popular folk jingle for kids, was adopted by executioners as a grotesquely playful method for choosing the next candidate for the grave, a la ennie-meenie-minoy-moe."

Weakened by the mass murderers, the CCP ultimately halted the bloodbath. Nontheless, CPP clamped on a post-1993 assassination policy. It targeted former communists who left the movement to silence others.

The first "death condemnations" were for "principal traitors." Assassinated were: Romulo Kintanar, Felimon "Popoy" Lagman and Arturo Tabara. "It is sometimes necessary to kill the chicken to scare the monkey," was Jose Maria Sison’s explanation for Kinatanar’s murder, Pierre Rousset writes in: "The Post 1992 CPP Assassination Policy."

Filipino communists have tried to squelch any discussion of the bloodbaths. "Why remember the CCP purges?" complained the party’s media liaison officer Anne Buenaventura in an full-page Inquirer opinion page article. The party ‘‘carried out comprehensive measures to rectify errors"––from expulsion of members to "self-criticism."

But like Pol Pot’s gang, executioners here have gone scot free. Some hold executive positions in button-down Makati offices. "Name all the victims and pinpoint their graves, so they can be given decent burials," say the survivors, their relatives and human rights advocates, grouped under Path (Peace Advocates for Truth, Justice and Healing).

"These individuals had names, faces and lives," PATH said. "Locating the graves and informing the families are the two most immediate tasks that that CCP-NPA should commit to... A full disclosure of what happened is called for, not just pieces of information that the (party) feels politically expedient to release at the moment."

Opening of three mass graves in Poland’s Katyn Forests revealed the murder of 21,857 reserve officers and civilians.. Exhumation of Leyte mass graves can perform a similar service, if followed up by pinpointing––and excavating––other "killing fields." Their opening may indicate how many were cut down in the "name of dictatorship of the proletariat." And truth is the only basis for closure.

AFP’s Major Felix Mangayo, meanwhile, says charges will be leveled against CPP commissars "including one alleged former leader who is now a lawmaker." Opposition Rep. Satur Ocampo has denied involvement. So has Jose Maria Sison from his Netherlands sanctuary. From the sidelines, Gabriela’s Liza Maza, AnakPawis’ Rafael Mariano, Bayan’s Teddy Casino and Crispin Beltran hold the basin for the collective hand-washing.

Their multiple fronts sneer that the army opened the Leyte graves "to bolster police claims that communist guerrillas were behind numerous recent killings of left-wing activists."

Maybe so. Let’s see if the Melo Commission can ferret out the truth of ‘‘salvaging’’ of journalists and left-wing activists. But those Leyte skeletons and desaparecidos also argue for equal scrutiny for Khmer Rouge style pogroms of the CPP. No double standards here.

"Despite years of neglect and silence, this issue is far from closed, contrary to what the CPP claims," Path officials Robert Francis Garcia, Lan Mercado and Daisy Valerio write: "The crimes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot continue to haunt them so many decades after... Filipinos should take this lesson to heart, and should never stop remembering. And reminding."

"Filipino communists refuse to consider the obvious. Have they... condemned themselves to the rubbish bin of history?" asked an Inquirer editorial titled: "The Cannibal Revolution."

So after over (37) "years of trying to overthrow the government, what does the New People’s Army have to show for it?"
What our Reds can show will be found in all those grisly secrets held within other sealed mass graves.

They should, therefore, be pinpointed and opened, with little loss of time––despite the predictable knee-jerk objections from JoMa, Satur, Teddy, Liza and Crispin and Co.