Soldiers Do Holiday Shopping : Words Replace Shooting as Philippine Peace Holds

LAOANG, Philippines — The symbol of peace stood conspicuously on the bank of the Catubig River. It wasn’t a dove or an olive branch. It was a V-150 armored personnel carrier.

To the villagers of this remote river town the vehicle is a familiar sight. They have seen it rumbling through the war-torn countryside, packed with soldiers, its gun trained on fleeing Communist rebels.

But this week the vehicle stood silent at the ferry pier. Its gun was pointed skyward, and there was not a soldier in sight. Inside were the wives and children of 8th Infantry Brigade soldiers who had gone across the river to the island’s principal market. One woman brushed her hair, another fed her baby.

The soldiers, one of the women said, were shopping for Christmas.

To the villagers of Laoang, an isolated town 475 miles southeast of Manila on the embattled island of Samar, the fact that a combat vehicle was being used for Christmas shopping was a concrete sign that the 60-day truce, now 10 days old, is holding--in a place where no one thought it could.

In Manila this week, the talk was of cease-fire violations. The public was bombarded by unconfirmed newspaper, radio and television reports of violations in remote places:

--Three killed in Negros, where 30 Communist rebels shot up a bus.

--Three killed in the Bicol region, far to the south, where rebels opened fire on a crowded dance hall.

--Four marines killed by their guide, a former rebel who shot them in their sleep.

One by one, the reports were discounted. A National Cease-fire Committee set up to monitor and investigate reports of violations concluded that none was an actual breach of the cease-fire, the first truce in the 17-year-old rebellion that has taken the lives of tens of thousands of people.

Some of the incidents were dismissed as the outgrowth of personal grudges and family feuds. Some are still under investigation.

Clearly both the military and the rebels’ political arm, the National Democratic Front, are using the incidents for propaganda purposes. A war of words has replaced the shooting war.

2 Sides Trade Charges

The military issued a report Thursday charging that the National Democratic Front and the rebels’ fighting arm, the New People’s Army, are using the cease-fire to consolidate their rural and urban forces, to lobby for land reform and demilitarization and to push President Corazon Aquino into agreeing to a coalition government with the Communists.

The rebel leadership has charged that Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, the military chief of staff, and his information officers are “fabricating” cease-fire violations in order to convince the public that the rebel leaders are insincere, that they cannot control their people and that they are guilty of the same sort of brutality they have long attributed to the military.

The rebels have proved to be correct in several instances. In the northern province of La Union, for example, the regional military commander reported Tuesday that a band of 10 rebels attacked a town hall, but the next day the same commander issued a “clarification,” saying that drunken soldiers had irritated local residents who apparently had driven them off with warning shots.

Not a single attack by either side has been officially confirmed. There is ample evidence that the cease-fire is indeed holding, at least in the critical rural provinces.

The pattern can be seen clearly in Northern Samar, an impoverished province where years of violence and mistrust led many military analysts to believe that no cease-fire could be effective.

Site of Massacre

It was here, three years ago, that one of the worst massacres of the war took place. The military wiped out an entire village in retaliation for the killing of a single soldier. The rebels used this incident to attract recruits, and today the provincial rebel leadership says it controls about 65% of the province’s towns and villages.

“There is no doubt that the cease-fire is holding and will continue to hold here,” a New People’s Army commander said in an interview. “We’re seeing to it that it does. Even if the military violates it--and we are certain they have not done so--we are under strict orders not to retaliate. We will obey those orders.”

The commander, who asked to be identified only as Comrade Philip, said it was not easy to deliver that order to his men.

“Ninety per cent of our army are peasants,” he said. “For them the war will not end until there is true justice, until there is genuine land reform, until the peasants own the land they till. It is difficult for them to understand this cease-fire business. It’s an abstract political tool, and these men are fighting soldiers.”

The interview took place just before midnight on the beach outside a crude discotheque on the outskirts of Catarman, the provincial capital. Without the cease-fire, the commander said, he would not dare come so close to the city. There is a large army base here.

