Those who know me well also know that I can relate. Pinagdaanan ko rin ang landas na yon at, ika nga sa Ingles, I survived “only by the skin of my teeth.”

The death of Alyssa Alano (known as “Ka Kikay”), two children, and other students during a firefight in Toboso, Negros Occidental last week, is a tragedy that should resonate far beyond tactical reports and kneejerk, polarized reactions from social media. From the lens of transitional justice, her death is not merely a casualty of war; it is a profound symptom of the “unresolved” in our national narrative. It is a stark reminder that as long as the roots of armed conflict remain unaddressed, the country will continue to lose its brightest minds.

There is a piercing grief in the death of scholars in the hills. Scholars deconstruct and imagine new worlds. When a young intellectual decides that the only remaining venue for their scholarship is the armed revolution, it represents our failure to convince them there should be less drastic ways. Each time a student falls in a firefight, we lose a potential architect of our future peace. We are left with the hollow lament of “what could have been” had their brilliance been harnessed for institutional reform rather than extinguished in a mountain encounter.

The Choice and the Cost

This lament is not academic for me; it is visceral. I know the pull of that choice and lived it at one point, enduring the heavy price that comes with it. But my conviction has evolved. While the grievances of the revolution are often legitimate, the method of armed struggle often creates new cycles of trauma that transitional justice seeks to break. We cannot build a “just” society on a foundation of perpetual bloodletting.

The death of young scholars in the course of armed conflict represents a systemic failure of accountability that spans both the state and the revolutionary movement. For transitional justice, accountability goes beyond who pulled the trigger, but about examining structures that allow such tragedies to recur.

State Accountability: The Proportionality of Force

For the state and its armed forces, accountability centers on the principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the Rules of Engagement (ROE). When a firefight results in an excessive casualty count or the death of individuals who might have been in a position to surrender, several questions of accountability arise:

The Principle of Proportionality: Was the level of force justified? With the power and mandate it holds as duty-bearers, the state must be held to a higher standard of accountability and transparency. An independent investigation is clearly warranted here.

Command Responsibility: Were systems in place to ensure soldiers’ actions are put in check? Were they ordered to exercise reasonable restraint or to ensure victory at whatever cost?

CPP-NPA Accountability: The Ethics of Recruitment and Exposure

The CPP-NPA also faces a profound ethical and political accountability regarding its recruitment and the deployment of the youth.

Putting Youth in Harm’s Way: Were the scholars put into the direct line of fire of a modernized state military? If they were indeed just doing “research” and “community work” in areas the movement “controls,” how were they protected? Putting these vulnerable youth in potential and actual battle zones makes their minders accountable as well. Or have these young people decided to become combatants themselves, whether full-time or part-time? If so, then the movement needs to stand by it and be proud of the “martyrdom” in their revolutionary lingo. When scholar Edgar Jopson (“Edjop”) was killed in the line of fire in 1982, comrades never hid the fact that he embraced the armed revolution.

The Mounting Cost: The movement must tally the cumulative damage of this “protracted people’s war.” When a revolutionary strategy results in the consistent death of the youth without achieving tangible societal transformation, the leadership must account for the human cost of their ideological persistence.

As someone who once walked that path and felt the weight of those choices, I see the continuing lack of accountability on either side. The state justifies the “kill” as a victory for anti-insurgency, while the movement frames the “fall” as a glorious sacrifice. Both narratives are convenient propaganda, but both are devastating for the families and the nation. The bottomline is the failure of peace. By insisting on  the decisive defeat of the insurgency on the part of the military; and the primacy of armed struggle on the part of the movement – both parties close off other avenues to pursue reform. They need to acknowledge that the persistence of war-as-policy contributes to the very “cycle of discontent” that prevents long-term peace.

The Peace Imperative

The ultimate accountability for both parties lies in their shared failure to move the struggle from the battlefield to the negotiating table. We must find ways of pursuing societal transformation without the need for arms. The memory of those who have fallen should not be used as fuel for further conflict, but as a solemn motivation to work out a long-lasting solution. Peace is not the absence of struggle; it is the presence of a system where we can struggle for justice without having to die for it.

Both parties should stop using the lives of the youth as currency for their respective agendas. Real accountability means working to resolve the extreme poverty, inequality, institutional corruption, and structural exclusion that make the armed option attractive. Until we effectively address these roots, we are all accountable for the Alyssas we continue to lose.

The header features an oversized painting “Pagpupugay at Pagkilala” created as a tribute to Alyssa Alano and the Toboso 19 by the UP Artists’ Circle Fraternity and Sorority with participation by other artists students on May 5, 2026. This article previously appeared in the author’s FB page and opinion column in Rappler on April 28, 2026. Re-published in Dateline Ibalon with the author’s permission.

About the author

ROBERT FRANCIS B. GARCIA is the author of “To Suffer Thy Comrades: How the Revolution Decimated its Own” on the CPP purges of the 1980s (Anvil, revised edition, 2017). He was Undersecretary at the Office of the Political Adviser for President Benigno S. Aquino III. He previously worked at the UN, Oxfam, ASEAN, and other international organisations. He is the Board Chairman of the Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD) and Founding Chair of the Peace Advocates for Truth, Healing, and Justice (PATH), a human rights organisation. He presently leads the Technical Assistance Team of Governance in Justice (GOJUST) II – Human Rights in UP Diliman.