Aquino Frees 2 Top Communists : Rebel Ambush Sends Message: Fight Goes On

The armed rebel fighters whom Marilou Ocfamia once called “friends” arrived at 2 a.m. Monday with a bang on the door and an angry warning: “If you don’t want to die, follow us.”

They made her carry her crippled father 100 yards up a jungle trail to a ramshackle hut, where she, her father and six other families spent the next 13 hours cowering in the mud.

The rebels set up their weapons in Ocfamia’s house and another nearby, and just after daybreak more than 100 of them opened fire with rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers, killing 17 soldiers and one civilian in a 45-minute assault on a troop truck traveling along the highway below.

The ambush at Guinobatan, an impoverished, rebel-controlled town 210 miles southeast of Manila, was one of the bloodiest guerrilla attacks by the Communist New People’s Army in recent years.

First Under Aquino

What is worse, say the people of Guinobatan and towns throughout its troubled region of Bicol, it was the first rebel raid in the Philippines since President Corazon Aquino took power from Ferdinand E. Marcos and pledged to end the nation’s gnawing insurgency by offering the rebels a six-month cease-fire.

“They (the New People’s Army) were after Marcos, but Marcos was already toppled,” a shaking and confused Ocfamia, the wife of a mechanic, said Wednesday. “That is what they wanted, and that is what we wanted. But the killing goes on.

“All I can say now is when we saw the military men lying dead this time, we grieved for them, because they were doing nothing against us. What can be the meaning of something like this?”

There was a meaning in the ambush, which came just two days before Aquino released from prison the two top leaders of the Communist Party and its military wing.

A Brutal Message

According to military commanders and sources close to the rebels, the attack at Guinobatan was a clear and brutal message both to the nation’s new president and to the rebels’ own rank and file that their armed struggle goes on--and that it will take more than vague offers of amnesty and national reconciliation to put down an armed rebellion that has swelled to more than 15,000 fighters and grown to encompass the entire nation.

Aquino’s press spokesman, Rene Saguisag, said Wednesday that the president hopes the release of Communist leaders Jose Maria Sison and Bernabe Buscayno--both jailed as murderers and subversives by Marcos--will signal the government’s intention to win the rebels over with peace offerings.

Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, who led a rebellion of Philippine military officers against Marcos and has now launched a campaign of military reforms, took a harder line, but he told reporters he will follow Aquino’s orders in seeking a solution to Asia’s only growing Communist threat.

Both views, though, fell short of the reality of Guinobatan this week.

“It seems to us, the New People’s Army struck Monday to drive the armed forces in this region to a point of desperation--so we will retaliate, and they can say to their people, ‘Look, the military are on the rampage again,’ ” said the regional military commander, Col. Edgardo Abenina, in the provincial capital of Legaspi City.

Keep Recruits in Line

“That would tend to keep their rank and file--the recently recruited rebels we know are now considering responding to the amnesty offer--in line. They would just think this military and this government are no better than the last ones.”

Even representatives of the region’s Roman Catholic Church, which campaigned hard against Marcos and spent thousands of hours documenting the abuses of his soldiers and paramilitary forces through the years, agreed that Monday’s attack was a clear message from the insurgents that they have no intention of laying down their arms and surrendering en masse.

“It is clear now that the hard-core rebels will never come over,” said Father Rene Realuyo, the young parish priest of Guinobatan who concedes he has had close contact with the rebels in the past. “They have to show the new recruits that they must continue the struggle.”

But as the coffins of the ambush’s military victims lay side-by-side in a military chapel this week, it was clear throughout the region that the attack was beginning to backfire on the rebels.

Local People Puzzled

Poor farmers, the traditional backbone of support for the Communist insurgents, were left horrified and puzzled. Popular radio announcers, who once were sympathetic to the New People’s Army’s stated cause of bringing justice and an equal share of the nation’s wealth to the people, were suddenly calling the rebels terrorists.

And the region’s military command, already reorganized by the Philippine military chief, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, to punish abusive and corrupt officers, quickly sought to capitalize on the mood simply by doing nothing.

“Because of the coup d’etat, the military has a new face now,” Realuyo said Wednesday as he sat in his 400-year-old church a few miles from the ambush site. “The people are now beginning to respect the military as their defenders.

“So now the people are angry and they feel pity for these dead soldiers. We have a new government. We have to cooperate. Marcos is out of the country already. And this time, the rebels hit a civilian in the crossfire.

“This is definitely a setback in their psychological battle for the hearts of the people. And it is obvious now that what they really want is to take power for themselves.”

That from a priest whom the military once suspected of being a Communist, a man who once watched from the altar as a soldier was shot and killed during his own wedding by a rebel assassin.

Rebels Popular in Area

If the New People’s Army won the hearts and minds of any Filipinos during its decade and a half of armed struggle, it was the people of Guinobatan and the surrounding Bicol region.

No one has accurate estimates of the relative strength of the insurgents in specific regions. But, in Bicol, a mountainous area of six populous provinces on the southern tail of Manila’s Luzon Island, the events of the past several months speak for themselves.

