Nuevo Ejército del Pueblo
The New People's Army or Nuevo Ejército del Pueblo ( Tagalog : Bagong Hukbong Bayan , Cebuano : Bag-ong Kasundalohan sa Katawhan , English New People's Army , abbreviation NPA ) is a revolutionary communist group in the Philippines , which was founded on March 29, 1969.
history
The NPA is the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (PKP or CCP for short). The organization has an estimated 10,000 members, much fewer than at the time of dictator Ferdinand Marcos , when it had 25,000 to 30,000 members and was represented in over 60 of the country's 73 provinces. In Marcos' time, NPA was also translated as "Nice People Around".
The NPA has its roots in the communist Hukbalahap organization, which originally began as a guerrilla organization against the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II and continued to fight the Philippine government until the 1960s . Then the NPA was re-established. She devoted herself to a revolutionary land reform program to lower rent and improve living conditions through health and literacy programs .
In April 2003, the US designated the group as a foreign terrorist organization . The founder of the NPA, José María Sison , lives in exile in the Netherlands , where he is still supposed to head the NPA and the CPP. The organization is accused of being a group of blackmailers and not a revolutionary group. She is also said to have contacts with the Islamist group Moro Islamic Liberation Front . The NPA mainly operates in rural areas, where they attack the military , the police and, in some cases, US soldiers . Sometimes police officers are members of the association themselves. In 1984 the Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB) split off from the NPA , a terrorist group that also appears in kidnapping, extortion and contract killings.
Procedure
The NPA refers to a further development of Marxism-Leninism , Maoism . The prolonged or protracted people's war , which the NPA also seeks to carry out, is considered to be the military-political basis for this. The protracted People's War means that warfare against the enemy must begin from a revolutionary basis , which is ideally the place in the theater of war with the lowest presence of the enemy and where it can be operated at the same time in cooperation with the local population (therefore people's war). The enemy's positions are then to be conquered piece by piece from the periphery in order to ultimately also be able to conquer the cities.
Currently the NPA controls mostly remote (peripheral) areas on the island of Mindanao, but also holds some areas in the north and in the central regions. The NPA is already carrying out socialist land reforms in individual areas.
literature
- Action group Philippines (ed.): Philippines - when the bamboo breaks (= Rororo. Rororo current. 5739). Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1986, ISBN 3-499-15739-X .