Throughout 2024, frequent armed clashes have continued between the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The long-running conflict has endured despite the significant weakening of the NPA and recent efforts to establish a peacebuilding process that aims to bring an end to its insurgency.
At the end of November last year, a high-ranking delegation from Manila met with the CPP’s political wing, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), in Oslo, the first such talks to be held in six years. In a signed joint statement the two sides agreed to a “principled and peaceful resolution of the armed conflict” and to address the “deep rooted socioeconomic and political grievances” that have long fueled the insurgency.
While the talks were heralded as a breakthrough at the time, it soon became evident that significant obstacles to peace remained. Less than a year later, it appears that such concerns were well-warranted, as the violence has continued, and a pervasive atmosphere of mutual mistrust persists.
After a brief respite in the conflict following the signing of the joint statement, the NPA resumed attacks on government forces while the AFP continued its counter-insurgency campaign against the weakened yet resilient rebels. According to the most recent Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Asia-Pacific dataset, there have been 128 armed clashes between the NPA and the AFP this year, which have killed 106 suspected NPA militants and 15 Filipino soldiers.
On September 11, four members of the NPA were killed in armed clashes with the AFP in Peñablanca town, Cagayan. The clashes were just the latest iteration of a conflict that has been waged over five decades across the Philippine archipelago and has cost the lives of an estimated 40,000 civilians, soldiers, and rebels. The rebellion is considered Asia’s longest-running communist insurgency and one of the world’s most enduring armed conflicts.
During a visit to a tactical command post following the recent clashes, AFP chief Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. congratulated the troops on the successful operation in Peñablanca and emphasized the AFP’s commitment to end the insurgency. He also said, “your dedication and courage are crucial as we transition to territorial defense operations.” Brawner’s remarks are worth noting as they directly relate to two key issues currently facing the Philippines.
First, the military is committed to continuing its counterinsurgency campaign of definitively defeating the NPA. Second, the AFP is seeking to shift its focus from internal security threats to territorial defense in response to the increased tensions with China in the South China Sea. The Oslo joint statement actually made specific reference to “the foreign threats facing the country,” and that both sides recognized “the need to unite as a nation” in order to resolve these and other challenges.
The ongoing commitment of the AFP to continuing its counterinsurgency campaign with the stated goal of “ending” the NPA is being carried out concurrently with the Marcos administration’s approach of advocating for a peacebuilding process. This process entails exploratory talks with the NDFP, amnesties for current and former NPA members, and government-funded development projects in regions the military designates as “rebel-free.” However, the implementation of these projects has so far been varied across different provinces.
According to Michael Hart, editorial and social media coordinator of the Pacific Review journal at the University of Warwick, the current approach can be viewed as a dual-track process. He describes the process as being one in which “the government engages in peace talks with the NDFP at the national level, while the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and the Philippine military continue to degrade the insurgency on the ground, as that would inevitably weaken the rebels’ negotiating position.”
While the security forces have remained openly skeptical of achieving a peaceful solution to the conflict, the CPP has not given them much reason to alleviate their misgivings. At the end of December last year less than a month after the signing of the Oslo agreement and on the CPP’s 55th anniversary, the CPP announced its third rectification movement, aimed at establishing more guerilla fronts and bases, and its intention to continue “basic or annihilative tactical offensives” against “isolated and detached units of the enemy.” It’s worth noting that the CPP statement was issued a day after an armed clash with the AFP on Christmas day that killed nine NPA fighters.
In response to the CPP’s statement, the National Security Council said it was “very perplexed and disappointed” and that the NPA was “determined to regroup and rebuild what remains of its forces, to continue its protracted war in hopes of achieving its end goal of overthrowing our democratic government.”
As counter-insurgency operations intensified, the CPP released another statement at the end of March that was even more escalatory than the previous one. In it, the CPP ordered the NPA to carry out an “all-out effort” to launch a new tactical offensive “to frustrate the brutal campaign of encirclement and suppression being waged by the U.S.-Marcos regime and shatter the reign of terror of the AFP in the countryside.”
By this point, the escalatory rhetoric from both sides was markedly different from the conciliatory tone of the Oslo joint statement. In July, National Security Adviser Eduardo Año stated that the NTF-ELCAC would “completely crush” the NPA by the end of Marcos’s presidential term. Similar declarations have been made by numerous previous administrations, without success.
After extended periods of little to no dialogue, the government recently announced it had re-engaged in exploratory talks with the NDFP. On September 2, Carlito Galvez Jr., the presidential adviser on peace, reconciliation, and unity, proclaimed that the government was “very optimistic” that a final peace agreement could be reached before the end of Marcos’s term.
At the same time, ongoing military advances have led more hawkish members of the military to believe that there is little point in negotiating with an enemy that has proven it cannot be trusted and is on the verge of defeat. By all accounts, the rebels are currently on the defensive and have been significantly weakened.
As of mid-August, the government estimated the number of NPA fighters at between 1,200 and 2,000, which it claims are operating across five weakened guerilla fronts. This is significantly down from the 89 NPA fronts that were active as recently as 2018 and the estimated 25,000 fighters that it fielded at the movement’s peak in the 1980s.
While the communist insurgency has mainly been pushed back into its traditional strongholds of Bicol, Samar, Negros, and parts of Mindanao, ongoing community support has made efforts to conduct further operations against the rebels an onerous task for the security forces. In many instances, heavy-handed counter-insurgency operations have produced greater resentment in local communities, particularly in some indigenous communities, which have in turn provided new recruits and vital community support for the NPA.
Although the NPA does appear to be in relative decline, with significantly reduced capabilities and territorial influence, its resilience and deep-rooted support in impoverished and remote communities have greatly complicated the AFP’s goal of decisively defeating the insurgency. While a ceasefire agreement seems like a logical first step in a possible peacebuilding process, mutual distrust, both sides’ prioritization of short-term military gains, and the rebels’ history of opportunistically using such agreements to rebuild and regroup make such an agreement seem currently unlikely.
It does also seem, however, that the rebels may not have the ability to rebuild and regroup to quite the same extent as during past ceasefires. Many top-ranking members of the CPP leadership have been killed in recent years, and the party’s founder Jose Maria Sison died in self-exile in the Netherlands in 2022. Georgi Engelbrecht, senior analyst for the Philippines at the International Crisis Group, told The Diplomat that recent setbacks and military pressure from the AFP had “further weakened the movement” and that “it would be difficult for the insurgency to revive itself.”
However, he also said that “you cannot kill an idea with bullets,” and that a definitive end to the conflict will require the government to “tackle the root causes” of the insurgency in socio-economically marginalized regions of the country. To do so, it will need to transition from some of the more cosmetic approaches of previous peacebuilding initiatives to more consultative and transformative policies. Such policies should be aimed at bringing real development to these remote regions while simultaneously promoting reconciliation with local communities. However, given the current weakened state of the insurgency, the government may have little incentive to pursue long-term peacebuilding initiatives of this kind.
For the time being it appears as though a potential path to peace for Asia’s longest-running communist insurgency will be long and fraught, with many challenges and setbacks along the way. It will ultimately require both sides to overcome the pervasive atmosphere of mutual mistrust before the final steps can be taken.