SUMMARY
The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has attacked civilians in various ways throughout the years. Though the reasons for their behavior vary, two general explanations of CPP’s rationale for targeting civilians can be deciphered.
The first is of ideological nature and relates to the CPP’s subscription to ‘revolutionary justice’. It means in practical terms that some targets are legitimate if the party perceived them as enemies of the people or the revolution (some CPP ideologues have deemed the civilian targets to have a ‘blood debt’ to the people). A structure has been built to mete out ‘revolutionary justice’, the Hukmanan sa Katawhan, or the Peoples Court. CPP established the system as a means to bring justice for the peasants and other “oppressed classes” in the countryside. For crimes defined as capital offenses, the Peoples Court is composed of nine individuals representing CPP, NPA, and the local underground mass organizations acting as a jury. The Peoples Court later tasks the armed wing of CPP, the New People’s Army (NPA) to implement its punitive decisions and in essence, punish, sometimes through one-sided violence, those deemed to be guilty.
The second explanation is proposed by intelligence analysts; they assert that CPP has targeted civilians, and often high-profile ones – not for the sake of justice for the people – but reckoning that these assassinations will lead to repression of CPP, which in extension will lead to subjugation of the Filipino people. Incited by this hypothetical government repression, the general populace will then reject the acting government and replace it with a communist state.
CPP, however, denies attacking ‘true’ civilians, claiming that these are precisely the people who the movement defends. For example, in a 2006 press release, a CPP spokesperson asserted that neither CPP nor NPA would do anything that would harm innocent civilians or provoke further repressive measures on their movement, in essence refuting the above explanation. The founder of the party, Jose Marie Sison, has similarly declared in a 2007 interview that NPA is the army of the people and hence strictly targets the military, police and paramilitary forces of what they perceive to be an oppressive regime. Further, the CPP-controlled New Democratic Front (NDF) signed a comprehensive agreement on human rights and international humanitarian law in 1998 with the Philippine government.
Turning to patterns of one-sided violence, it appears that CPP through its armed wing, NPA, has attacked two types of civilian targets. First, the group has singled-out foreign investors and foreign-owned companies. The rationale is believed to be twofold: to entirely drive out foreign investment with intimidation tactics and to benefit monetarily through the extortion of these businesses. The second NPA tactic has been targeted assassinations of Filipino citizens who have been critical of CPP and NPA. It appears that the group has specifically targeted Filipino politicians, security officials, and members of the news media. This category also includes former members who have become civilianized or have defected to other left-leaning groups, as well as members who are believed to be government spies (the latter targeting often takes the form of internal purges). However, increasing doubt has been raised in the 2000s, as to whether CPP are solely responsible for the plentiful killings of (non-CPP) leftist activists.
CPP first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 2015, when the one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. By October that year, targeted killings by the group had resulted in 25 civilian deaths.