Last November, the regional chief of military intelligence, Col. Andres Busmante, was shot and killed in broad daylight near his home by a 13-year-old boy who volunteered his services to the Communists, local priests said.

Two months ago, rebels took over the town hall in Camalig, the town adjacent to Guinobatan. As hundreds of residents watched approvingly, the rebels disarmed the soldiers in the town hall, tipped their berets to the crowd and left without firing a shot.

Monday’s ambush was proof of the rebels’ strength. They managed to mobilize 100 combatants and stake out a major national highway for more than seven hours before they struck--although, as Ocfamia and other residents said, this time they used force to evacuate nearby homes.

Despite the ambush, the rebels have significant support in the region; the negative reaction to the raid may be only temporary.

Bert Listana, a lawyer in Legaspi City and local leader of the leftist organization Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, said it will take more than a change in government and a call for a cease-fire and reconciliation to eliminate the fundamental recruiting tools of the Philippine Communists.

Other Issues Remain

Marcos, long considered the Communists’ best recruiter, is gone, but a host of other issues remain--among them, the government’s heavy reliance on the United States and an economy that leaves the poor even poorer every year.

“I believe that the U.S. government is still interfering in our political, cultural and social affairs--perhaps even more so now than under Marcos,” Listana said. “And, when you look at (Aquino’s) Cabinet, the majority of the members came from the upper middle-class. Her government is definitely bourgeois.

“You do not see any farmers or laborers in Aquino’s government.”

Listana has a strong personal motive for his opposition to the government. His brother, Clemente, was one of the many suspected Communist sympathizers kidnaped and believed killed seven years ago by members of Marcos’ armed forces. Even after Ramos’ recent military reorganization, Listana said, the officer he suspects of killing his brother still holds a senior position at regional headquarters.

“There are still many members of the armed forces of the Philippines who should be prosecuted before there is any attempt to reconcile with the rebels.”

But the efforts have begun nonetheless, even on the local level.

‘Give Aquino a Chance’

During a victory Mass on Saturday--two days before the ambush--Father Honesto Moraleda, a longtime opponent of Marcos and his armed forces, joined hands with the military commander, Col. Edgardo Abenina, in calling for peace.

“Why not give Aquino a chance,” Moraleda told the thousands who gathered in his home town of Daraga. “Let it go some time.”

He appealed to the insurgents to heed Aquino’s call to lay down their weapons in exchange for amnesty.

After Monday’s raid, though, the priest was asked whether a mass surrender is likely. “I doubt it,” he said. “They have already stated this on the highway at Guinobatan.”

Col. Abenina, too, has made an indirect pitch to the Communist rebels through appearances in the past few days before university student councils and clergymen throughout the region.

“I keep telling them we shall welcome anyone who wants to surrender, and I will not touch a hair on their head,” Abenina said Wednesday. “But, at the same time, I tell them, never use that venue as a trap to kill me, because that will be treacherous.”

Abenina added that he has no intention of retaliating against the rebels for the ambush. Instead, he is looking for avenues to contact their leaders and discuss reconciliation.

Radio Show Query

Among those channels is Ariel Ayque, the region’s most popular radio commentator. Ayque, who does a nightly call-in show in Legaspi City, asked his listeners recently how the rebels are reacting to Aquino’s call for a cease-fire and amnesty.

Last Saturday, he got his answer, a typewritten letter from the “regional command of the New People’s Army” that vowed: “We will continue our struggle because the new government is unjust.”

Ayque read the letter over the air at 6:30 a.m. Monday. Three hours later, the rebels ambushed the troop truck.

“There is no question these were the hard-core insurgents,” Ayque said, adding that he and other announcers are now calling the rebels “terrorists” on the air because it is they who are taking the initiative in the fighting. “This has turned some of the masses against them, but the massacre has also left some people accusing Cory (Aquino) of not having articulated a specific plan to combat the insurgency.”

Seen Forcing a Stand

Col. Abenina, too, issued a thinly veiled criticism of the new president Wednesday.

“I believe the rebels were also using this raid to try to force the government to issue an official proclamation on their stand on the New People’s Army,” Abenina said. “And for me, as a commander in the field, I need that myself right now.”

Whatever the formal proclamation, though, the commander, who has a reputation among the region’s residents as an honest reformer, said it will take time to end the insurgency.

“The Communist movement will never end in the Philippines because there will always be the hard-core elements at the top,” he said. “Maybe, though, we can bring it into a nonviolent format. But, to do that, the government will have to give them at least an inch--probably a lot more.”

Whether or not Aquino finds that balanced solution no longer matters to Expedito Tolod. The 32-year-old military policeman was among Monday’s ambush victims.

His brother, Rene, was about to lift the coffin onto a military plane that would carry Expedito Tolod to his home province Wednesday afternoon when he turned and said: “Mrs. Aquino is talking about a cease-fire, and something like this happens. Well, she can talk all she likes, but this is the reality.”