Communists in Philippines Launch Legal Party

The founders of the political and military wings of the Communist insurgency in the Philippines formally launched a new leftist political party Saturday, six months after President Corazon Aquino freed the two leaders from prison under a blanket amnesty.

Billing their organization as an alternative to traditional Philippine politics, which have relied for decades on money, guns and private armies for power, the new party’s leaders declared on the first day of a two-day convention here that their decision to enter the legal political arena is “a continuation of our struggle in other arenas and other forms.”

The meeting, held in a posh convention center built under sponsorship of former First Lady Imelda Marcos, was opened by Jose Marie Sison, founder and former chairman of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines and chief of the new party’s preparatory committee.

The keynote address was delivered by Bernabe Buscayno, known to his followers and to the nation’s armed forces as Commander Dante, founder of the New People’s Army, the military wing of the party Sison founded.

Warning by Enrile

Thousands of civilians, soldiers and rebels have been killed in the 17 years that the Communists have been fighting the Philippine government. And in many recent speeches, Aquino’s defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, has warned that Communist leaders are trying to take advantage of moves Aquino has made to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the conflict since she took office in the wake of last February’s overthrow of President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Speaking Saturday to about 1,000 followers who had assembled for the new party’s founding congress, Buscayno said the party “should not be defensive about the red-scare tactics of fascists and reactionaries.”

He described the group, which is named Partido ng Bayan, or the People’s Party, as a new political force that “will raise the consciousness of the Filipino people . . . and organize them not only for elections but for other forms of struggle that will occur in the days to come.”

There was no mention of the word communism on the convention’s opening day. But the rhetoric used by Buscayno, held in prison for years by Marcos after military intelligence identified him as the founder of the New People’s Army, left little doubt that the party amounts to a new, legal front for the Communist Party of the Philippines, a Maoist group founded in 1968.

Buscayno declared that Partido ng Bayan will “represent the interest of the Filipino masses” and that it “will fight for” redistribution of the nation’s land, as well as “ending foreign imperialism, particularly from the United States.”

Other leftist leaders who spoke Saturday were even more radical.

“I give you a Red greeting,” declared left-wing labor leader Crispin Beltran, who went on to accuse Aquino’s new government of continuing a campaign “of terrorism and threat” against the nation’s workers.

“The remnants of the fascist dictatorship are still active,” Beltran said, adding that Enrile “is the biggest threat at present,” as well as “U.S. imperialism, which is behind the collapse of our economy.”

Even the trappings of the convention, seen by most political analysts as something of a watershed in the battle between left- and right-wing forces that has been emerging since the fall of Marcos’ 20-year regime, reflected the mood and the tone of the growing Communist movement.

The affair opened with a solitary figure on the stage blowing a water buffalo horn. The speeches were short and harsh. Singers and dancers who performed for the delegates wore plain T-shirts, blue jeans and sneakers. None of the women performers wore makeup or jewelry.

Leaders of the new party were careful, however, to stress that they are, in general, supportive of Aquino’s efforts to unify the nation and to find a peaceful settlement to the long-running Communist insurgency.

“This is a coalition of the left-of-center, and even some from the center,” said Jose Castro, a long-time leftist and a chief organizing committee official in the new party.

Has 10,000 Members

Castro said that the party is starting out with just 10,000 members, but he predicted it will have 10 times that number by the end of the year, when his party and a half dozen others that have sprung up since Marcos’ ouster will be preparing to compete in local, regional and national legislative elections.

The party, he said, will simply “plug into” three major leftist organizations that have been recruiting members in Manila and the Philippine countryside for more than a decade: the May First Movement, a labor group with 600,000 members; the National Peasants Organization, which claims 800,000 members, and the activist group Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, which claims a membership of at least 2 million and has staged dozens of sometimes-violent street protests in recent years.

Castro denied, however, that the new People’s Party is merely a legal front for the Communist Party of the Philippines.

“We are not promoting the Communist ideology, and we do not intend to put up a Communist state,” Castro said. “We simply see a need for a transition from a semi-feudal and semi-colonial state.”

Although Castro stressed that the new party’s candidates, who will be fielded in elections expected no later than next March or April, “clearly are going to be anti-imperialist,” he said it will only be after the elections that the party will decide “whether we will advocate progressive capitalism or democratic socialism.”