SUMMARY
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) is a Filipino organisation influenced by Marxist-Leninism and Maoist thought and whose aim is to overthrow the Filipino government through armed struggle and replace it with a communist regime. While CPP has provided the political and strategical leadership since 1968, the organization also consists of the New People’s Army (NPA), established in 1969 as the armed wing, and the National Democratic Front (NDF), set up in 1973 as an alliance of various left-wing movements.
CPP has its origins in the 1960s, when young communist militants were expelled from the original Filipino Communist party, PKP. These young activists were incited by the successful revolutions in China and on Cuba and inflamed by U.S. involvement in Filipino affairs and in 1968, the break-away faction, spearheaded by Jose Marie Sison, established the Communist Party of the Philippines.
CPP outlined the plans for a military struggle in the 1968 ‘Program for a People’s Democratic Revolution’. The ideological document made clear that CPP did not perceive the Filipino regime as the only antagonists, but that “all the reactionary bourgeois classes supporting it” were to be combated. CPP, through its armed wing NPA, begun its military operations in the rural areas of Northern and Southern Luzon, but extended its activities in the 1980s from its traditional areas to establish substantial presence in central Visayan and on Mindanao. CPP has remained active in most parts of the country and while the movement has been predominantly rural-based, the organisation has also carried out occasional urban operations.
CPP is not known to have received any significant external assistance. In the 1970s, attempts to smuggle in Chinese weapons failed and in the early 1990s, it was suggested that Vietnam and North Korea had financially supported and armed NPA.
NPA was added to the USA’s list of Foreign Terror Organisations in 2002.
Jose Maria Sison, the founder of CPP, has directed CPP and NPA activities from the Netherlands, where he has lived since 1987. Sison lost the chairmanship position for a long period; starting with his arrest in 1977 (he was subsequently detained for nine years). He managed to resume leadership in 1992 after publicly denouncing the sitting chairman as an agent of the then-president Fidel Ramos; the sitting chairman had just signed the first comprehensive peace agreement with the Ramos government. This broadside marked the beginning of a clear fragmentation within the party. Sison blamed the movement’s declining power on the past leadership’s misguided policies of urban insurrection (he emphasized instead the Maoist tenet of rural “protracted people’s war”) and NPA “regularisation”, i.e. the formation of larger battalion-sized units, at the expense of smaller units more closely integrated with the peasant mass base. The movement split into those who endorsed Sison’s diagnosis and those who rejected it; the latter seceded and formed new revolutionary parties. The armed wings of these parties have occasionally clashed with NPA.
CPP has been involved in the intrastate and one-sided categories of organised violence.
