Young Reds urge renegade soldiers to join communist movement

TARLAC CITY — The outlawed Kabataang Makabayan (KM), the youth arm of the communist-led National Democratic Front (NDF), urged restive junior officers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to join the underground movement.

In a statement, KM national spokesman Andres Guerrero II said that if Lt. Senior Grade Antonio Trillanes IV and the rest of the so-called Magdalo group, who tookover the Oakwood Premier Hotel last July 27, "are sincerely pro-people, they should be imbued with the spirit of the Katipunan and the Philippine Revolution."

Guerrero noted that the renegade soldiers "would be at the winning end if they would join the growing revolutionary youth and the people in advancing the Philippine revolution."

The KM is composed of students and out-of-school youths, aged 18 to 35. Trillanes and the other junior officers who led the Makati mutiny, are still in their late 20s and early 30s.

Earlier, Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founding chair, Jose Ma. Sison, said in a statement from his base in Utrecht, the Netherlands, that the mutiny made it imperative for Maoist cadres to organize revolutionary cells among the ranks of soldiers.

Sison is also the founding chair of KM, which was outlawed along with other militant groups after Martial Law was declared in the 1970s. It was later integrated into the NDF and has become a bastion of recruitment for CPP cadres and the New People’s Army (NPA).

Resumption of the peace negotiations between the government and the CPP-NPA resumes next month in Oslo, Norway. But CPP spokesperson Gregorio "Ka Roger" Rosal told The STAR in a phone interview that the peace negotiations will not amount to anything if President Arroyo will not show sincerity in pursuing a peace pact with the Maoist movement.

One of the demands of the rebel movement before the resumption of the peace talks is the removal of the CPP-NPA in the list of foreign terrorist organizations.

However, an armed splinter group of the communist movement, calling itself the Revolutionary Proletarian Army-Alex Boncayao Brigade (RPA-ABB), is now tagging the NPA as a terrorist group.

Miguel Guevarra, a self-confessed commanding officer of the RPA-ABB in Luzon, said the NPA is actually a "menace to society" as it exposed the group’s terrorist activities including bus torching, bombings of cell sites and extortion.

"These are only examples of the CPP-NPA atrocities that are committed nationwide by these so-called revolutionaries," Guevarra said. — With James Mananghaya and Artemio Dumlao