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The 1950's Huk uprising was to the Philippines what the Maoist rebellion is to India - the Huk rebels were defeated.
As we struggle to get a handle on the Maoist insurgency that cuts a large swathe of terror across India and threatens to become bolder and bloodier, it's worth recalling how another Asian country, the Philippines, faced a similar ordeal and came out winning. History always has a thing or two to teach if anyone cares to learn.
In basic character and motivation, there's no difference between the Maoist rebellion in India and the Huk uprising in the Philippines in the 1950s. The Huks were the military arm of the Communist Party of the Philippines formed, originally, in 1942 to fight the Japanese occupation forces during World War II. The group's real intention, however, under the leadership of the legendary Luis Taruc, was to enlist peasants, mount a revolutionary war, and take over the government.
And what could be a better battleground than the plains of central Luzon, a rich agricultural area, where a large peasant population worked as tenant farmers on vast estates owned by rich landlords? As the Liberal Party swept the 1946 elections that marked the end of US colonial rule, Taruc retreated to the jungles and declared an open rebellion.
By 1952, the Huks claimed to have 170,000 armed troops and 2 million civilian supporters behind them. In areas they controlled, they killed defiant landlords, set up local governments, and redistributed estate land among landless peasants. They used terror as a weapon, just as the Maoists do, and raids, hold-ups, kidnappings, ambushes, and murders became their modus operandi.
Then came the counter-attack and straightaway involved the military. With special US military assistance, the government of President Manuel Roxas unleashed a fierce retaliation, dubbed the "mailed fist." But, because of its bluntness, it was a misguided campaign. As Roxas' hunter-killers went after the Huks, and the army and civilian guards attacked villages to flush then out, stories of random brutality spread like wildfire and fuelled civilian anger to an extent that threatened to turn the entire government crusade upside down.
At that point, in 1950, President Roxas appointed a new defence minister and, luckily, he happened to be Ramon Magsaysay, a respected liberal politician who later became president himself. It was this appointment and the reforms that followed that finally turned the tide against the Huks.
One part of Magsaysay's reforms, of course, had to be military. But his was a different military approach and went far beyond merely cleansing the ranks of corrupt and incompetent officers who behaved like an army of occupation. Instead of large, sweeping operations that were the practice until then, he formed smaller combat units that could be deployed with minimum preparations and more frequently. The idea was to reduce chances of intelligence leaks, keep the Huks under pressure, and destroy their sense of security.
At the same time, Magsaysay changed the very role of the military. Just as he wanted the forces to kill Huks, he also wanted them to act as ambassadors of goodwill and participate in public services and development activities to gain the people's trust. If any dispute arose between peasants and landlords, army legal officers offered the former free legal counsel. If any case of military abuse was reported, Magsaysay dealt with it personally.
He also changed his own way of functioning. He developed a personal routine that included almost daily excursions into the field to interact with people and assure them of help and protection. He made telegrams free for villagers so that they could communicate with him more often and easily. If he couldn't answer the telegrams personally, he made sure one of his key staff did.
But Magsaysay's tour de force was a programme, called Economic Development Corps (EDCOR), under which captured or surrendering insurgents were resettled on government land far away from the hotbed of central Luzon. They were given titles to their holdings, sealed by the government. There was only one condition: the holdings couldn't be sold or subdivided and must be worked by the owners themselves.
For the rebels who had never owned their own land, EDCOR was a huge deal. The programme became so popular that many resettlement areas had to be opened on the island of Mindanao, and "Land for the Landless," once a Huk slogan, became an effective government weapon. By 1954, eight years after it began, the Huk rebellion was practically over. Taruc surrendered, went to prison, was pardoned by Marcos in 1968, and remained a disillusioned man till his death in 2005 at the age of 91.
In 1969, a splinter group of what remained of the Communist Party formed the New People's Army and launched a new people's war that reverberates to this day in the jungles and hills of northern Philippines. But it's nothing more than just a faint echo of the old battle.
