Talk-Show Personalities : Philippine Communists Take to TV to Sell Views

After 17 years in the jungle, eating off the land and waging a “people’s war” against the government, leaders of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines have hit the talk-show circuit in a campaign to sell their views on peace to the people.

Night after night, television screens in Manila have displayed the faces of Saturnino Ocampo, Antonio Zumel and Carolina Malay, the three Communist negotiators who signed a temporary cease-fire last week with the government of President Corazon Aquino. The truce goes into effect Wednesday.

On Thursday, Manilans could even pick up the phone and ask questions of the Communists. On columnist Louis Beltran’s TV program, “Straight From the Shoulder,” there were 210 calls--a record.

Many callers asked, “Do you believe in God?” And Ocampo replied, “Within the movement, there is freedom of belief.”

One asked, “If the Communists take over the government, will you rid it of corruption?”

‘Try Our Best’

“We can only try our best,” Zumel replied.

Another questioner: “My father was a police captain who was killed by the (Communist) New People’s Army. What can you say about that?”

“I don’t know the circumstances of your father’s death,” Malay said, adding softly that it is, after all, a war.

The government and the rebels are hoping that the war will come to an end, for 60 days at least, under the cease-fire agreement. It will mark the first official break in the irregular warfare, which has gone on for 17 years and claimed the lives of 16,500 Filipinos during the past six years.

The cease-fire is a political tool for both sides. And in the week leading up to it, leaders of the government and the Communists’ umbrella coalition, the National Democratic Front, have been working overtime to advance their ideas about what it means, appearing at lunches and banquets as well as on television.

‘Our Side of the Story’

So ardent has been the government’s effort to counter the rebels’ media blitz that Minister of Agriculture Ramon Mitra and auditor Teofisto Guingona, the government’s cease-fire negotiators, literally crashed Beltran’s talk show Thursday night. The two turned up, uninvited, and after listening for more than an hour, Mitra spoke up. He said they were there because they had seen the earlier shows and realized that “someone had to present our side of the story.”

For the most part, the government’s campaign has been led by Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, the armed forces chief of staff.

Ramos, looking like a professional pitchman, carried on for two hours Wednesday before a lunch crowd at the Army Navy Club. Flanked by charts and graphs, he spelled out in detail the toll that has been exacted on the nation by “the Communist terrorists.”

“We must remember,” Ramos told his audience of veterans and foreign diplomats, that the insurgents and their leaders represent “an illegal political movement.” He compared them to “a colony of white ants or termites, in that their mode of operation is usually hidden.”

“They start in the foundation,” he said, “and they eat their way up. Even though the edifice seems presentable and strong, its foundations are already gone.”

Grim Official Picture

With the aid of chart after chart, Ramos drew a grim official picture of the insurgency: a movement that has grown from 7,750 people under arms in 1982 to 23,200 at present; a Marxist-Leninist ideology that exercises influence in 18% of the country’s 41,000 villages; a civil war that takes an average of eight lives a day--the lives of more than 2,000 soldiers, rebels and innocent civilians just since Aquino took office in February.

Ramos came down hard on what is commonly called the Communist program of progressive, or revolutionary, taxation. He said this “is a regressive tax and is almost always obtained through armed aggression.”

The tax, which the rebel leaders have said is more a system of “contributions to the cause of revolution” from farmers and businessmen in areas controlled by the rebels, has raised more than $7 million this year, Ramos said.

Asked about the cease-fire, which the military approached with reluctance that has given way to skeptical willingness, Ramos said the military is sincere in “wanting to give peace a chance,” and added, “I think all of us, on whatever side, are truly looking for an enduring peace.”

He emphasized, however, that any political settlement “must not compromise the safety of the people.” He said that “our democratic and free institutions must be preserved, and it must lead quickly to economic recovery, especially for the masses.”

