President Rodrigo Roa Duterte. PRESIDENTIAL PHOTO
President Rodrigo Duterte said he was still open to peace negotiations with communist rebels but didn’t want to hold talks with any of their top leaders and chief negotiators.
He also suggested that they must first abandon their armed struggle, which the rebels have repeatedly said they would not do before a final peace deal.
In a message intended for exiled rebel leaders, he said: “You come (here), cut and cut cleanly. You adopt the democracy that we find ourselves in.”
Jose Maria Sison, founding chair of the 50-year-old Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), Fidel Agcaoili, head of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) and Luis Jalandoni, Agcaoili’s predecessor as chief rebel peace negotiator in the aborted talks, have lived for decades in the Netherlands.
Ousting Duterte is impossible
Meanwhile, a former member of the communist New People’s Army has criticized Sison for issuing a “New Years resolution” for the CPP to oust Duterte, claiming there is no way to topple a President whose ratings are so consistently high.
The NPA member, who identified himself only as Ka Ernesto, said in a message to reporters, that the communist group cannot oust Duterte saying that this will only result to a lot of bloodshed and create chaos among the group and the civilian population.
He said the CPP cannot oust the President who enjoys a very high trust and approval ratings from the people.
“How can you dislodge a President who has a very high 75% approval rating coming from the masses?” he added.
Ka Ernesto said there is a lot frustrations that made him decide to leave the communist group including the use of organizations like the National Union of Journalist of the Philippines (NUJP) as fronts to shield arrested NPA rebels.
He said the NUJP has a direct link with the Utrecht-based leadership because a special operation the NUJP is spearheading–and that is to shield NPA members who are getting arrested.
Ka Ernesto, being a long member of the communist group and youth organizer for the NUJP, is a witness of the communications and dialogues of “RSV” and “JMS” on Facebook messenger and other social media chat app. He claimed to have deciphered messages of those communications.
Ka Ernesto said he has been with the movement for a long time and he can attest to the fact that the operations and leanings of NUJP are being manipulated by the communist group.
He believes that the CPP NPA NDF has no more success left for its members and this is a failed initiative of the group because even the leadership lacks sincerity and dignity.
He said the CPP is leaving their foot soldiers to die in the battle field while the leaders are living an extravagant life in Europe and getting all the resources of the organization.
He claimed that the change the members are expecting will no longer happen because the leaders no longer have the moral dignity to show.
Visiting ‘Usman’-hit provinces
The President spoke on Friday night during a briefing by disaster officials in Camarines Sur on the effects of Tropical Depression “Usman.”
He had earlier made an aerial inspection of the damage from the storm in the hardest hit parts of Bicol, a region where he acknowledged the New People’s Army (NPA) had a strong presence.
He said Agcaoili, who wanted to raise certain legal issues which he did not specify, and Jalandoni were “more difficult to talk with.”
“They wanted to talk to me. I said, ‘No,’” he said.
Compared to Moro National Liberation Front chair Nur Misuari, he said Sison, who acted as political consultant for the NDFP in the talks, was “hopeless.”
“At this time, Sison and I do not understand each other. But I’d like you to know that we are keeping the fire burning, and you cannot really close [the door on the talks],” the President said.
“You cannot afford to lose all channels of communication. You would have to leave even a small opening,” he added.
The President terminated the talks in November 2017, accusing the rebels of continuing attacks on government troops despite the then ongoing negotiations. He later moved to legally proscribe the CPP, NPA and NDFP as terrorist groups.
In response to the President’s latest remarks on a possible resumption of peace talks, Sison said: “Enemies need peace negotiations before they can become friends or partners for the sake of the Filipino people who desire social, economic and political reforms as basis for a just and lasting peace.”
“Thus, I welcome the statement of Duterte that he is still open to peace negotiations even as there is still an exchange of hostile words in the mass media and exchange of bullets in the battlefield,” he said in a statement on Saturday.
In an online interview with the Inquirer, Agcaoili said the two sides should soon take steps to determine whether the negotiations to end Asia’s longest-running insurgency should resume.
“From experience, the first step is feelers being relayed through mutually known and acceptable persons, sometimes thru the third party facilitator or the Royal Norwegian Government (RNG) if (both parties) agreed to negotiate again,” he said.
Norway has been brokering the on-and-off negotiations to end the half-century-old communist insurgency, one of the longest-running in the world.
Agcaoili said both parties should make public their stand in separate statements to the media.
“Then calls or messages are exchanged between representatives of both sides to make arrangements for quiet and confidential informal talks which would decide on the resumption of formal talks,” he said.
The talks, however, are unlikely to resume anytime soon.
“I don’t know what will happen and if it can happen at all,” the President said.
Last December, he issued an order to government forces to “destroy” the NPA and the CPP and establish law and order.
“Law and order, means you have to destroy, not really fight, but destroy the Communist Party of the Philippines, including its legal fronts and infrastructure,” he said.
“Unless we are able to destroy every one of them, our children and grandchildren will face the same problems,” the President said.
In another statement on Saturday, Sison said the Duterte government was hallucinating in believing it could defeat the NPA by its target date of mid-2019.
“In the last quarter of 2017, Duterte’s highest military subordinates claimed they would finish the CPP and the NPA before the end of 2018 and they utterly failed,” he said.
“They have moved their goal further to the middle of 2019. They will certainly fail again. It is pure hallucination for them to imagine they can easily destroy an armed revolutionary movement that has grown in strength by fighting a 14-year fascist dictatorship and a series of pseudo-democratic regimes,” he added. –With reports from Julie M. Aurelio and Mart Sambalud