Former Sen. Rodolfo Biazon once said that any insurgency, any rebellion, cannot be quashed just by rounding up and killing the government’s “enemies.”
“First of all, we can’t kill them all,” he said, adding that for every rebel the military killed, they seem to create three, four or five new “enemies.”
There will always be new recruits, men and women seeking revenge for relatives the military killed, he noted, leading to a cycle of violence that leads only to mounting casualties.
Biazon knows whereof he speaks. He was a former military chief of staff, more importantly, a grizzled, battle-tested Marine whose storied military career spanned over three decades. He was no armchair general or mere military propaganda mouthpiece.
The past few days saw some bloody clashes between government forces and communist rebels, resulting in more such deaths of the state’s so-called enemies.
Jevilyn Campos Cullamat, a 22-year-old medic for the youth propaganda wing of the New People’s Army, was killed during a clash in the jungles of Surigao del Sur.
Cullamat was the youngest child of Bayan Muna Representative Eufemia Campos Cullamat.
The military released photos of troops posing with Cullamat’s corpse, displaying insurgent flags and weapons allegedly recovered from the encounter.
Eugenia Magpantay and Agaton Topacio, consultants of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) for peace talks with the government, which ended in November 2017, were also killed in a recent police operation in Angono, Rizal.
The CPP said the two, who were both 69 years old, had already retired from active duty. But the police said they were killed because they “resisted arrest”—an all-too familiar refrain we hear nowadays in news coverage of shootouts or manhunts being carried out by our police force.
Three other consultants of the CPP have been killed since last year in operations that had more or less similar narratives.
The government is getting additional funds to bankroll its anti-insurgency programs, with the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, which was created by President Duterte in 2018 to counter communist propaganda, set to receive P19.13 billion next year, a significant raise from its P1.7 billion budget in 2020.
Perhaps the administration could do some soul-searching on where this huge amount should really be spent on, if it really wants to quash a communist rebellion that has existed since 1969. And it would do well to heed Biazon’s words of wisdom as a source of insight.
Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon and other opposition senators are pushing for the billions in anti-insurgency funds to be reallocated into the government’s health, social welfare, calamity response and housing programs, all of which are in need of more money.
Drilon argued that the government needs more funds for the social aspect of governance rather than the security aspect. “I am not saying that we do not need to support our security sector. We have to. But the allocation for the anti-insurgency campaign can be postponed for one year. The insurgency problem has been with us for a long time. I don’t think our programs will collapse if we postpone the P19-billion anti-insurgency fund to 2022,” he said.
Indeed, pouring money into our security forces to stamp out insurgency is a myopic way of addressing an age-old problem that has its roots on poverty.
The real challenge before the government is poverty reduction and sustainable development. The economic integration of those in the margins is a powerful tool for breaking the nexus of poverty and conflict.
Using the might of arms to crush insurgency may work for a while. But the same problems that lead to the recruitment of new rebels to replace the thousands who are killed in conflict will remain. The military solution only spawns more enemies than the government initially dealt with.
There is no long-term military solution to the insurgency problem. Experience has already shown us that even after thousands of Filipinos have already been killed on both sides—excluding the thousands more of innocent civilians who were caught in the crossfire—insurgency and rebellion are still very much alive in the country.
This is because the same crippling poverty that makes rebellion an ideal employment choice for men and women who have no stake in the status quo still exists.
The government should first do everything it can to address the discontent that leads to rebellion. We should always go to the root of the problem to solve it.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano