Interview Of Prof. Jose Maria Sison On Anti-Infiltration Campaigns Of The 1980s

Juan V. Sarmiento, Jr.
Editor, Talk of the Town
Philippine Daily Inquirer
December 28, 2003

Introduction by the INPS Website Editor:
This interview with Prof. Jose Maria Sison was solicited on November 23, 2002 and was published on December 28, 2002 in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It is brief and is a mere sidelight to a five-part series of sustained slander against the Communist Party of the Philippines running on the front page of the PDI from December 26 to December 31, 200.

But Prof. Sison succeeds in pointing out that the rectification movement in the CPP since 1992 has rooted out the causes for incorrigible opportunists and criminal elements to carry out the so-called anti-infiltration campaigns that victimized CPP cadres and members, Red commanders and fighters, mass activists and other people in the 1980s.

According to the CPP, those who have been most culpable for the bloody witch-hunt and the most unremorseful have fled from the CPP. Some of them have formed groups subsidized by foreign funding agencies or related to foreign Trotskyite groups. Others have openly hired themselves out to reactionary politicians and to the US and Philippine intelligence and psywar agencies.

The favorite line of these renegades is to call the CPP Stalinist. They try to demonize all the tens of thousands of intelligent, honest, hardworking and militant CPP members. They seek to destroy the entire CPP and perpetuate the system of oppression and exploitation by US imperialism and the local exploiting classes of big compradors and landlords.

The CPP has maintained its revolutionary integrity and has cleaned its ranks through an educational movement of rectification to combat the ideological and political causes for incorrigible opportunism and criminality, to mete out disciplinary measures without death penalties and without unleashing another hysteria and to give to those remorseful and with relatively minor culpabilities a chance to be amnestied or pardoned, to be reformed and remolded and remain revolutionaries.

According to the NDFP, anyone who has complaints of human rights violations against the forces of the GRP or the NDFP can present such complaints to the Joint Monitoring Committee or to either the GRP or NDFP part thereof under the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law. This is the more available approach to arrive at the truth and appropriate action than dishing out all kinds of hearsay and slander in the anti-communist press or aiming for a nonpartisan "truth commission" in the vague future.

Communist Party founder explains 1980's purges.

Jose Maria Sison, founding chairperson of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), who is now based in the Netherlands, cited "the law of contradiction" in trying to explain why the purges happened. These are his answers to the questions e-mailed by Juan V. Sarmiento, Jr., PDI Editor

1. Did you not have any inkling that something like Operation Missing Link in Southern Tagalog, Olympia in Metro Manila and other purges such as those in Northern Luzon and Eastern Visayas was happening in 1987-1989?

Reply: I got some amount of hearsay and reliable statements from various people. You must take into account the distance between the Netherlands and Philippines, particularly the time gap between a Philippine event and any kind of report about it. By the way, you do not mention Kampanyang Ahos, which was the very worst of the bloody witch-hunts.

2. Was there any effort on the part of the local leadership to consult you on how to conduct the purge/s?

Reply: At no time have I ever made myself available for consultations with any entity for conducting what you call "purges". However, I am always ready to discuss with anyone the correct principles and methods of investigation, prosecution, trial and evaluation of evidence. I can draw from my knowledge and experience as a student of Marxism, teacher of political science and victim of fascism and counterrevolution.

You are using the term "purge" with some special connotation or tendentiousness, even as feudal, bourgeois and proletarian parties use the same term in common and in general to mean removing from the membership list those deemed inactive, deceased or errant. At any rate, you should be pleased that the CPP uses far stronger terms (crimes, madness, etc.) to condemn and repudiate the crimes involved in the events that you have mentioned.

3. Why did the purges happen?

Reply: The law of contradiction operates everywhere. A revolutionary party of the working class can be penetrated by bad elements or parts or even the entirety of it can degenerate. Bloody witch-hunts can thus occur if the proletarian revolutionaries and the people are not vigilant and militant in handling the problems of penetration and degeneration. The CPP should be praised for rectifying the political errors of opportunism, for confronting the crimes and upholding the principle and right of due process. The rectification has been able to consolidate, revitalize and further strengthen the CPP and in effect the entire revolutionary movement.

4. Who should be held responsible?

Reply: On the basis of available CPP publications, I think that the CPP and other revolutionary organizations and the people concerned know best who are responsible for definite crimes. But there are of course counterrevolutionaries and plain muddle heads who simply say that the entirety of Marxism-Leninism or the entirety of CPP is responsible.

It is like some people saying that liberal democracy and liberal democratic parties are forever disqualified by the reign of terror in the French revolution or that the Catholic Church is entirely no good because of the notorious witch-hunts and inquisitions in its history or that the old democratic revolution in the Philippines was invalid because Emilio Aguinaldo was culpable for the killing of Andres Bonifacio and General Antonio Luna. ###

(Bonifacio, founder of the Katipunan, which launched the Philippine Revolution in 1896, was killed by the men of Aguinaldo, leader of a faction of the Katipunan, who became the President of the First Philippine Republic. Luna, a general in the First Republic, was also killed by Aguinaldo's men. PDI Editor)

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