Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

NEW PEOPLE’S ARMY • 491necessary to achieve this goal. Since the end of the apartheid regimeand the election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa on 10May 1994, the membership of this group has declined.NEW ARMENIAN RESISTANCE. See ARMENIAN SECRETARMY FOR THE LIBERATION OF ARMENIA; JUSTICE COM-MANDOS OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE.NEW PEOPLE’S ARMY (NPA). The Communist Party of the Philippines,Marxist-Leninist (CPP-ML) founded the NPA on 29 March1969 as its armed wing to carry out protracted armed struggle to overthrowthe current constitutional government in favor of a “people’sdemocratic state.” The roots of the NPA reach back to the Huks, orHukbalahap, a group of Communist anti-Japanese resistance fightersduring World War II. Chinese state sponsorship of the NPA beganon 26 December 1968 when the CPP broke ranks with the MoscowalignedPhilippines Communist Party but ended in 1976, and followingsome retrenchment, the group began to grow again by 1982, financingitself through extortion and arming itself by raids on police and armyunits. While the NPA is the armed wing of the outlawed CPP-ML, ithas established its own legal political front, the National DemocraticFront, which operates openly in Manila. From a peak membership ofup to 25,000 in the early 1980s, the NPA is now estimated to havearound 16,000 members with a larger support network.Since 1987 the head of the CPP-ML, Jose Maria Sison, had beenresiding in the Netherlands, where he exploited his political refugeestatus to direct the CCP from Utrecht. Although Sison was active in2001 in the political campaign to unseat President Joseph Estrada,he was later arrested by the Dutch National Criminal InvestigationDepartment in Utrecht on 28 August 2007 for his suspected role inthree political assassinations within the Philippines in 2003–2004and has been facing prosecution for these crimes in the Netherlandssince 30 August 2007. While he was released from detention on 13September 2007, his assets were subject to freezing/sesquestrationby the European Union, and on 5 June 2008 the Netherlands DistrictCourt of The Hague ruled that his prosecution could be resumed.While originally a rural guerrilla insurgency following Maoist preceptsof guerrilla warfare, in recent years the NPA has involved itselfincreasingly in urban operations and in entrepreneurial terrorismin targeting foreign investors and contract workers for extortion or