Army unveils new NPA ‘killing field’

The military announced yesterday it had uncovered another New People’s Army (NPA) "killing field" in Candelaria town in Quezon province, indicating that summary executions by the communist rebels have not stopped.

"We just want to know what is happening in the organization," Army spokesman Lt. Col. Jose Mabanta told a group of journalists who joined the trip to the killing field in a sparsely populated farming village in Candelaria.

Armed Forces Southern Luzon Command chief Maj. Gen. Ernesto Carolina said skeletal remains of six NPA guerrillas executed by their comrades were unearthed in the towns of Magdalena in Laguna and Mauban in Quezon last week.

Soldiers were led to the shallow graves by NPA rebels who turned themselves in.

Carolina said the six were among 33 NPA guerrillas murdered by their comrades under an ongoing purge dubbed "Operation Missing Link" launched by the rebel movement in 1998.

"There is a second wave of purging. As a matter of fact, here in Southern Tagalog, there were more than 30 victims in the last two or three months," Carolina said.

The remains of the six victims were interred in a makeshift cemetery called "Bantayog ng mga Biktima ng Karahasan ng NPA" in Candelaria where 52 other victims discovered earlier were given decent burial.

The military recovered over 200 victims of NPA executions from secret mass graves around Mt. Banahaw and nearby areas in the ’80s. They gave the remains decent burial in individual graves with unmarked crosses.

The victims were either NPA members accused of veering away from the organization or civilian sympathizers murdered by their comrades.

Others were suspected military informers, Mabanta said.

He added that the NPA executions have not stopped despite a noticeable decline in communist rebel activities.

Citing information given by NPA rebels who were captured or have surrendered, Mabanta said at least 32 NPA rebels were executed by their comrades from January this year.

Some 230 people were reportedly killed over the past five years, on top of about 4,000 other rebels who have been murdered in the previous decade in a purge undertaken by the communist insurgents, Mabanta said.

The 15,500-strong NPA, the military arm of the Communist Party of the Philippines, has been waging a Maoist rebellion since 1969.

The government suspended talks with the CPP and its political wing, the National Democratic Front, after NPA guerrillas assassinated two congressmen — Marcial Punzalan of Quezon and Rodolfo Aguinaldo of Cagayan — last year. — Paolo Romero