Domoguen: A community development approach vs Cordillera local communist conflict

IN A calamitous situation, the President is duty-bound to call on the whole of government and the nation to take action.

For instance, with the occurrence of an infectious and virulent virus that is cutting down the lives of the people from one community to the other, the President must lead the whole of government and the nation to manage, contain, and eliminate if possible, the infectious virus from the environment.

But I am not going to talk about the 2019 novel coronavirus from Wuhan, the provincial capital of the province of Hubei (Hupeh), Central China in this article.

The topic I will discuss pertains to the communist movement in the Philippines and the call by the President for Filipinos to end the communist armed conflict together.

At the moment though, I think the communist movement in the Philippines may have originated in China. The communist groups under the old Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) were “Maoist-communists.”

It was only in 1968 that a new Soviet-leaning Communist Party of the Philippines emerged with its military arm, the New People’s Army formed the next year. This group soon dominated the movement in the succeeding years.

According to historical literature, the communist movement in the Philippines had its relevance to the country’s national affairs during the Second World War when it joined the fight against the Japanese.

After the Second World War, the movement was either outlawed by the Supreme Court or forced to go underground when its members committed themselves to armed struggle in gaining power over the Republic.

Revolutions die in the hands of evil men. Like all other communist thrusts to gain government power around the globe, the movement’s struggle in the Philippines is considered one of the bloodiest.

Besides, losing its combatants in their fights with government forces, the movement is known to have killed thousands of its members who were suspected to be enemy spies or sympathizers.

Soon the Communist Party of the Philippines mutated from a revolutionary organization into several local criminal groups engaged in bombing public power plants and establishments, extortions, fighting each other for funds, and killing villagers and their elders who do not bow down to their wishes.

Today, the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military arm, the NPA, are considered as terrorist organizations in the Philippines.

President Rodrigo Duterte issued Executive Order (EO) 70 last December 4, 2018 to end the local communist armed conflict. The President’s order also directed the adoption of a national peace framework and formed a national task force to work for the realization of both purposes.

The government’s approach against communist insurgency is no longer purely military in nature.

EO 70 created and mandated the national task force (NTF), under the Office of the President, to provide an efficient mechanism structure for the implementation of a “whole-of-nation” approach, which was likewise institutionalized as government policy for the attainment of inclusive and sustainable peace.

The bulk of the unified operations of the NTF-End Local Communist Armed Conflict (ELCAC) on the ground is passed on to the Regional Task Force-ELCAC and Technical Working Groups (TWGs).

The members of the RTF-ELCAC includes the regional directors of the government’s development and security agencies.

In the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) serves as the RTF-ELCAC Secretariat and works closely with Secretary William Dar of the Department of Agriculture (DA), the designated Cabinet Officer for Regional Development and Security (CORDS) for the Cordillera.

According to officials of the National Task Force-End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), the nation’s indigenous peoples (IPs) in isolated communities are being lured into an insurgency against the government. It was reported that some IP villages are now serving as bases for the NPA’s insurgency operations.

Through its different agencies, the government under its whole-of-nation approach is implementing multiple activities with multiple strategies to end the local communist armed conflict.

Pursuant to a directive by Secretary Dar to intensify the government’s convergence efforts in addressing poverty in depressed areas of the Cordillera to end the communist insurgency, the DA-CAR reported that multi-million development projects were already implemented in insurgency areas previously identified by the military.

Cameron Odsey, OIC Regional Executive Director of the DA-CAR, recently reported that in 2019, the agency implemented some P354,744, 300 worth of community development projects, activities and programs (PAPs) in the communist-terrorist group (CTG) affected and threatened barangays of the region.

He said that there were a total of 112 PAPs implemented by the agency in 43 barangays in the five provinces of the region, except Benguet.

The DA’s banner programs, foreign and locally funded special projects supported the implementation of 90 development PAPs worth P317, 686, 800, according to Odsey.

Meanwhile, Odsey said that the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) and the National Irrigation Administration (NIA), implemented 48 PAPs with a total cost of P37,057,500.

The NIA is not under the DA but its programs and projects are complimentary essential to agricultural development and production. It implemented a total of P31,380,000 total costs of irrigation projects in ELCAC barangays in the province of Abra, Ifugao, Kalinga, and Mountain Province.

To sustain the agency’s support and assistance to the ELCAC program, Dr. Odsey reported that Secretary Dar signed a new program document directing the implementers of the DA’s Special Area for Agricultural Development (SAAD) to include the ELCAC areas as part of the program’s coverage areas in 2020 and beyond.

The agency is targeting to implement some P45,993,280 worth of PAPs this year (2020); P829,152,050 in 2021; and, P187,909, 550 in 2022 in 59 CTG affected and influenced barangays.

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