Duterte to Sison: I will arrest you or better yet never come back home

President Rodrigo Roa Duterte.
JOEY DALUMPINES/PRESIDENTIAL PHOTO

President Rodrigo Duterte has again vowed to order the arrest of “dying” Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder Jose Maria Sison if the exiled communist leader decides to return home to the Philippines.

“And if Joma Sison comes here, I will arrest him or if I were him, ‘wag na siyang bumalik dito (never come back here),” Duterte said in a speech before the San Beda College of Law annual alumni homecoming on Friday.

“Better still, I will not allow him to enter his native land and that is a very painful experience especially if you’re dying and you think na you should be buried in your own cemetery, in your own town,” he added.

Duterte issued the statement a day after signing Proclamation No. 360, which terminates the peace talks between the government and the CPP’s political arm the National Democratic Front (NDF).

The President said he would never enter into a coalition government with the communists, maintaining that he could not give something that he does not own.

Sison, who is also the chief political consultant of the National Democratic Front, has been in exile to the Netherlands since 1987, after peace talks failed under former President Corazon Aquino.

Last year, Sison expressed hope that he would end his almost three decades of being in exile since Duterte, his former student in the Lyceum of the Philippines, became president.

However, things went sour as the Philippine government and NDF disagreed on many issues on the negotiating table and the string of skirmishes between the state troops and communist rebels on the ground.

Duterte had urged Sison to “come home and fight,” saying he should not stay in another country while his men die fighting in the countryside. /jpv

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