Like an Iceberg

Ramos likened the Communist movement to an iceberg. Only one-seventh of it shows above the surface, he said, but the other six-sevenths are the most dangerous.

In the persons of Ocampo, Zumel and Malay, a newly visible part of the iceberg has surfaced on the television screens, and many analysts are speculating on the political implications of the rebel leadership’s new high profile.

Several prominent Filipino columnists see it as a reflection of the National Democratic Front’s strategy of using the cease-fire as a security shield to permit an intensified propaganda campaign aimed at winning over people in urban centers like Manila, where their influence has been considerably less than in the provinces.

U.S. Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth told reporters Friday: “They’re trying to acquire some aura of political respectability. But whether they can do that as committed Marxist-Leninists dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government is another question. I don’t think they can.

“I just don’t think there’s a very strong reservoir of support for violent political action here. There is a great collective memory of functioning democratic institutions.”

Depends on Performance

In the end, according to Bosworth, “revolution in this country depends, above all else, on the performance of government and its ability to improve the quality of life overall in the country.”

Based on their public performance this week, Ocampo, Zumel and Malay apparently would agree that the record and future policies of the Aquino government constitute the fundamental issue in the negotiations, which are to continue while the cease-fire is in effect.

Many of the television viewers who called in expressed curiosity about the Communist Party’s programs for the country. A laborer said he wonders how the party plans to redistribute the nation’s land and wealth, a fifth of which is now in the hands of less than 2% of the people.

“We are already doing it,” Malay answered. “We are implementing a plan of agrarian revolution.”

Malay went on to say that with information campaigns on planting techniques, with practical and technical assistance and, sometimes, with pressure tactics, the movement is forcing feudal landlords to break up their holdings and is teaching peasants to become self-sufficient.

Ministry’s Program

Mitra broke in to say that “it sounds like our program in the Ministry of Agriculture.”

“Yes,” Malay shot back. “The difference is, ours is working.”

Many callers asked what seems to be in the minds of most Filipinos: Will the cease-fire endure in a nation where there are tens of thousands of firearms, scores of armed groups roaming the countryside, and lingering dissent within the military over the wisdom of the cease-fire?

Like Gen. Ramos, the Communist leaders could offer no more than their hope that it will. But they stressed that fighting men on both sides have committed themselves to the agreement.

Most of the callers exhibited a deep ignorance and mistrust of the movement that to middle- and upper-class Filipinos has been little more than a name and a growing list of casualties.

“Communists are also Filipinos, but you cannot talk to them,” one caller said.

‘Godless Atheists’

“The Communists will never take over our Catholic country,” said another. “They’re godless atheists.”

A good many of the questions focused on the three rebel leaders themselves, for this is a country where personalities often count for more than politics,

Malay, the daughter of one of Manila’s foremost political scientists, a graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris and the wife of the Communist leader Ocampo, was asked how she came to be a Communist.

“It all began in Paris” in 1968, Malay said. “There was the Vietnam War. There was all this ferment, and we were in the middle of it. . . . I realized that our country was in the same predicament.”

Ocampo, one of Manila’s top journalists until he went underground to join the Communists a decade ago, said he became a Marxist because he saw the “failure of democratic capitalism” in a country as “economically oppressed” as the Philippines.

Resists Personal Questions

As for Zumel, also a former journalist, widely known as a nationalist and a harsh critic of former President Ferdinand E. Marcos, he resisted all questions of a personal nature. He said simply, “I believe in Marxism.”

By the end of the week, it was clear that the three Communist leaders had emerged as distinct personalities, and that they are likely to continue to expound in public the movement’s ideology and plans.

It was also clear that the new role the three leaders are playing is taking its toll after years in the jungle.

Before the Beltran show began Thursday night, Malay was asked how she is holding up under the strain of nightly talk shows and daily luncheon appearances.

“Terrible,” she said. “I’m exhausted. I miss so much being out in the countryside. In a way, there’s a far deeper peace out there.”