Bulatlat - The Philippines's alternative weekly newsmagazine

This story was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 4, February 27-March 5, 2005

Fil-Canadian Groups Call Bello A ‘Pseudo Progressive’

When Walden Bello, a self-proclaimed Filipino progressive intellectual, goes to Vancouver, Canada on March 18-19 to deliver a speech in connection with the second year of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he may find himself without a sizeable audience.

By Bulatlat

This is because large Filipino-Canadian groups are expected to boycott him following their withdrawal from the Stop the War Coalition (Stopwar.ca) in protest of the coalition’s decision to invite Bello as a speaker.

The long-standing member-organizations of the Stopwar.ca, namely, the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance, Filipino Nurses Support Group, SIKLAB (Overseas Filipino Workers Organization) and the B.C. Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, withdrew from the coalition Feb. 17. The decision to withdraw was backed by nine other large organizations of Filipino-Canadians.

In a statement emailed to Bulatlat, the groups decried the coalition’s move to reject their proposal to remove Bello as speaker in the March 18-19 anti-war mobilization, by a 12-9 vote which was clinched, they said, only because “each member of the coordinating committee had an additional vote against one vote for every ordinary member organization.”

The groups withdrew from the coalition as a principled decision, saying that the coordinating committee’s vote was a “backward and reactionary position.”

The Filipino-Canadian groups called Bello “an obscure and insignificant figure in left politics in the Philippines…(who) has been hobnobbing around the world crying foul in intellectual and academic circles wantonly and carelessly claiming that he has been put on a fictitious ‘hit list’ by the Philippine revolution.”

“Hit list”

Bello, who is also president emeritus of the Akbayan political party, and manages the Ford Foundation-funded Focus on the Global South, has been denounced by various groups in the Philippines and abroad for waging a disinformation campaign about an alleged “hit list” crafted, he said, by Jose Maria Sison, senior political consultant to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), and naming a number of legitimate militant groups as “front organizations” of the underground Left.

“Bello’s irresponsible claims,” said the Filipino-Canadian groups, “clearly falls in line with the current attempt of U.S. imperialism and the Arroyo government to vilify Professor Sison as a ‘terrorist’ and force the Philippine revolutionary forces to capitulate.”

The groups denounced the Jesuit-educated Bello as a “pseudo progressive” who cannot speak either for the progressive movement in the Philippines or the Canada-based network of solidarity and support groups.

Meanwhile, the Stopwar.ca coordinating committee has also been criticized for inviting speakers to the anti-war mobilization without informing the member organizations. Stopwar signed a petition circulated by Bello against Sison and the Communist Party of the Philippines without consulting its constituents, it was also reported. Bulatlat

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