Ex-child fighter: NPA brainwashed me

A former child combatant recounted how the New People’s Army (NPA) recruited her when she was 17 and justified to her why they killed her father when she was still in her mother’s womb.

Marife Binosa, now a mother of two, could not hold back her tears when she faced The STAR and narrated how she entrusted her life to the NPA only to learn later that they had killed her father on suspicion that he was a military informant.

“I was brainwashed,” she said. “I was made to believe that what they did to my father was right. All throughout the years I spent with the movement, I also had the false belief that my father really committed an offense against the revolutionary movement.”

Speaking in Filipino, Binosa, who was recruited in Quezon province, said she and her husband Manolito, a revolutionary tax collector, surrendered to the military last year despite the NPA’s warning that they would be arrested and tortured.

“That is what they do to every member who wants to return to the mainstream,” she said. “They make them believe that (their) lives would be in greater danger if (they) surface and turn (themselves) in.”

Binosa said the NPA has been recruiting children as young as 14 to fight the military in the name of the communist cause.

“I don’t want my children to grow up in an environment of human rights abuse and violence,” she said.

“I’m starting to live a normal life and hopefully correct the mistakes that I have done in the past,” she added.

Some NPA cadres have sexually abused female recruits, Binosa said.

The use of children in combat is prohibited under the Geneva Convention.