By Reihana Mohideen
MANILA — A split in the Communist Party of the Philippines has recently been made public by the circulation of several statements.
The split revolves around directives issued by the CPP leadership faction around Wilma Tiamzon to abandon the party's legal front organisations in order to advance the armed struggle in the countryside.
A number of key party leaders who opposed this line were expelled. According to one leader of the opposition, Nicolas Magdangal, "There's a strong propensity to treat all debates [within the party] as counter-revolutionary". He says that opposition from party members has been stifled.
An open letter to "friends and allies" widely distributed in March by the national officers of the legal peasant organisation aligned with the CPP — the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) — explains: "They [the Tiamzon faction] say that the anti-APEC campaign and the anti-imperialist World Peasant Summit in 1996 were wrong ... so was the anti-GATT/WTO campaign in 1995, the Church-Peasant Conference, the campaign calling for the dismantling of the rice cartel, and all other major political battles we initiated in the past to defend the peasantry and the Filipino people's interests.
"They assert that it is not necessary to build open legal organisations and pursue peasant struggles in the framework of a strong open peasant mass movement ... they pushed for the dissolution of KMP chapters in the villages and towns, a policy we firmly opposed ... projects had to be stopped, including the program that for years had supported the KMP's political work ... armed units of the underground movement were mobilised to raid the local office of one of the KMP's support NGOs in order to force its closure."
The Tiamzon leadership has labelled the opposition it expelled as "wrong-liners" and "reformists". According to the KMP, the "wrong line" in the current debate comes from those who are "guilty of an ultra-left error that [leads to] political isolation [and to] denigrate the importance of legal peasant organising and open mass struggles ... they deny the importance of various forms of struggle."
According to left sources here, the struggle is sharpest in central Luzon (where the CPP base was strong), where at least 500 party members have been affected by the directives and ensuing purge.
A number of CPP organisations in central Luzon were ordered by the leadership to fold up because they were "wasting time on politics and legalism". Also ordered to fold up were chapters of the May First Movement (KMU) in central and northern Luzon, Mindoro, central Visayas and Mindanao.
The impact of the split on the KMU and other CPP legal organisations is still unclear. However, there were reports of two May Day rallies in Bataan, central Luzon — a 2000-strong rally organised by the labour alliance Amba-bala, which was previously the KMU chapter in the area, and a much smaller KMU rally of around 100 people.
There are no reports on how the Netherlands-based chairperson of the CPP, Joma Sisson, has responded to the split. The Tiamzon leadership faction represented Sisson in the Philippines.