REFILING: FEATURE: The Philippines relives a dark rebel past

MT. SAPANG DAKU, Philippines, Sept. 5 Kyodo

(EDS: THREE PHOTOS ACCOMPANYING THIS STORY ARE AVAILABLE VIA E-MAIL. THE PHOTO ADVISORY IS TO FOLLOW)

All is quiet except for the sound of nature in the mountainous Mt. Sapang Daku region in the central Philippines.

No one would suspect it had witnessed scores of murders in a wave of paranoia that swept the Philippine rebel movement nearly two decades ago.

Almost inaccessible on foot because of steep slopes and thick forest, the place was a stronghold of Maoist guerillas until the recent discovery of a mass grave of at least 100 people allegedly killed in a purge by the rebels of their comrades.

A patch of forest no more than 100 meters square in Leyte Province about 620 kilometers southeast of Manila is pitted with shallow graves where guerrillas suspected as infiltrators into the rebel movement were bludgeoned with wooden clubs and bamboo poles or bayoneted to death.

Most of the skulls still have blindfolds on them and most are cracked, some nearly split in half.

The skeletal remains are intact, still wrapped in the clothes they wore when they were killed.

Standing near the shallow pits up to a meter deep, a forensic expert raised a skull to show how it had been cut in half.

''This one was probably hacked by a bolo,'' he said, referring to a long knife popular among Filipino farmers.

The military and relatives of victims have dug up about 20 graves and the bodies of 67 people have been exhumed since the mass graves -- called by local residents ''The Garden'' -- in the jungles of Inopacan were discovered after the recent arrest of a local rebel leader.

Regional battalion commander Lt. Col Mario Lacurom said as many as 300 bodies could be unearthed at the site.

The killings are supposedly part of ''Operation Anti-Venereal Disease,'' an anti-infiltration campaign by the communists in the mid 1980s to clear out suspected informants and traitors.

The campaign was part of a series of purges in the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People's Army, of what it perceived were military infiltrators and government-sponsored ''deep penetrating agents'' within its ranks, Lacurom said.

Many local residents, who claimed relatives were snatched by rebels in the 1980s and not seen again, endured long hours of walking to reach the graves where they tried to identify remains by the clothing found.

Domingo Eras, Jr., 43, said he positively identified one of the remains as his brother Gregorio, who was wearing a white checkered polo shirt when abducted by rebels in 1985.

Onlookers hope forensic experts can identify all the remains so they can honor their loved ones with proper burials.

No one can say, even within the rebel movement, how many communist cadres were arrested, detained, tortured or killed, but some survivors of the purges say the number could reach 3,000.

Top rebel leaders have acknowledged that some commanders killed 600 to 900 suspected spies from 1985 to 1986 in southern Mindanao.

More than 100 were tortured and killed in a rebel camp south of Manila in 1988 in what was known as the ''Oplan Missing Link'' and a similar operation called ''Olympia'' took place at about the same time in Manila that later became a nationwide campaign against enemy infiltration, according to people who survived the purges.

After learning of the killings, top rebel leaders ordered in 1988 regional commanders who oversaw the purges to stop the killing and release detainees who were still alive.

They launched a ''rectification movement'' to acknowledge the killings as the worst blunder in the history of Marxist insurgency in the Philippines. It was followed by a splintering of the group into various factions.

Robert Francis Garcia, a political instructor in one guerrilla unit, survived the torture and now lives with the trauma of having been tortured by comrades he considered his family.

''The torture is doubly painful because the torturers were our friends,'' Garcia told Kyodo News.

Torturers sometimes slit the skin with a knife or shaved off eyebrows for fun, Garcia said, adding that other times they would sear the skin of their captives with a lamp or force their legs apart and sit on their thighs.

He said a ''standard execution'' meant smashing the head of a captive with a wooden club or stabbing the victim in the heart with a bayonet through the rib cage or down from the collar bone.

In his book ''To Suffer Thy Comrades'' released in 2001, Garcia quoted a cadre: ''One of our companions was brought in front of us. They then turned him around while we waited in suspense. Next thing we knew, the back of his head was hit with a large wooden club. With the third blow on his head, his skull cracked open, and he lay dead on the ground.''

To this day, no perpetrator has been convicted by a court and justice seems painfully slow to survivors who consider the purges as the most flagrant violation of human rights, Garcia said.