The Garden

The Maoists have such a cruel sense of humor. The mass graves they dug in Leyte for the victims of communist purges in the late eighties they called ‘The Garden."

Garden suggests a pleasant place, abundant with greenery and infused with the scent of blossoms. How could one associate that word with the anguished cries of those tortured until they died, the scent of blood spilt on soil and the stench of rotting flesh and excrement.

Last week, soldiers of the 8th Infantry Division were led by villagers to the site of the mass graves. The skeletal remains of scores of victims of what the local CPP-NPA called "Oplan Linis" were exhumed.

The soldiers lit candles around the graves and said prayers. The AFP chief of staff flew in with a priest to perform the usual rites for the dead – better very late than never.

Communists do not believe in souls – and the scene at the freshly uncovered mass graves do suggest that the tormentors of those who lie there have definitely lost theirs.

What an irony: it had to be the "enemy" who would take pains to care for the spirits of the victims found here when it was way, way too late to save their lives. It was the "enemy’ who would mourn the toll that communists, in their seasonal fits of extreme paranoia, exacted on their own ranks.

It was a horrible sight. Many of the skulls recovered were bashed in, suggesting the NPA guerrillas killed their own comrades by smashing their skulls with a blunt instrument. The evidence calls to mind the Maoist Khmer Rouge’s most common method of execution: hitting the back of the head with a hammer.

It was an economical – albeit cruel – method of execution. The Party was not about to waste bullets on their own comrades. The executioners, convincing themselves that they were committing barbarism against "traitors", probably did not even cringe when they hammered friends and colleagues to death.

Did their stomachs not turn when brain matter spilt so senselessly onto the mud?

I few years ago, I read the detailed and vivid account of one survivor of these purges within the communist movement. He spoke of "suspects" being held in wooden cages, tortured incessantly until they admitted to imagined crimes and then led out to be killed, one after the other in rapid sequence.

I could not hold back my own tears as I struggled reading through the account. I wonder how those who ordered these killings, some of them still inflicting their insane demagoguery on us to this day, could avoid weeping at the very memory of thousands who were killed with extreme brutality – and at the thought that the same brutality continues to this day.

Several thousand CPP activists, mass leaders, cadres and guerrillas were killed during the late eighties and the early nineties. Depending on the locality, the orgy of fraternal mass murder was called "Kampanyang Ahos", "Missing Link’, "Zombie" and Olympia." The one carried out in Leyte during this period was called "Operation Linis" and, according to the authorities, resulted in the systematic murder of over 400 cadres, activists and guerrillas.

After The Garden was uncovered in Leyte last week, relatives of the victims came trekking up slippery slopes, clambering up mountain sides and daring the elements to see if any of the exhumed skeletal remains belonged to the loved ones they lost. They had waited 20 years for this moment. In those many years, they prayed each night for those they loved well and lost so mysteriously. In those many nights, they shed a tear of grief each night before they slept.

Without proper dental records, it was not possible to give names and faces to the silent skulls collected by teams of soldiers and policemen digging up the muddy graves. Relatives of the victims could only stare at the silent screams of cracked skulls and hope that their loved ones are among those receiving prayers and final rites.

I lost several of my friends to these purges. To this day, I keep a candle on my desk which I light from time to time in their collective memory.

After The Garden was discovered, the AFP filed additional charges against the CPP’s putative chairman Jose Ma. Sison, NDF chair Luis Jalandoni and Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo. Captured documents indicate to the authorities that these were the three main personalities associated with the mass murders.

From the grapevine, I have heard of a few other names of senior CPP leaders who personally conducted the torture and murders. Some of them have escaped to join their ideological idols in comfortable self-imposed exile abroad, using the "safe conduct passes" issued during the nineties, when peace talks with communists were being done in earnest.

The CPP has apologized for the mass murders. It has shed crocodile tears: according to the records, the killings continue to this day.

A document captured in Quezon province recently suggests that yet another deadly purge is in progress. This time, the killings go under the name of Oplan Bushfire. This pathetic communist movement is in yet another fit of extreme paranoia.

Over the last five years, according to the National Security Adviser, the CPP-NPA was directly responsible for 1,227 murders. In Region VIII alone, military authorities have documented 112 killings.

Leftist propagandists have been claiming that over 700 killings have been done by the military against their comrades. They have yet to produce the names of that number of victims.

Yet, most of the cases investigated and solved by the task force assigned to look into the matter have resulted in cases filed against NPA personalities. There seems to be a war going on in the shadows. Two wars in fact: one involving yet another campaign by the Maoists against "deep-penetration agents" in their ranks; another inflicted against each other by factional rivals within the communist movement.

There will be, it seems, more mass graves to be dug up in the future. The paranoia and ideological orgies continue.

(More next Tuesday)