Organizer: Patricio N. Abinales, Kyoto University
Chair: Thomas M. McKenna, University of Alabama
Discussant: Alfred W. McCoy, University of Wisconsin, Madison
In the half century since its founding, the Philippine republic has been challenged by three major insurgencies: the Communist-led Huk rebellion of the 1950s in Luzon, the Muslim separatist insurgency in Mindanao begun in the 1970s, and a second Communist-led insurgency fought by the New People’s Army, which spread throughout the nation in the 1970s and 80s. The armed social movements that promoted these insurgencies mobilized populations, challenged the state with varying success, and reshaped regional societies in ways mostly unintended. Rather than a top-down, leadership-centered view of these insurgencies, the panel explores their dynamics "on the ground," at the level at which people interact.
The central argument is that the armed movements were shaped to a large extent by the ways in which movement activists in thousands of rural and urban communities sought to negotiate support, gain allies, accommodate adversaries, undermine enemies, and convince themselves and others that their (shifting) goals were worth dying for. Hence a regional approach: how the insurgencies were "acted out" and affected people and society differed by region, depending on the specific interplay between movement activists and local societies and cultures within (inter)national contexts.
This panel focuses on the NPA and Muslim separatist insurgencies—neither yet completely settled—and the challenges they both presented and faced in the two Philippine regions of Mindanao and the Visayas. By bringing together scholars with fresh research on these major insurgencies, the panel hopes to provide new, comparative insights into the regional dynamics of Philippine armed movements.
Revolution from the "Middle": The Communist Party of the Philippines’ Mindanao Commission
Patricio N. Abinales, Kyoto University
Very often, scholars of rebellion who focus on the intricate and often difficult relationship between vanguard parties and their "masses" tend to treat the former as a group whose members are indistinguishable from each other. This conflation of the former tends to obscure the considerable variations within revolutionary leaderships that sometimes represent differing interpretations and perspectives on how their respective revolutions are to move forward. This paper examines one such divergence in perception and action within the Philippine communist movement as expressed through the document "Ang Ating Walong Taong Pakikibaka" (Our Eight Years of Struggle). This document, which is one of the few comprehensive region-based historical evaluations ever done, was written to describe how Mindacom took root in the country’s second largest island. It is surprisingly frank about the failures and successes of the organization and, more importantly, as to how Mindacom "deviated" from the original norms laid down by the party’s founders. This paper argues that Mindacom’s "deviations" from the "political line" were not necessarily the result of the disjuncture between policy and reality, but the outcomes of negotiations and accommodations that cadres had to make with local communities and among each other, to implant the revolution in Mindanao. The Mindanao committee became the fastest growing organization of the party in the 1980s precisely because it sought the middle ground. Compromise can lead to success and not necessarily revolutionary failure—as scholars like James Scott are fond of underscoring—as this fascinating document has shown.
From Autonomy to Secession: The MILF Story
Marites Danguilan Vitug, Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front is waging a secessionist war in the Philippines, continuing the 27 years of on-and-off fighting started by the Moro National Liberation Front. A breakaway group of the secular MNLF, the MILF, influenced by the Middle East and Pakistan, advocates an independent Islamic state. The MILF started out as a moderate organization, fighting for autonomy, and later shifted to a radical position. This paper traces their history (from the split with the MNLF and how the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos helped deepen the divide) and examines the reasons for their transformation, ranging from the pragmatic to the ideological. Through this sea change, they were able to build the army and grow to be the 13,000-strong movement they are today. (The MILF is considered by the Armed Forces of the Philippines to be the most formidable "threat" in the country.) Very little has been written on the history of the MILF probably because they emerged to be important only in recent years—eclipsed by the MNLF and Nur Misuari’s projection—and also because of the reclusive personality of its leader, Salamat Hashim. Hashim granted his first media interviews only in 1997. Even the Philippine military, in the 1980s and well into the early 1990s, dismissed the MILF as a fledgling group. The government of Fidel Ramos, engaged in peace talks with the MNLF from 1992–1996, ignored the MILF. A combination of factors—government inattention, Islamic resurgence, social and economic exclusion—has fueled the rebellion.
Provincial Dynamics of a Nationwide Revolutionary Movement: Rise, Decline, and Outcome of the CPP-NPA in Negros Occidental
Rosanne Rutten, University of Amsterdam
When, in 1971, Manila-based student activists of the CPP-NPA arrived in the hacienda society of Negros Occidental to spread their Maoist revolution, they faced a formidable task. In this bastion of hacienda-owners, they and their local student recruits encountered an array of power groups that could block their access to poor populations or compete for the latter’s allegiance: planters, (para)military groups, Church communities, incipient labor and peasant unions, gangs of bandits. Indeed, confined to urban safehouses and student networks, they made little headway at first. Yet by the mid-1980s, CPP-NPA activists had gained widespread support in sugarcane haciendas, villages, and urban neighborhoods, had turned adversaries into allies, and posed a powerful challenge to planters and authorities—only to lose this support by the early 1990s under the combined influence of counterinsurgency, regime change, and internal conflicts. The insurgency, meanwhile, had reshaped provincial society. This paper traces the rise, decline, and outcome of the Negros Occidental CPP-NPA by focusing on strategic interactions: who did the activists turn into supporters, allies, and enemies and define as such, how did they deal with one another, how did these alignments and contentious interactions change over time and shape the local trajectory of the CPP-NPA, and what did these interactions yield to the various groups involved? How, moreover, did local interdependencies and cultural "commonsense" affect the strategic choices of activists and adversaries? Based on fieldwork, provincial newspapers, army and CPP-NPA documents, the discussion throws light on the provincial dynamics of a nationwide movement.
"Mindanao Peoples Unite!": Frustrated Efforts to Find Common Cause Between Muslim and Christian Insurgencies in Mindanao
Thomas M. McKenna, University of Alabama
In the mid-1980s, nationalist organizations in Mindanao leading regional resistance to the Marcos dictatorship initiated a series of well-funded efforts to persuade young Philippine Muslim (Moro) intellectuals and activists to support the nationalist cause. Nationalist initiatives were primarily educational in nature, including seminars, conferences, and international speakers but also the creation of certain "Moro" political organizations. These comprehensive efforts were well organized and made good strategic sense. Separate armed Muslim and nationalist armed movements on Mindanao controlled much of that large island’s territory. Any endeavor to merge popular support for those armed movements and create a united Muslim-Christian oppositional front had the potential to wrest effective control of the entire island from the Marcos regime. Nevertheless, the nationalist initiatives were, with very few exceptions, conspicuously unsuccessful. Based on fieldwork in an urban Muslim community and a wide range of documentary sources, this paper argues that these failures were not due to any general cultural aversion on the part of young Philippine Muslims to political cooperation with non-Muslims but rather to the cultural biases and miscalculations of non-Muslim organizers. In particular, the cultural framings utilized by nationalists to elicit support for cooperative collective action were usually ineffective, and at times offensive, to Muslim student activists. The paper suggests, in fact, that attempts by nationalists to emphasize the most "positive" aspects of Islam to Philippine Muslims bear an ironic resemblance to similar efforts made by American colonial educators earlier in the century.