A farce played out

 

SOME 30 New People’s Army rebels who surrendered to the government recited the country’s “Oath of Allegiance” during the presentation of surrenderees under President Rodrigo Duterte’s Executive Order 70, which created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, held at Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig on Tuesday. (PhilStar)…

 

CORRECTED: Some 30 personalities who recently withdrew their allegiance and support from underground movement engineered by leftist labor groups recited the country's “oath of allegiance” during the presentation of surrenderers under President Duterte's Executive Order 70, which created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, held at Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig on Tuesday. (PhilStar)

WHAT A transformation! In a matter of hours, the 30 NPA rebels transmogrified into 30 personalities who recently withdrew their allegiance and support from the underground movement.

No doubt their morphing induced by the tsunami of snickering mockery in the web uniformly tagging the “surrenderees” as more like the archetypal huffing, puffing pot-bellied pulis patola ­– think Sinas, than the emaciated mountain-dwelling romanticized rebelde – think Che, or the young Kumander Dante.  

Aye, a slapstick farce played all too vividly there, the police and military truly worthy of their Keystone Kops tradition. Clueless? Google it.   

There is nothing new to the military presentation before the media of alleged rebel surrenderees. As a matter of course, that has long devolved into nothing more than fakery. That the state forces still persist in doing it only shows the strategic stagnation they are mired in in the war against the insurgency, notwithstanding the military modernization programs bruited about of late, not to mention the billions in intel funds.

Indeed, intelligence – outside the military sort – is beyond purchase.

Of the event at hand, I wrote more than 32 years ago – in the 8-13 Dec. 1988 issue of the long-defunct Angeles Sun:

The fallacy of overkill

THE ARMED Forces of the Philippines may be winning the insurgency war but the bite, that walloping impact, of victory is dissipated with the amateurish handling of information dished out for public consumption.

This is indicative of an inept, if not inane and inutile, propaganda machinery. Or of the employment of propagandists steeped in the old Hitlerian institution of the Big Lie. Nowhere is this more evident than in Pampanga where the overkill syndrome has become the norm in martial propaganda.

Rebel surrenderees are a stock-in-trade in the hearts-and-minds battle in any insurgency campaign, be it in Vietnam, in Malaya, in Somoza’s Nicaragua, or here.

The packaging of information relative to the surrenderees could spell the chasm of a difference between earned propaganda value and loss of credibility. To the latter has fallen many a report of surrenders. Not for anything else but for the substance of incredulity or illogic.

For instance, there were this year successive reports of NPA “regulars” surrendering in droves in Pampanga – 50 in Lubao, 40 in Sta. Ana, 30 in San Simon, if memory serves right – aside from the “200 regulars” captured and “subjected to tactical interrogation for one week” by a ranking PC (Philippine Constabulary) officer.

Against the backdrop of military pronouncement that there are less than 200 NPA regulars in Pampanga, the reports would show that the NPA in the province is operating on a deficit manpower or negative level!

Incredible too is the superhuman feat of tactical interrogation for one week of 200 NPA rebels by only one PC officer. With him alone, we wonder why there is still an insurgency war in Pampanga or in the whole country for that matter.

The slip in the surrender drama shows too in some field officers’ attempt at excellence directed toward an ultimate rise in the ranks.

During the Marcos misrule, an officer-friend was lionized in the local press for the number of “surrenderees” who took the oath of alliance to the Republic before him. The surrender rites being always on Sundays and in marketplaces sowed the seeds of disbelief that subsequently uncovered the sham of surrender and ultimately effected this officer’s relegation to the doghouse.

He was found to have been gathering all marketgoers on Sundays, telling them of a new Philippine Republic to which every Filipino should pledge his allegiance, and then passed off the pictures to newspapers as those of NPA surrenderees.

Overkill transcends the figurative and goes to the literal in certain casualty reports in internecine encounters between the NPA and the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB).

The conclusion of 20 dead in a recent encounter between the two, without any body retrieved or accounted for is plainly fictitious. Especially when the speculated number of combatants did not go beyond two scores and the firefight lasting for a mere ten minutes (that would be two killed per minute).

The above data culled from a single military report evidenced the contradictory and illogical presentation of facts and fantasies that have become indistinguishable in many a military mind.

That the NPA has greatly lost its strength in the province, owing to military victory in Maj. Sonny Gutierrez’s and Maj. Roman Lacap’s fields of battle; in Col. Efren Q. Fernandez’s barangay dialogs; and in Lt. Col. Amado Espino Jr’s “capitalist cheerers,” is not simply believable but even highly probable.

It has been a long time since the last sparrow killing and field encounter. A number of NPA sympathizers do indeed return to the fold of the law. A relative peace reigns in the province. No need therefore to tilt the balance more by coming up with these ridiculous and insulting propaganda schemes. Which makes an utter fallacy of the military’s actual victory.