Bulatlatan
Written by: Waya-waya
Published: Bulatlatan, September 16, 2009;
Source: Bulatlatan snapshot at the Internet Archive;
Markup: Simoun Magsalin.
The Communist Party of the Philippines is again wracked by a major split among its Central Committee members between two warring factions belonging to the Benito Tiamzon and the Joema Sison camps.
CPP founder Jose Maria Sison now finds himself beleaguered and outnumbered by pro-Tiamzon forces in the Maoist party who hold sway in the majority of regions in the archipelago. This is because the couple, Benito and Wilma Tiamzon, are supported by their comrades from the Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK), a rival activist organization to Kabataang Makabayan in the 1970s.
Well-known SDK leaders who are now in the highest CPP posts rallied around the Tiamzon couple to depose the CPP founder from his dynastic reign. Finally they have the number to effectively end Sison’s elitist and armchair rule as Party Czar. Sison’s bacchanalian revelries are over. These SDK leaders in the CPP are well placed in strategic posts:
Visayas-Mindanao Regional Leaderships
Antonio Cabanatan
Menandro Villanueva
Concha Araneta
Tomas Dominado
National Party Organizations
Rafael Baylosis – Trade Union and NCR movements
Vicente Ladlad- United Front Organizations
Antonio Tujan – Education and Research
NPA Commander Jess Lipura – Military secretariat
Northern Luzon-Central LuzonRegional Leaderships
Elizabeth Principe-Velasco
Esteban Manuel
Eugenia Magpantay
Reports have it that the remaining support for Sison merely comes from the partylist groups of Satur Ocampo-Neri Colmenares of Bayan Muna and Liza Masa of Gabriela.
The KM organization dates back to the mid-60s under the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas led by the Lava family. Joema Sison, then a member of the Provisional National Executive Committee of the PKP representing the youth sector, organized the firebrand organization, Kabataang Makabayan (KM).
However, Sison maintained secret ties with the Southeast Asian Bureau of the Communist Party of China based in Jakarta, Indonesia, wherein Sison involved himself with the China-USSR debate since the early 60s. Sison made a pact with his Chinese political officer to reestablish the communist party in the Philippines under the Maoist ideology. In 1967, Sison accused the Lava leadership with a litany of “opportunist errors” and bolted out from the PKP.
The PKP split was manifested in the KM Split of 1967 where Sison got a handful of urban-based student activists and the Lavas retained the loyalty of their rural youth members within KM. The Sison-Lava polemics were made public by Sison through a series of articles printed out in university newspapers and in propagated leaflets in numerous leftist organizations. These were Sison’s preparatory steps towards the 1968 reestablishment of the CPP based on “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse tung Thought.”
The leftist youth movement led by Kabataang Makabayan were soon thrown into chaos as Sison imposed his personal leadership and the Mao Tsetung ideology. In 1967, more schisms spawned from KM as youth activists accused Sison of dictatorship and of splitting the emerging nationalist youth movement.
The Samahan ng Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK) was organized by Prof. Vivencio Jose and Perfecto Terra Jr. of the KM cultural bureau. The SDK bolt-out was followed by the withdrawal of other groups from KM. These were: Katipunan ng Kabataang Demokratiko (KKD) led by the Balgos- De la Cruz clan and the Samahan ng Progresibong Kabataan (SPK) led by Dr. Nemesio Prudente and the PCC youth activists. The common adoption of “demokratiko” in their new organizational names suggested the idea that KM was not democratic in relating to its own members and to the student youth movement in general.
Inspite of the splits that depleted KM membership, Sison proceeded with the CPP reestablishment in 1968. He gathered his chosen compatriots from the KM National Council and elected themselves as Central Committee members of the CPP.
Sison attempted the assassination of Prof. Vivencio Jose in downtown Avenida Rizal, Manila, in 1969 by sending out an NPA sparrow who stabbed the professor with a long knife in a crowd. The wounded professor survived the attack and sustained his leadership activities in the SDK. The group of Jun Terra, Ed Masbad, Amador Amad, Romulo Jallores, a certain Gildo and Voltaire all of SDK Taytay (a group fascinated in urban guerilla warfare) were placed in the NPA order of battle in 1970.
The SDK focused on developing militant youth activists capable of leading mass movements and mass struggles, alliances and united front organizations as well as in catalyzing the reemergence of the nationalist labor and peasant movement. In the 70s the SDK far outnumbered the KM in schools and major cities nationwide with a total membership of 35,000 by January ’71.
Most KM activists were deployed in the rural areas to start the Maoist-inspired guerilla warfare. SDK and the other nationalist organizations dominated the leadership of the First Quarter Storm, with Ramon Sanchez and Romulo Jallores in direct leadership of the street protests and demonstrations. In 1971, it was the SDK who started the Diliman Commune in UP with the call, “Raise High the Barricades!”
Unable to outdo the SDK in student councils and school newspapers, KM and Sison bad-mouthed the SDK as “elitists, petty-bourgeois, sectarian” and branded them as “Samahang Double-Knit” (double knit was the fashionable textile of the ‘70s used by college students). However, Sison realized the advantage of recruiting the SDK into the CPP. Numerous sectoral organizations were developed by the SDK: MAKIBAKA was initiated by SDK in mid-1970; Siningbayan, Gintong Silahis, PSIA in ’71; the winning-over of NAFLU and CLP to the nationalist labor front; the formation of ZOTO in 1971; and the support in the CNL formation in 1972.
The Sisonites quietly recruited Ellecer “Boyong” Cortez, an old-guard of the SDK, who in turn recruited the SDK second-line cadres in late 1970 into the CPP. By 1971, a repudiation of the Vivencio Jose-Jun Terra leadership was conducted in the SDK which created tension and new division (Vic Ferrer-Noel Cabrera “factionalism”) within the organization. For Sison, “the best way to capture a fortress is from within,” thus the massive recruitment of SDK cadres soon followed. Inspite of a CPP victory within the SDK, a KM attempt to dissolve the SDK, KKD and SPK in late 1971, under the guise of “simplification of organizations” failed through an opposition led by Antonio Hilario Jr., SDK Secretary General.
The massive entry of SDK cadres in the CPP enabled the fledgling party to rapidly establish regional committees nationwide in 1971–72. However, Sison ensured that the top posts and leadership bodies of the CPP were dominated by KM cadres. SDK cadres later found themselves treated as “third-class citizens” of the CPP and were commonly seen as “representatives of the Jose-Terra erroneous line,” thus underestimated by arrogant KM cadres. Sison always inquired into the mass-organization background of cadres before confirming them into leading CPP posts.
The KM-SDK rivalry have expressed itself in several organizational conflicts and cases of discrimination against SDK cadres in the CPP: in the Bicol Region in 1971, in Western Visayas ’71–‘72, in the National Trade Union Bureau in ’72, in Central Luzon ’72–73.
Sison’s organizational sectarianism through the years finally boomeranged on him. The present dominance of SDK cadres in CPP posts under a raging Sison-Tiamzon leadership conflict makes him an underdog. The power struggle between him and Benito Tiamzon can only be won “on the ground” not by remote control from Utrecht. His KM compatriots in the regions and national organizations do not have enough influence to outbalance the dominance of the SDK factor.
Furthermore, his recent blunder in the uncoded roster of CPP cadres archived in Utrecht computers immersed him in hot water. Sison’s irresponsible neglect of basic security measures (required of an ordinary CPP member) have placed the lives of CPP leaders in the open legal organizations in great danger. His luxurious living and Casanova pleasures in Utrecht are unacceptable to the CPP “insulares”. Sison’s case is indefensible. Now, there is no way but out for Sison.