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
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.
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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