Rebels Reach Gateway to City : Violence of War Spreads Into Manila’s Backyard

The bloody Communist insurgency came to Manila’s backyard last week, and for the 8 million people in the nation’s capital, a civil war long confined to the nation’s remote provinces began to hit home.

But for four young men whose mutilated corpses lay in the St. Mathews Funeral Home, just an hour’s drive from downtown Manila, the war was over.

All four were tortured and killed by government soldiers in an all-out military counteroffensive launched last week in a suburban province where war had been virtually unknown. The killings came just two days after Philippine President Corazon Aquino announced to the nation that she had told her military commanders to use “all the force at our disposal” to retaliate against Communist rebel attacks.

Aquino further toughened her stand on Sunday, declaring that she is ready to lead the country into war. Both of her statements were announcements of her government’s increasing impatience with the four-month negotiations attempting to achieve a nationwide cease-fire.

As Aquino’s rhetoric hardened against the rebels, so did the military’s strategy. Commanders launched limited offensives in key regions of the country--one of them Bulacan, a backyard province of Manila. And, as the prospect of peace faded in the capital, the killings and counteroffensive nearby assumed a more frightening reality for many Filipinos.

The new strategy took on a human dimension at the St. Mathews Funeral Home here in Bulacan’s bustling provincial capital, which is as near to Manila as San Bernardino is to downtown Los Angeles. The military commanders who ordered the killings of the four men did not even know their victims’ names.

The young men laid out on the stark, concrete floor were allegedly members of a Communist New People’s Army unit of 40 heavily armed regulars that had attacked a police station and killed a patrolman in the nearby town of Calumpit on Nov. 9, according to the provincial military commander, Col. Leandro Mendoza.

Mendoza said the four men were killed while trying to escape. He did not explain, however, why the throat of one was slashed and his shoulder chopped open; why the face of another was disfigured and his mouth bashed in, or why a third had a crushed skull.

Rights Inquiry Made

The signs of torture on the four victims in Malolos, discovered by a visiting Times reporter, are now just one part of a nationwide investigation by Aquino’s Presidential Commission on Human Rights, which fears that the mandate Aquino gave her military last week may be perverted by the armed forces into an all-out terror campaign against the Communist rebels and their civilian sympathizers.

Throughout the week, Manila received a flood of reports of military rocketings and strafings of villages in isolated pockets across the nation.

Witnesses said a peasant organizer was slain by the military south of Manila. More than 800 families on the southern island of Mindanao said they were forcibly evacuated when government helicopter gunships began randomly strafing their villages. A religious group in the southern city of Zamboanga declared that several nearby villages were “indiscriminately shelled” by military howitzers. More than 60 civilians were killed, the group said.

A Roman Catholic Church-based human rights group announced at a Manila news conference Tuesday that 238 people have been tortured by the military since Aquino took power last February, and a spokesman for the Task Force Detainees said the incidents appeared to be increasing dramatically in recent weeks.

Referring to Aquino’s hard-line defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, the group’s spokeswoman, Sister Roberta Ilumin, added, “We could relate this in terms of Minister Enrile’s counterinsurgency program.”

The government and military leaders have flatly denied the allegations.

Ramos Accuses Rebels

In a speech in Manila last week, the armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, a professional soldier and West Point graduate, instead accused the New People’s Army of “unprecedented militarization.”

The charge of human rights violations on the part of the Philippine military--leveled almost daily during the 20-year authoritarian rule of President Ferdinand E. Marcos, whom Aquino and her supporters unseated in February--”is, of course, largely the work of anti-government forces,” Ramos said. Ramos said the Communists have “stepped up their propaganda campaign against the men in uniform under the new democratic atmosphere” that Aquino has engendered.

“If there is any militarization being done in this country, it is being done by the Communist Party of the Philippines, its military arm, the New People’s Army, and its propaganda arm, the National Democratic Front,” he said.

