Defense chief: Talks better off without Joma

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana. INQUIRER PHOTO / NINO JESUS ORBETA

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana on Friday said the peace talks between the government and communist rebels would make more progress if Jose Maria Sison, founding chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), had no role in the negotiations.

Lorenzana slammed Sison’s “childish tantrums” when the exiled former CPP leader on Friday said it would be easier and more productive for the rebels to take part in the movement to oust President Duterte than continue negotiating peace with the current administration.

“I am sure that once you are out of the picture, true peace will have a chance to become a reality and you will be consigned to the dustbin of history,” Lorenzana said.

“Mr. Sison, you know that the peace talks are the only thing that is keeping you in the limelight. Without it you are irrelevant,” he added.

Mr. Duterte’s actions since he took office in 2016 showed he was not interested in a political settlement of the nearly 50-year-old insurgency but only in the “capitulation and pacification” of the CPP and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), Sison, chief political consultant to the communist-led National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) in the talks, said in a statement on Thursday.

“Based on the implications drawn from the current impasse, the NDFP can no longer negotiate with a [government] that is headed by Duterte,” Sison said. “So long as he heads the [government], the Filipino people, especially the oppressed and exploited, cannot expect any benefit from negotiating with the Duterte regime.”

Sison’s ‘bluster’

Lorenzana said it was the NPA that was “antipoor” for sabotaging “propeople projects by burning equipment and intimidating contractors, which stalls development in the countryside.”

He added that NPA guerrillas no longer believe in Sison’s “bluster” and were surrendering in “droves” to live peacefully and productively.

Military spokesperson Col. Edgard Arevalo said in a separate statement that the NPA  lost 7,531 fighters, most of whom had surrendered to the government, in the first six months this year.

Mr. Duterte had brushed off Sison’s statement.

“If they are not willing to talk to me, that’s fine, I have no problem. So we continue with the war,” he told reporters in Bohol province on Thursday.

“If you want to cease overthrowing governments, fine. You want to talk? Come here. If you don’t want to, fine,” he said.

Clarification

On Friday, Sison clarified that “not once” has he terminated the talks and his statement on Thursday was his personal view on the state of the negotiations after the government canceled the resumption of the formal talks scheduled for late June in Oslo, Norway.

“The reports that I ended the peace talks are wrong,” Sison told the Inquirer in an online interview.

He said only the NDFP’s national council could “make the decision to suspend, cancel or terminate the peace negotiations with (the government) and (it) has not yet made such a decision.”

NDFP chief negotiator Fidel Agcaoili on Friday said the media misinterpreted Sison’s statement.

“No, we did not end the peace talks,” Agcaoili told the Inquirer in a separate online interview from Utrecht, the Netherlands, where he and Sison live in exile.

Review of agreements

Agcaoili said they will wait for the results of the review of the various agreements reached in informal talks between the government and NDFP negotiators before deciding on whether to pursue the talks.

Jesus Dureza, Mr. Duterte’s peace adviser, has said the talks were just postponed for three months to allow public consultations on the agreements.

These, he said, would build both goodwill and support for the peace negotiations among the people.

Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III, chief of the government peace panel, on Friday said some groups, which he did not identify, were against peace.

“We try not to be distracted by these groups,” he said.

He downplayed the harsh verbal exchange between Mr. Duterte and Sison, who was one of the President’s college professors, saying these were “words of endearment” between a teacher and his student.

In a separate statement on Friday, the CPP said it acknowledged Sison’s pessimism about the future of the talks under the Duterte administration.

“As allied members of the NDFP, the party and the NPA await the convening of the NDFP national council and the issuance of its decision soon,” the CPP said.

“Indeed, it has been starkly clear that peace talks with the (government) under Duterte was going nowhere. Duterte has proved himself a stubborn antipeace President and warmonger,” it said.

It said the party leadership and its National Operations Command have “issued orders and directives” to the NPA to “frustrate” the government’s counterinsurgency program called “Oplan Kapayapaan.” —WITH REPORTS FROM JAYMEE T. GAMIL, DELFIN T. MALLARI JR., JOVIC YEE AND JULIE M. AURELIO