‘Alyansa’ an illusion; the real, dangerous one is the Marcos-CPP alliance

Second of three parts

WITH Camille Villar and Imee Marcos bolting out of his “Alyansa para sa Bagong Pilipinas,” President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s vaunted alliance of parties is now revealed as an illusion. Only Speaker Martin Romualdez, because of his and the Marcos family’s billions of wealth or through funds siphoned off from the budget, remains as the group’s sole real member and source of funding.

Believe me here, there are no real parties in this country, only collections of politicians given monthly finances by a tycoon or a rich politician. The powerful Nationalist Coalition, for instance, withered after Eduardo Cojuangco Jr. passed away in 2020.

The other so-called members of the alliance have little in their war chest for an electoral campaign, and thus will focus entirely on their own candidates, if they have — Partido Federal, Ronaldo Puno’s National Unity Party, and Tito Sotto and Jack Duavit’s (and formerly Manuel Villar’s) Nationalist Party. It’s every man for himself in this election.

What has emerged is the most unholy, most despicable alliance ever in Philippine history: the Marcos-Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) alliance. Both have thrown to the dustbin any semblance of principles. Marcos’ father fought the communists throughout his 14-year dictatorship, with the CPP even undertaking the sordid Plaza Miranda bombing in 1971 for Filipinos to blame him. On the other hand, the elder Marcos jailed and killed thousands of Party members during his regime.

Conti

This alliance is most clearly evident in the fact that a longtime Party cadre, Kristina Conti, a nominee of the party-list Bayan Muna, had managed to infiltrate the International Criminal Court (ICC) and get the rank of Assistant Counsel to the Prosecutor. With ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan — who in 2021 replaced the first prosecutor, Fatou Bethsouda, who went after then-president Rodrigo Duterte starting in 2018 — busy in other high-profile ICC cases (as those on the Gaza genocide and the Ukraine war), which he prefers, the ICC has practically given Conti the task of prosecuting Duterte.

How anomalous can an ICC case be? The prosecutor is a cadre of the Communist Party against which Duterte waged an intensified campaign, leading to the decimation of the New People’s Army (NPA) from 20,000 rifles at the start of his administration to 1,500.

It is not just Conti’s legal skills and energies that will be employed to get Duterte convicted. The CPP has mobilized its mass organizations and even cadres in Congress to undertake a massive propaganda campaign to portray Duterte’s intensified police operations as crimes against humanity, similar to past ICC cases. This is really such a stretch, as those involved African defendants (from Congo, the Central African Republic and Uganda), whom the world media had exposed as undertaking genocides against tribes who were their own tribe’s sworn enemies. The world was shocked by these cases as the perpetrators ordered entire villages killed with machetes and the children recruited as soldiers.

The Party’s party-list representatives in congressional hearings last year were among the most vociferous in their attempts to claim Vice President Sara Duterte as corrupt and her father guilty of crimes against humanity.

Muted

The Marcos-CPP alliance has also been obvious in that the CPP’s front organizations have muted criticisms against the administration over such issues as the transfer of P80 billion in PhilHealth funds to dubious projects, the rash of kidnappings and the United States’ installation of Typhon missiles in the country.

Quite ironically, the communists have been adept in campaigning on issues of human rights violations. Since its beginnings in the 1970s, the CPP has used the issue of the state’s alleged human rights violations to demonize the Marcos dictatorship. It has, in the past 50 years, mastered the tactics of effectively using alleged human rights violations as an issue against the state and had planted cadres or sympathizers in human rights organizations here and all over the world, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the huge organizations that have been feeding the ICC with false information. It has recruited idealistic, bleeding-heart lawyers to its stable of human rights attorneys, housed in the National Union of People’s Lawyers, headed by the longtime personal counsel of CPP founder Jose Maria Sison. Scores of NPA commanders had been released on grounds that their human rights were violated.

An NPA fighter kills the Republic’s soldiers in ambushes. He is captured and brought to the courts. He cries to high heavens that his human rights have been violated. Leftist lawyers get to release him on technicalities. He returns to the hills or asks for a less risky task. That’s what the CPP has been doing.

However, the CPP, in fact, had realized in the 1980s that the way to demonize Marcos can’t be through its local courts, whose judges are closer to the ground to know the reality.

Thus, in its campaign against Marcos, the communists filed civil cases solely in the US Honolulu Circuit Court, and thus were able to fool its naïve judge — who probably thought the Philippines was one of those brutal Latin American banana republics — that there were widespread violations of human rights, through summary killings, illegal detentions and torture. The communists, therefore, had been able to get that court to order the payment of $2 billion in compensation to 9,541 alleged “human rights” victims.

Thousand

While there were indeed at least a thousand innocent human rights victims, the communists managed to portray CPP cadres, NPA fighters and even Moro National Liberation Front mujahideen as victims, too. Indeed, they were able to get the court to order as much as P2 million in compensation to communist leaders like Sison (and his wife) and to NPA commanders responsible for the killing of policemen and soldiers.

Already, Conti’s propaganda corps are claiming that this feat can be done in the ICC case, that it can be ordered to compensate victims of Duterte’s war on illegal drugs. Thus, there has been a rush of people claiming they were victims of Duterte’s antidrug campaign. Even the sensationally ignorant Malacañang spokesman Claire Castro-Seechung claimed that the Anti-Money Laundering Council can freeze Duterte’s assets to be used for such compensation.

The communists have employed a similar tactic in the case of Duterte, and had not filed a single case against him as an individual and his other officials, although cases had been filed successfully against policemen who were allegedly involved in the Duterte government’s intensified police operations against illegal drugs. The intent here is to claim that the ICC has the right to try Duterte since there is no legal system operating in the country, and that no Filipino is bold enough to file charges against him. Indeed, even former senator Leila de Lima and other Duterte haters were told by the Marcos-CPP camp that the ICC case cannot push ahead if they filed cases against Duterte.

You will be voting for this country’s ruin if you vote for anybody or any party-list with the Marcos-CPP Alyansa.

---

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

Twitter: @bobitiglao

Archives: www.rigobertotiglao.com

Book orders: www.rigobertotiglao.com/shop

The post ‘Alyansa’ an illusion; the real, dangerous one is the Marcos-CPP alliance first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

‘Alyansa’ an illusion; the real, dangerous one is the Marcos-CPP alliance
Source: Breaking News PH