Army Captures Rebel Camp In Southern Philippines

DAVAO CITY, Philippines (Mindanao Examiner / Oct. 20, 2008) – Army special forces have occupied a training base of communist rebels after an intense firefight in the southern Philippines, officials said Monday.

Officials said the weekend fighting in the hinterland village of Casoon in Compostela Valley’s Monkayo town left a still undetermined number of New People’s Army rebels either killed or wounded. There were no reports of military casualties, said Lt. Col. Roland Bautista, a spokesman for the Army’s 10th Infantry Division.

Bautista said troops, backed by military aircrafts, clashed with the rebels until they fled and abandoned the camp, which could house at least 100 people. He said troops discovered 20 foxholes and observation posts inside the camp.

“Government forces have occupied the NPA base which is being used as training ground for new recruits of the sparrow unit,” Bautista told the Mindanao Examiner.

Sparrow unit refers to the NPA hit squad, blamed for the assassinations of policemen and soldiers in the country.

The NPA, armed wing of the underground Communist Party of the Philippines, is fighting for almost four decades now to overthrow the democratic government and install a Maoist state in the Philippines.

The United States and the European Union blacklisted the CPP and NPA, including its political wing, the National Democratic Front, on Manila's prodding and froze their assets abroad.

Peace talks between rebels and the government collapsed in 2004 after the CPP-NPA-NDF pulled out from the negotiations because of their inclusion on the terror lists of the United States and the European Union.

The rebels demanded that President Gloria Arroyo asks the US and EU to strike them off from the terror lists before they resume peace talks. Manila rejected the demand and suspended safety and immunity guarantee for rebel peace negotiators.

Mrs. Arroyo has ordered the military to crush the communist insurgency in two years and set aside an additional budget of P1 billion for the Armed Forces of the Philippines for this purpose.

But in May this year, government emissaries secretly held talks with rebel leaders in Norway in an effort to revive the peace talks, but they failed. The rebels demanded that the Arroyo government complies with agreements it previously signed with them.

The rebels presented 13 impediments that must be overcome before formal peace talks could resume and among these were the terrorist tag by the United States and the European Union of the CPP and its founder Prof. Jose Maria Sison, the NPA; the illegal “suspension” of the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG).

And for the suspension of the military’s anti-insurgency campaign dubbed as Oplan: Bantay Laya and the consequent gross and systematic violations of human rights; the persecution, murder, arrest and enforced disappearance of NDF consultants; the demand for capitulation of the NDF to the Filipino Government in the guise of prolonged ceasefire before addressing the fundamental problems of Philippine society and the roots of the armed conflict; and the failure to indemnify the victims of human rights violations under the Marcos regime.

Sison, who is living in exile in The Netherlands since 1987, founded the CPP-NPA in 1968. He was arrested early this year by the Dutch police on charges of masterminding the killings of two former rebel leaders Romulo Kintanar and Arturo Tabara, but had been subsequently freed. (Mindanao Examiner)