In Town to ‘Coordinate’

Comrade Philip said he was speaking for all the rebel commanders on Samar, and probably the rebel command in Manila as well.

He had come to town, he said, to “consolidate and coordinate” with the movement’s urban-based political leaders, confirming the military’s suspicion that the rebels are using the cease-fire to strengthen their underground network.

The truce has taken a personal toll on the commander, a former seminary student who abandoned his studies and took up with the guerrillas six years ago as the military was about to arrest him for subversion.

“I can’t get used to sleeping inside concrete walls,” he said, “and, look, I’m getting fat. In the hills we survive on roots and whatever the land will give. It’s better up there. Even if the cease-fire lasts, I must return to the hills, to help with the training of new recruits next month. I’m looking forward to it.”

The interview with Comrade Philip was itself a part of the rebel propaganda blitz. The rebels allowed dozens of reporters, foreigners and Filipinos, to enter rebel-held areas to inspect their camps and talk with field commanders about the war, the cease-fire and their motives.

In Samar, both the rebels and the military are using other propaganda weapons too, not the least of them an armored personnel carrier, carrying women and children, drawn up on a river bank.

Thousands Attended Rally

On Dec. 10, the day the cease-fire took effect, the rebels’ political arm and several leftist groups, among them the student-oriented Bayan, or Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, scheduled a political rally in Catarman to welcome the cease-fire and commemorate International Human Rights Day.

Thousands of villagers marched for miles, and hundreds of rebels, their weapons put aside, walked in from distant mountain camps to take part in the daylong rally. Estimates of the crowd vary from 7,000 to 20,000, but no one disputes what happened.

Thousands of the demonstrators, led by leftist leaders and unarmed rebels, took over the province’s only radio station, contending that the military had impounded the vehicles they had hired to take them back to their villages.

For six hours their leaders were on the air condemning the military, urging land reform, calling for the removal of the two big U.S. bases north of Manila, and generally “making the people of the province aware of our cause,” as one leader said later.

Even the most remote village in the province has a small transistor radio, and thousands of people responded to the leftists’ calls for food and support by pouring into the capital with sacks of rice and containers filled with water.

Impressive Leftist Show

When night came, the leaders left peacefully for their villages, but not before virtually everyone in town agreed that it had been an impressive show of strength by the leftists--even though there were strong indications that many of the peasants had been told they would have to pay a “tax” to the rebels if they failed to turn out for the affair.

The local military commander, Col. Frederico Ruiz, saw to it that criminal charges were filed last week against the leaders of the radio station takeover. He said it was a criminal act not covered by the cease-fire because the rally’s organizers do not admit to being Communists.

“We welcomed the exercise of their political rights,” Ruiz said, “but not with intimidation, not with coercion. What they did was display exactly what they are capable of doing. This had a very negative effect on the people. The advocates of what are supposed to be the guardians of human rights . . . used force and coercion, turning radio technicians into virtual prisoners, just to further their political aims.”

Such comments led Pepito Rivas, the provincial chairman of Bayan, to charge that “the black propaganda of the military is still going on. . . . Our purpose is to exact reforms from this government, not to install a Communist government.”

Army ‘Information Campaigns’

Col. Ruiz said he is trying to use the cease-fire to mobilize a propaganda counteroffensive.

“During the cease-fire,” he said, “we don’t call our patrols combat patrols. We call them public information campaigns. When the soldiers go into the barangays (villages) they talk about the new constitution. They tell the residents about the New Armed Forces; they listen to the problems; they sleep with them; they eat with them.”

This week there have been no patrols at all in northern Samar.

Thursday night, Col. Ruiz used the social hall at his military camp to put on the Catarman Lawn Tennis Assn. Christmas party. There are no lawn tennis courts in the entire province but, Ruiz said, it was an opportunity to bring members of the civilian community into his camp to show them that “soldiers are just people.”

A soldier commented privately: “It is very much the season of peace. Never mind what they’re saying in Manila; there’s a cease-fire, and it’s working. And I assure you, you won’t hear anything but empty words and Christmas carols--at least until after New Year’s Eve.”