The Armed Forces of the Philippines have dug up hundreds of shallow graves in the Southern Tagalog region and in Northern Mindanao, where the victims of Jose Ma. Sison’s orgies of violence had been dumped. These were members of the CPP-NPA who had been tried and found guilty of collaborating with the government.  The CPP-NPA Kangaroo courts sentenced them to a gruesome death on mere suspicion.  These atrocities have stained the hands of Prof. Sison, who was the one who ordered these bloody purges.  This inevitably invites comparison with the Khmer Rogue leader, Pol Pot, who converted Cambodia into killing fields, decimating the population of that country.

Behind the suave, philosophical front, Sison’s New People’s Army had been ravaging the countryside for three decades, with thousands of innocent farmers and their families being killed in a continuing saga of paranoia, brutality and destruction.

Now the Communists have announced a global drive “to defend the democratic rights of Jose Ma. Sison” using the Internet and other media.  Their chosen battleground is the European Union, which has cast itself in the role of the world’s foremost champions of human rights.

In Western Europe, human rights have become the new secular religion.  The Christian churches are empty on Sundays, but human rights advocacy, especially in the Third World, can open generous European pockets.  In this way millions of dollars donated for human rights find their way to the coffers of so-called liberation movements and are transformed into arms to battle the existing, duly-elected governments and spread terror among the peaceful, law-abiding populace.

When Renato de Villa was Secretary of National Defense, military intelligence disclosed that an average of $12 million was being siphoned off annually to the New People’s Army from generous donors, mainly from European support groups who had been duped into believing that the CPP-NPA were the foremost guardians of human rights in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

Now the global war against terrorism in all its forms has caught up with the CPP-NPA and their European supporters have been asked to reassess their attitude and policy towards the CPP-NPA and similar movements around the world.

Various Philippine governments have chosen to ignore the CPP-NPA’s propaganda campaign against the government in Europe.  Prof. Sison and his NDF cohorts, upon being released from jail in 1986, had the effrontery to claim political refuge in the Netherlands, seeking shelter under the EU Convention on Human Rights and the liberal immigration laws of the Dutch government.  They were living off the fat of the Dutch taxpayers who were paying for their board and lodging in the lovely city of Utrecht.

Recently, the Netherlands authorities declared the CPP-NPA as a terrorist organization and ordered that their funds and assets be frozen.  The legal status of Sison and his cohorts as asylum seekers has now become extremely precarious.  Sison fears he may be expelled from his Dutch refuge and dreads his possible extradition to the United States and a lonely cell in the detention prison for terrorists maintained by the US Army in their Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.

Recently I led a special diplomatic mission to Europe, to ask the governments there to interdict the CPP-NPA as a terrorist organization and to cut off their funding sources.  The first fruit of this mission was the decision of the EU Council of Ministers declaring the NPA as a terrorist organization and Professor Sison himself as a terrorist.  The EU list of foreign terrorists is constantly updated.  But there is no longer any possibility of the decision on the CPP-NPA being reversed, although Sison and the NDF have mounted a strong propaganda campaign globally “to defend the democratic rights” of Jose Ma. Sison.  They choose to miss the basic irony, that these are the same rights Sison and the CPP-NPA would take away from the Filipino people by installing a godless Communist dictatorship in the Philippines.

The Communists have always appealed to history as the final arbiter of great political issues.  Under their doctrine of historical materialism and the class struggle, the victory of communism is historically ordained and is therefore inevitable.  But the collapse of the Berlin wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union has clearly demonstrated the verdict of history against international Communism.  Democracy has triumphed and Marxism-Leninism has joined other obsolete forces in the dustbin of history.  The Communist parties of Eastern Europe have transformed themselves into peaceful social democratic parties that freely and openly participate in democratic elections.

It is our ardent hope that the Filipino Communists will now follow the route of their senior brethren in Europe.  If they accept a comprehensive peace settlement being offered by the Philippine government under the leadership of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, they will be able to reclaim a future of safety, security and freedom both for themselves and their loved ones, and for the larger Philippine society from which they have been temporarily alienated.  With the countryside made safe for investments and a stronger political stability established, there will be no limits to what the country can achieve in social and economic development.  We shall cease to be the economic laggard of East Asia and leap to the front of the world’s economic development race.

Professor Sison and his Communist cohorts are, from their own doctrinal perspectives, facing their moment of truth.  If they remain intransigent in their false beliefs they will fall into a historical limbo without any hope of salvation or relief.  Clearly they are on the wrong side of history.  The whole civilized world is now united in the fight against all forms of terrorism.  Their countrymen who have suffered from their depredations are waiting to embrace them in a new reconciliation and solidarity for the advancement of the Filipino nation.