LEST WE--most importantly, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and AFP chief Gen. Hermogenes Esperon--forget, the Anti-Subversion Act was passed when the Hukbalahap had been crushed, not to make possible its defeat. The law was proposed by the Magsaysay administration but it was passed only in 1957, early during the Garcia administration (it thus predates Malaysia's Internal Security Act by three years)--at a time when the government no longer considered the Huks a serious threat. The law was meant as a preventive measure--to preclude the resurgence of rebellion.

Therefore, when the President and her open-to-extension AFP chief of staff proposed the revival of the Anti-Subversion Law, on the grounds it would be a vital tool for defeating the New People's Army, they did so from ignorance. We can't help but be concerned over a government that intends to crush an insurgency, and yet remains woefully ignorant about the lessons that must be learned from successful counterinsurgency efforts here and in neighboring nations.

In modern history, two of the most successful counterinsurgency efforts took place in Malaya (today's Malaysia) and the Philippines. And these were directed against home-grown communist rebellions. They both began in the same year, 1946, went through a similar period of lack of success in the first three years, and basically ended a year apart from each other--1957 in the Philippines and 1958 in Malaya.

In both efforts, success was made possible by shifting to the use of small anti-guerrilla units which, skilled in tracking, camouflage and close-hand fighting, aggressively pursued the enemy. This approach was accompanied by shrewd parallel efforts of the governments of both countries to reclaim the moral high ground--the Philippines, through clean elections in 1953 and President Ramon Magsaysay's charismatic and reform-oriented leadership; and Britain, by convincing the Malayans that independence would be granted after communism shall have been crushed. Media in both countries, too, proved generally supportive of the government troops.

Yet both nations crowned their successes with laws meant to ensure no communist movement could ever rise again. The Philippines did so by means of the Anti-Subversion Act; Malaysia did so, by reenacting, after independence, its own Internal Security Act (ISA). The path pursued by both nations, with regard to these laws, is instructive.

The Anti-Subversion Law, in the hands of a Republic grown enfeebled and corrupt, became a favorite tool of a dictatorship incapable of defeating a new Communist Party. Malaysian governments enacted periodic amendments such that Reginald Hugh Hickling, the British lawyer who drafted the colonial-era Internal Security Act (and who helped draft the Malaysian Constitution) would later say, "I could not imagine then that the time would come when the power of detention, carefully and deliberately interlocked with Article 149 of the Constitution, would be used against political opponents, welfare workers and others dedicated to nonviolent, peaceful activities."

The recent round of anti-government demonstrations in Malaysia has led Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, formerly ambivalent about, if not critical of, the ISA, to announce he will implement it without remorse. Here at home, of course, after the Ramos administration's peace initiatives, which included repealing the Anti-Subversion Act, the present administration has never quite abandoned the hope that the law can be revived. In fact, it has begun to actively lobby for its reenactment--using Malaysia's and Singapore's ISA as a model.

We doubt that the dream of a revived Anti-Subversion Law includes retaining the safeguards the statute had against possible abuse of power--e.g., requiring fiscals to build a prima facie case, which could be contested in court by the accused, "who shall have the right to be represented by counsel, to testify, to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to cross-examine witnesses against him." And which penalized providing false testimony.

Why do we express this doubt? Because in their recent statements, Esperon and those lobbying for the law's resurrection indicate that they are more intent in a law that establishes guilt by association than in the safeguards such a law should contain. The proposal to revive the law discloses a frustration with democracy; it does not reflect a shrewd audit of the necessary tools for defending the Republic.