COMMENTARY
Posted: 1:08 AM (Manila Time) | Jan. 28, 2003
By Nathan Gilbert Quimpo
Inquirer News Service
Doddering target
The vindictiveness, viciousness and long memories of at least a number of those in the CPP leadership should not be underestimated. I distinctly remember an account narrated to me by Charlie (pseudonym), one of Kintanar’s closest deputies.
Sometime in the mid-80s, the NPA General Command received from the CPP leadership an “order of battle,” i.e., a list of persons to be executed. The list, the GC was told, had originated from prison.
One of the names near the top of the list was an unfamiliar one. When the GC asked for clarification, they were told that the person concerned was a “Lavaite” (one belonging to the pro-Soviet Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, from which Sison and company had broken away before reestablishing the CPP along the Maoist line in 1968).
In preparation for the kill, the GC sent an operative to Central Luzon to check the “Lavaite’s” whereabouts. That proved easy. Neighbors simply pointed to his house, and said, “That’s him, in the yard.”
The operative drew near but soon stopped dead in his tracks. He was shocked to find an old man, sweeping fallen leaves, doing so very slowly. Reporting back to the GC, he asked, “Why him? He’s so old. ’Uugod-ugod na!’ (Already doddering!)” Kintanar and company quietly “demoted” the old man to the bottom of the list, thereby saving him from the gunman.
When the story was told to me, I recalled something I had read some time ago: that the intense ideological struggle of the young Maoists in the PKP with the “Lavaite” leadership had been in the 1960s. This meant that someone or some persons in the CPP leadership had not forgotten—or forgiven—those who had opposed and criticized them even after twenty years!
The former NPA chief was tried in absentia by a kangaroo or possibly even fictitious “people’s court” purportedly in 1993. Kintanar’s executioners certainly took their time in meting out the death sentence, but they did not have to wait for Kintanar to get to be an old, doddering man.
If the perpetrators, especially the mastermind, of the Kintanar murder are not apprehended and punished, then the foremost question now can only be: Who’s next in the order of battle?