MANILA, 11 March 2007 — Police searched the home of a left-wing lawmaker yesterday, three days after a court ordered his arrest for multiple murders in the 1980s, but their quarry was nowhere to be found.

Ocampo’s wife said her husband was just biding his time, but also warned that he might be forced to rejoin the underground movement if the government continues to deny left-wing groups an active role in mainstream politics.

About 20 police officers, most of them in plain clothes, rummaged through Satur Ocampo’s warehouse and bedroom, opened closets, searched under the bed and questioned his wife on his whereabouts.

“I told them my husband was not here,” Carolina Malay-Ocampo, the lawmaker’s wife and a journalism professor at the University of the Philippines, told reporters after the raid on their residence in suburban Quezon City.

“They looked for my husband everywhere, even underneath our bed. I told them to give him some time to show up and prove his innocence.”

On Wednesday, a court on the central island of Leyte issued an arrest warrant against Ocampo and the leadership of the communist movement and its military arm, the New People’s Army (NPA), for the murder of 69 former comrades suspected of betraying the rebel cause.

Ocampo, a two-term member of the lower house of Congress, contested the charges, telling a clandestine news conference he was in military detention when the rebels began killing members suspected of spying for the government.

Ocampo was an economic journalist for a local newspaper when the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law in 1972, forcing him to go underground with the communist rebels.

Captured in 1976, he was tried in a military court and detained until 1985 when he escaped and rejoined the guerrillas. Re-arrested two years later, Ocampo was freed in 1992 when the government opened peace talks with the communists. He won a seat in Congress in 2001 as a member of the Bayan Muna (Nation First) party-list group.

“This government is afraid of the presence of Bayan Muna in Congress,” Ocampo told reporters before going into hiding on Thursday.

In February 2006, Crispin Beltran, a left-wing labor leader and lawmaker, was arrested at his home in Bulacan province, north of the capital, over a murder case in the 1980s.

One year later, after left-wing lawmakers were accused of conniving with rogue soldiers in an alleged plot to grab power, Beltran remains under arrest in bed in a state-owned hospital.

Plain Harassment

Critics of the administration continued to slam the warrant of arrest against Ocampo.

Former Vice President Teofisto Guingo-na said in a statement that he stood “against the arrest” of Ocampo in “what appears as violations of the rule of law, the granting of full freedoms to candidates during candidates, and the long time policy of government to pursue peace.”

Guingona, who headed the government panel in short-lived peace talks from 1986 to 1987, during which the leftist lawmaker was a member of the NDF panel, said Ocampo had heeded calls to “abandon rebellion and use elections and other peaceful democratic means to pursue programs in government.”

It was, therefore, “ironic that the government which (Ocampo) serves now seeks to block his use of those democratic means.”

Human rights lawyer Neri Colmenares, one of Ocampo’s counsel and a fellow Bayan Muna nominee in the May party-list elections, called the raid “underhanded” and “harassment.” He said he was at a press conference called by lawyers’ groups in support of Ocampo and had only been informed of the raid on the lawmaker’s home.

He added they would “look into the circumstances of the raid because I hear they conducted an illegal search. They should remember that a warrant of arrest does not give them the right to search.”

Activist and civil libertarian Renato “RC” Constantino Jr. called the arrest warrant on Ocampo “for murders committed during the time of Marcos, while he (Ocampo) was in jail is so ridiculously silly — it’s dangerous.”

Grievously Wrong

Administration senatorial candidate Joker Arroyo yesterday strongly urged the military to stop digging into past cases involving leftist leaders, saying the latest arrest warrants issued against them were “grievously wrong.”

“The armed services must restrain itself from digging into the past which was intended to be buried by past administrations,” he said in a statement.

Arroyo noted that during the presidencies, both Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos adopted policies that “were designed to put to rest the past adventurisms of the Left and Right.”

Aquino immediately lifted President Ferdinand Marcos’ suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus while Ramos backed the repeal of the anti-subversion law.

Arroyo reminded the military that Ramos’ policy benefited not only the communists but “equally benefited the military rebels who rebelled against President Aquino... and even enabled the detained Gringo Honasan to run and win a seat in the Senate.”

He urged the military to “re-think its position.”

“It has a responsibility to protect the State and the people from current elements that would want to subvert its authority,” Arroyo said. “At the same time, it has also a duty to adhere to established government policy that what is past is past, otherwise, there will be no stability in government policy.”