EDITORIAL | Resistance as a racket

For the longest time, the Communist Party of the Philippines–New People’s Army–National Democratic Front of the Philippines has robbed the Filipino indigenous people of their narrative of resistance and materially benefited from it. And even after their defeat and retreat from many ancestral domains, the CPP-NPA continues to exploit the narrative of the IP for its political and economic survival.

The CPP and its legal national democratic organizations remain convinced that they alone hold the narrative to IP resistance. They frame campaigns to demand the reopening of Lumad schools or the exoneration from criminal liability of their CPP cadres who subjected children to unconscionable harm as their own struggle in disguise. But IP communities know that their histories are older than the Party, and that their futures need not be dictated by it.

Indeed, the CPP has forfeited any moral standing in many IP areas. It has a long record of atrocities against the IPs, from extra-judicial killings of IP elders to the systematic recruitment and exploitation of children and destruction of ancestral communities. The 7th UN Report on Children and Armed Conflict identified the NPA as responsible for 41 percent of grave violations against children. Former members revealed that the so-called Lumad schools closed in 2019 were in fact grooming grounds where minors were indoctrinated to normalize the CPP-NPA’s armed struggle. This while the NDFP hypocritically cites international child-protection conventions while rejecting the 2002 Optional Protocol banning such recruitment. 

These violations, compounded by enforced evacuation of communities to defend the “base” and save “our schools,” practically use IP villages as human shields. By exploiting ancestral grievances and masking coercion as “liberation,” the CPP-NPA turned ancestral lands into battlefields and co-opted genuine voices of self-determination.

In particular, the current campaign to reopen so-called Lumad schools or “Defend Talaingod 13” are more for international fundraising narratives than rooted community struggles. They have become tools to mobilize foreign funds and sustain the movement’s relevance. The struggle of IP should never be allowed to become a milch cow for the movement’s ledger ever again. With revolutionary taxation nearing zero, many national democratic organizations now lean heavily on overseas donations, messaging, and social media spectacles. Because how can they otherwise? The CPP and its legal machinery can hardly set foot in IP communities, let alone carry  genuine mass movement.

As the nation celebrates National Indigenous Peoples Month under Proclamation No. 1906 this October, what is to be done? To be sure, IP communities across the country are actively fighting the CPP’s gatekeeping of their narrative. We can support this by championing IP autonomy in their narrative and resisting the CPP’s claim that it alone speaks for the IPs. This also means that the historical harm caused by the CPP-NPA should be brought to the forefront, and so should the pursuit of justice for its victims. Former rebels’ are more than ready to aid this campaign for restorative justice.

We must also demand child safety and not propaganda. The focus should be on constructing legitimate Lumad and IP schools under the Department of Education to  ensure child protection, local governance, and transparency, not on reopening the CPP’s pseudo-Lumad schools that groomed children to violent extremism.

At the same time, we must hold funding accountable. Donations for IP causes, especially from foreign organizations, should not be audited judiciously. Aid should build classrooms, water systems, and livelihoods, and not serve the CPP’s survival. We must also press for measurable service delivery. Land rights, teacher deployment, potable water, and rural health clinics must match the rhetoric this October. Anniversaries of struggle should be matched by anniversaries of actual deliverables.

Finally, we must stand with IP communities, and not the organizations that exploited them. True solidarity rejects any actor that coerces, recruits, or silences dissent from a marginalized sector. Our test should be simple: does it empower the Lumad, or does it use them? Does it uphold consent, or manipulate it for political ends?

Dignity for the indigenous people means autonomy in voice and their narrative and not as an attachment to some ideology’s slogan.