‘Ideological activism: nothing to be alarmed about’

By declaring support for the Duterte administration’s “whole-of-nation” approach to counterinsurgency, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) regional office in the Cordillera has – wittingly or not – violated its mandate to foster academic freedom, as directed by the 1987 Constitution and the law that created the CHED in 1994.

The violation is contained in a memorandum issued by the regional office last Oct. 21, urging all higher educational institutions under it to take part in the “region-wide removal of subversive materials both in libraries and online platforms.”

The move was made at the behest of the National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC).

“Subversive materials,” says the memo signed by director Demetrio Anduyan Jr., are “literatures [sic], references, publications, resources and items that contain pervasive ideologies of the communist-terrorist groups.” It directs the school officials to surrender these materials to the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA) and to submit an inventory of them to the CHED-CAR.

The NICA acts as the secretariat of the NTF-ELCAC that President Duterte created, through Executive Order No. 70 in December 2018, with him as chairperson.

Groups from the academe and the broad community of human rights defenders have denounced what they called a “brazen attack on academic freedom.”

The former president of the University of the Cordilleras, Ray Salvosa – probably in hindsight as a student activist during the First Quarter Storm of 1970 – noted that the CHED-CAR memo follows the strategy of the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, who declared martial law in 1972.

In the academe, “the search for truth should not have any blindfolds or limits imposed on it… All sides of an issue should be presented,” Salvosa said. “When an institution decides what you can and cannot read, that is the same thing as telling you what you can and cannot think about.”

Students at the University of the Philippines-Baguio belonging to UP Rise (UP Rises Against Tyranny and Dictatorship) debunked the CHED-CAR stance. “Books, resources and other reading materials are not the root cause as to why there is armed conflict in the Philippines,” they said.

Now, how did the CHED-CAR violate the Constitution and the law creating the CHED? These two citations can explain:

• Article XIV, Section 5(2) of the 1987 Constitution succinctly states: “Academic freedom shall be enjoyed in all institutions of higher learning.”

• Republic Act 7722 (Higher Education Act of 1994), in its Section 13 titled Guarantee of Academic Freedom, says: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as limiting the academic freedom of universities and colleges.”

Question: Did the CHED-CAR consult and acquire the approval or acquiescence of its national office before it issued Memorandum 133? If yes, then the Commission itself is wholly complicit.

Before Director Anduyan issued his memo, the Kalinga State University in Tabuk City had already removed publications from its library, after a military-police team visited the library and took away certain books and references. These included handbooks on the agreements signed in the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations, which Duterte had unilaterally “terminated” in 2018.

Two other institutions – the Isabela State University and the Aklan State University (in the Visayas) – have done the same, at the instance of NTF-ELCAC. The ISU president, Ricmar Aquino, reportedly directed the removal of all NDFP handbooks from the main campus library and all 10 other campuses.

Besides violating the Constitution and RA 7722 by complying with Duterte’s EO 70, CHED-CAR has also allowed its office to be instrumentalized by the NTF-ELCAC to pursue two objectives:

• Depict the documents pertaining to the achievements of the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations as “containing pervasive ideologies of the communist-terrorist groups” to justify their inclusion among the reference materials to be purged from the libraries; and

• Resurrect “subversion” as a political offense applied to persons tagged as Leftists and to the materials being purged from the libraries – without an enabling law.

Among the NDFP-published handbooks being removed there is one titled “The GRP-NDFP Peace Negotiations: Major Agreements and Joint Statements, September 1, 1992-June 9, 2019.” It’s a compilation, in facsimile, of every document bearing the signatures of the members of the GRP and NDFP negotiators and witnesses, and the negotiators’ initials on every page of each document.

By condemning this publication as “subversive,” CHED-CAR and NTF-ELCAC effectively implicate the GRP negotiators and witnesses who signed the documents as complicit in their imagined “subversion.” Could it be that denigrating the signed peace accords is intended to buttress presidential peace adviser retired AFP chief Carlito Galvez’s false claim that the negotiations over 24 years had produced “nothing?”

As regards “subversion.” the Anti-Subversion Act of 1957 – which deemed membership in the Communist Party of the Philippines as a crime – was repealed in 1992, at the instance of then president Fidel V. Ramos. The repeal led to Ramos’ reviving and pursuing, throughout his term, the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations, whose initial talks in 1986-87 he himself and then defense chief Juan Ponce Enrile had aborted.

In August 2019, DILG Secretary Eduardo Año (an NTF-ELCAC key player) proposed the revival of the Anti-Subversion Act, purportedly to counter the recruitment of communist rebels among the youth. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra opposed the proposal, stressing that being a CPP member is not a crime; moreover, that “being Leftist is far from being terrorist.”

Notable was Guevarra’s statement: “As long as activism remains in the realm of ideology, there is nothing to be alarmed about.” His statement squelches the CHED-CAR memo, which says: “It is our moral consciousness not to allow our youth to be ingrained with peace-detrimental ideologies that could turn them as subversive and become communist-terrorist.”

As a coda, think about this: Cordillera student leaders report that the CHED-CAR sponsored one youth/student seminar wherein Sandro Marcos, son of Ferdinand Jr., was the “inspirational speaker.” His aunt Imee Marcos (has she forgotten?) performed a similar role during the early years of the martial-law regime.

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