Sara Duterte wants Davao City excluded from holiday truce

Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio (Photo by NOY MORCOSO / INQUIRER.net)

MANILA, Philippines — Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio wants to exclude her city from the government’s holiday ceasefire with communist rebels, saying that the insurgents’ “duplicitous nature” might come into play and they might take advantage of the truce.

“As spoilers of peace, we believe that the Christmas truce will be used by the terrorist groups as an opportunity to regain communities previously cleared of their presence, consolidate their forces, and derail the progress of existing government rural development projects,” the presidential daughter said in a statement Monday.

“With this, we ask the Duterte government to exclude Davao City from the scope of the Christmas ceasefire with these terrorists. We also seek the same once the national government pursues the reopening of the formal peace negotiations,” the mayor said.

President Rodrigo Duterte on Sunday approved the recommendation of the government peace panel to declare a ceasefire over the holidays after he hinted at the possible resumption of peace negotiations with communist rebels.

READ: Duterte OKs holiday truce with Reds

Duterte-Carpio tagged the government’s initiative to pursue peace as “useless and deleterious to the accomplishments of our local peace initiative, the Peace 911.”

Peace 911 is a peace-building program for the city’s conflict-affected areas and areas identified as a stronghold of the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

“To be covered by the ceasefire or the peace negotiations will only disrupt and threaten the gains of our process of peace and development in these communities formerly controlled by the terrorists,” Duterte-Carpio explained.

The presidential daughter, who referred to the communists as “terrorists,” questioned the sincerity of the rebels in the peace negotiations.

“To believe that they desire a peaceful end to the insurgency problem would be playing ignorant of their bloody habit — how they slaughtered countless civilians in the past and made many countryside communities suffer from poverty and underdevelopment, and blaming the government for it,” she said.

“These groups manipulate and turn communities to rise against the government, propagate fear, inflict abuses, extort, and execute and murder civilians through its deranged brand of revolutionary justice,” she added. “These and more are the reason why these groups are called terrorists. And we should never negotiate with terrorists.”

/atm