RED TAG?

WHY are the members of Party-list Groups identified with the Communist Party of the Philippines so pregnant with the so-called “Red Tag”? For one thing, no one goes to jail now for adherence to communist ideology. It has long been decriminalized under Republic Act 7636 which was approved by Congress and signed into law by Pres. Fidel V. Ramos on September 22, 1992, barely three months after he assumed the Presidency from Cory Aquino.

The meat on the bone was in luring back members of Jose Ma. Sison’s CPP and its armed elements, the New People’s Army, and Satur Ocampo’s National Democratic Front to give up the cause and participate in governance.

The first act of the government was to allow party-list organizations to participate in the election process. It allowed sectors in the society which were perceived to be not represented in congress and of course, the many shades of ideological persuasions that pretends to represents the urban poor, the peasants and human rights activists to name a few.

Not a few of these are rightists, centrists, and leftists which we now know as the legal fronts of the CPP-NPA-NDF.

The sublime irony of the decriminalization of Communism is that while the “legal fronts” are allowed to participate in the political processes it has maintained its armed militia, the NPA, to continue with its armed struggle assaulting government forces, harassing civilians, exacting so-called revolutionary taxes on construction firms and agricultural enterprises in remote communities. They have not ceased from recruiting members from the vulnerable groups in the hinterlands to beef up their armed revolutionaries and ideologues in university campuses. Not a few campus activists had vehemently denied their ties with the Reds only to end up later dead or wounded in armed encounters with the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

The series of peace negotiations which the government had with CPP-NPA-NDF in the faraway Netherlands where the communist supremo, Joma Sison, holds fort had been for naught. Each time the talks come to fruition, Joma recoils and resorts to double talk. Joma out-smarted and out-witted the government in that the legal fronts of the CPP-NPA-NDF are still ensconced in Congress enjoying all the perks that other congressmen have. In a stinging rebuke of Davao City Mayor Inday Sara Duterte-Carpio, “the party-list system is the milking cow of terrorists”.

The CPP-NPA-NDF has a flag of its own - a bold RED with hammer and sickle emblazoned in it. Red is always the symbol of the cabal and you see the streets turn red whenever members of the party-list groups, its legal fronts, hold rallies against the government.

Red Tag? How else? The NPAs even paint their faces red while in combat missions.