Jose Maria Sison, Philippine Communist Party Founder, Dies at 83

Jose Maria Sison, the founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its long-running guerrilla insurgency, died on Friday in exile in the Netherlands, where he had lived for decades. He was 83.

His death, in a hospital in Utrecht, was announced by a spokesman for the party, Marco Valbuena, who called him a “great Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thinker” and revolutionary leader. He said Mr. Sison had been hospitalized for two weeks but gave no cause of death.

A government military spokesman, Col. Medel Aguilar, said he believed that it would be hard for the party to replace Mr. Sison and that his death could further weaken the movement. “No one can match his intellect,” he said.

Mr. Sison, a left-wing organizer and poet, founded the party on Dec. 26, 1968, in a clandestine meeting with 13 of his young comrades.

Three months later, joining a rebel leader named Bernabe Buscayno, he established the movement’s armed wing, the New People’s Army, or NPA, with a small force armed in some cases with outdated weapons.

The NPA grew to a force of 25,000 armed guerrillas scattered throughout the Philippines, carrying out raids, assassinations and extortion schemes directed at landowners and becoming a source of instability to the government.

The threat of the communist insurgency was one factor in the ouster in 1986 of President Ferdinand Marcos. The United States, determined that Mr. Marcos’s unpopularity was fueling the growth of the communist opposition, withdrew its support for him.

The party’s political wing, the National Democratic Front, or NDF, has played a role in national politics, but the insurgency today has been weakened by squabbles and factional killings partly instigated by Mr. Sison. Military officials estimate that it has