Ramos then cited statistics. The rebels, he said, had just 2,400 high-powered firearms in 1982. Now, he said, they have 12,000. While the number of daily casualties in the war is down from 14 a day to eight or nine, the military targets are higher in rank and the civilian casualties greater in number. And the rebels, he said, have attacked 17 town halls and seven police stations since Aquino took office.

‘Lack of Sincerity’

“We can only attribute this to the Communist Party’s lack of sincerity as the government extends to them the hand of reconciliation,” concluded the general, who specialized in psychological warfare for the American troops in Vietnam after graduating from “psy war” training at Ft. Bragg, N.C., in 1960.

Whoever is at fault--Ramos’ military or the militarized left--it has become clear that Aquino’s often-quoted “path of peace” may well have led to a dead end. And in Malolos, at least, it was clear last week that that path had reached its end.

Brig. Gen. Eugenio Ocampo, the government’s commander for the region north of Manila, conceded that much of the new war in Bulacan province is psychological in design.

“It is strategically important because it is the gateway to Manila,” Ocampo said in an interview the day the four suspected guerrillas were killed. “The rebels are attacking here now because they want to show the people they can cross into Manila anytime they want.

“We are going to wallop them right here,” he said, “and make it known to them, and to all the people who live here, that they are not going to cross into Metro Manila.”

Other senior military sources said they believe that Bulacan province is strategic for another reason. It has rivers and rich fish ponds, and the rebels see it as an area from which to extort capital to finance their war, the sources said.

Under Ramos’ Orders

Whatever the motives, Ocampo--who said he launched his offensive under direct orders from Ramos--said he considers his role crucial in what he called the Aquino government’s efforts to “follow the concept of a just war.”

“It’s simple, really. First you must exhaust all means of peace. Only when you exhaust all those means, then you start your war.”

In the case of Bulacan province, though, those distinctions are not so clear-cut.

Ramos said in an interview that he launched the counteroffensive in Bulacan solely because the rebels had attacked the Calumpit town hall, which Ramos emphasized was “a civilian target.” Actually, the target of the attack was not the town hall but a military police station across the street. The town hall was unscathed.

Several leftists interviewed about the attack said it did not fit the pattern of a standard New People’s Army raid, in which the attacking force first sends in an unarmed patrol to locate the armory and policemen and then follows through with the attacking force.

In Calumpit, the attackers fired about 50 rounds of M-16 bullets into the windows of the station, uncharacteristically wasting valuable ammunition. They killed one of the two policemen who were inside that night but left without ever entering the building, despite the fact that military reinforcements did not reach the town for more than an hour after the attack.

No Bullet Wounds

Finally, provincial commander Mendoza said the four suspected rebels picked up by his men had been killed in a 30-minute skirmish. Yet none of the victims bore gunshot wounds as they lay in the funeral home, and all showed signs of torture.

Mendoza conceded in an interview that he is already under investigation by the presidential human rights commission for allegedly killing civilians and later claiming that they were rebels. He denied the charge--”civilians by day, rebels some other time,” he said. But the colonel added: “I don’t care about that right now. We have a war on our hands, and we have to keep that war from crossing into Manila.”

Asked about human rights violations by military commanders in his region, Ocampo said flatly, “In Bulacan, we do not care about them,” adding only that “Gen. Ramos emphasized the fact that there is no cease-fire now.”

Ocampo then explained that there are differences in the political and military approaches of the commanders within the Philippine armed forces now.

“If you analyze this in the spectrum of the armed forces, some of the commanders are to the right,” Ocampo said. “If you take Adolf Hitler as the right, these men are somewhere to the right of Hitler.

“As for me, I would say I am somewhat left of center.”

One officer in Bulacan province who has an even clearer definition of his role in the offensive is 2nd Lt. Richard Albano. He is the new station commander installed in Calumpit to protect the town after the rebel attack.

Albano said his men patrol the town every night and generally mix with the local residents.

“My mission here is not to counterattack,” said the young officer, who has seen 14 of his 215 classmates from the Philippine military academy class of ’84 killed in combat. “My mission here is to regain the confidence of the people.

“I am not here as a soldier. I am here as a politician.”