arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

MANILA (Reuters) - Communist rebels raided a Philippine Army camp and killed 12 people Monday while tens of thousands of workers, singing revolutionary hymns, gave a murdered leftist leader a hero's burial in Manila.

Only two soldiers, both of them wounded, survived Monday's rebel attack.

It was the first major rebel assault on a military target since President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (news - web sites) took office more than three weeks ago in a ``people power'' uprising that ended former actor Joseph Estrada (news - web sites)'s rule.

The attack on an army outpost on Samar island in the central Philippines coincided with Arroyo's efforts to revive stalled peace talks with the Marxist guerrillas.

The dead included 11 soldiers and a militiaman, a military report said. It said the attackers suffered heavy casualties but it gave no figures.

In Manila, workers and students estimated by police to number between 30,000 and 50,000 gathered for the burial of assassinated leftist leader Filemon Lagman. A red flag embossed with the hammer and sickle sign draped Lagman's coffin and white and yellow blossoms smothered the casket as a truck bore his remains along a three-mile route to the cemetery.

Men acting as pall-bearers wore red scarves over their faces to mask their identities.

Mourners carried red flags, turning the funeral march into a massive, flowing red sea.

Waving clenched fists, they shouted, ``The fight goes on.''

Lagman was gunned down by two assassins last week in a Manila university campus.

Police said evidence suggested Lagman, who broke from the mainstream leftist Communist Party of the Philippines in 1995 and organized a militant union, might have been killed by another leftist group.

The attack by 100 New People's Army (NPA) rebels in Samar occurred two days after Arroyo announced she had set up two teams of negotiators to try to re-start negotiations with the Marxist group and with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

The NPA, which operates mainly in northern and central regions of the country, has been fighting for a Marxist state for more than three decades.

The MILF is one of two groups fighting for an Islamic state in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic country.

Talks with the communists collapsed in May 1999 after the rebels accused Manila of violating preliminary agreements.

Negotiations with the Muslim separatists broke down in August last year after the military overran several MILF bases in a major offensive ordered by then president Estrada.

Arroyo has reversed Estrada's tough policy against the two rebel groups, saying the country needed to be united to confront its many economic problems.

The military estimates NPA strength at 11,000 men and the strength of the MILF at 15,000.