Once again, young people’s lives are sacrificed to the altar of a war that for more than half a century has yet to end.

Soldiers opened fire quite indiscriminately on 19 alleged communists April 19 in Barangay Salamanca Toboso, Negros Occidental. Among these were young people who have merely gone to peasant communities in an effort to learn and serve and stand in solidarity

Of the 19 slain, only ten were acknowledged by the Communist Party of the Philippines to be NPA members. The rest were non-combatants, peasant advocates and ordinary villagers who were red-tagged and are supposed to be protected under the International Humanitarian Law.

The list of young people killed reads like the casualties of the NPA-AFP skirmishes under the Marcos regime long ago. According to reports, Nichole Ledesma was a journalist. Alyssa Alano was a UP Diliman student leader. Maureen Santuyo was a young peasant advocate and also a student of the UP Open University. Errol Wendel was a peasant organizer, researcher, and artist. Lyle Prijoles was a Filipino-American human rights advocate.

This list reminds me of how some of the best and the brightest in my generation got decimated when martial law was declared. Like these recent casualties, my generation of young people then who went to the hills and died at the foot of some lonely mountain were not exactly communist dissidents. They simply wanted justice and a livable society for the poor. But for want of a compelling ideology that is rooted in the realities of where our people truly are, most were influenced by variants of a marxist ideology that has proven to be without traction because outside of our social and cultural context.

Similarly, the military continues to be driven by the old anti-communist scare of Cold War days. It is a mystery as to why this mythology persists among the current military leadership. There is apparent refusal to sit at the table and negotiate terms to ending the war.

About two and a half years ago, the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front signed the GRP-NDFP Oslo Joint Statement under the auspices of the Royal Norwegian government. Both parties agreed to work for a principled and peaceful resolution of the armed conflict. This gave hope that the country will be able to finally achieve a just and lasting peace.

However, the new Framework Agreement for this round of negotiations appears to be in limbo. Instead, the creation of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), has opened the door to more cases of human rights violations as in the present case. There are reports of public funds for this purpose being used for questionable barangay development programs’ by way of coopting so-called rebels.

The government is aware that the NPA has been whittled down to a ragtag army and a handful of sympathizers. Given this, it may be that it has opted to smash it with an iron fist instead of sitting at the negotiation table.

The Council of Leaders for Peace Initiatives (CLPI), a multisectoral and diverse group of peace advocates from all over the country, has called for the resumption of talks initiated under the auspices of the Royal Norwegian Government. It has warned that as public trust erodes over the massive and deepening corruption crisis that grips the country, the structural grievances that have fueled this conflict will continue.

The killing of a new generation of peasant advocates tells us that the government, in training its guns against its own people, will merely add to the grievances that are at the root of this conflict. It will never put an end to the rise of a new cohort of young people willing to sacrifice and die for the causes they believe in.

The sitting President, Marcos Jr., has only a fragile window to put to right the terrible legacy of state violence that his father began. He can begin to atone for that history by putting an end to this war of attrition that has gone on for more than five decades.

His own political survival might hinge on acknowledging the sins of the father and acting decisively towards the healing of an entire generation’s traumatic memory.

The fallout of the human rights violations of that period pushed an entire generation of socially committed youth to the margins. Those who survived cruel beatings and torture during detention came out with their brains damaged, reduced to vegetable lives. Some fled to the US, mostly ending up living insignificant lives when their talents could have been used for the good of the country.

Those of us who managed to keep our ideals intact as we navigated through the tricky waves of careerism and compromise started NGOs instead. We have a voice, but little else.

Imagine what it would have been like if the best and the brightest of this generation were occupying positions of power and not the corrupt and mediocre leaders who now rule over us.

The lack of a deep bench of competent leaders who can seriously steer this country is partly because an entire generation whose passion for justice and the poor was lost. We may have gotten waylaid ideologically, but it has cost us dearly.

It is time to put an end to this useless war that continues to claim the lives of the best and most committed among our youth.