DEFENSE Secretary Voltaire Gazmin on Tuesday said the defense department prefers localized peace talks with communist rebels rather than negotiating with the insurgents at the national level.
“That [localized negotiation] is not the stand of the government but that is what we in the defense department have been encouraging the military to do so that they will have peace in their areas of responsibility. In the first place, those [rebel leaders] living in the Netherlands and local leaders here are fighting with each other. So localized peace talks depend on the military commander in the area. For example, if you’re a commander in Tarlac and you want peace in the area, then you talk with the rebel commanders operating in your area of responsibility,” Gazmin said.
Such strategy had long been implemented by the military through the government’s Social Integration Program, which is being implemented by the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process. One of the features of the SIP is to award cash money to rebels who surrender their firearms. Such rebels are also qualified beneficiaries of the government’s livelihood projects.
The strategy, however, was rejected by the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army-National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF) and said it was a mere propaganda by defense and military officials to scuttle the national-level peace negotiations and project an impression that the local units of the NPA are not united.
Last week government chief negotiator Alex Padilla announced that the government will no longer return to the negotiating table with the NDF because the government sees no progress in the peace process.
The NDF is the negotiating arm of the CPP-NPA.
Malacañang said the NPA has resorted to banditry and violence and that the Netherlands-based CPP leaders, headed by Jose Maria Sison, no longer have control over local NPA units.
In a statement, the CPP castigated President Aquino and his officials for allegedly “engaging in the cheapest form of anti-NPA propaganda in the vain effort to justify its failure to seriously engage the revolutionary forces in peace negotiations and coverup its failure to address the socioeconomic problems of the people that are at the root of the raging armed conflict in the Philippines.”
“If the leaders and members of the NPA were driven only by the selfish aim of enriching themselves, they would instead simply join the government and allow themselves to be used by the criminal scalawags posing as politicians, officers of the military and the police, judges and big bureacrats,” said the CPP.
The CPP also laughed off claims by the military that the rebel strength has neared to inconsequential.
“The Aquino administration and its armed forces desperately try to downgrade the current strength of the revolutionary forces by endlessly repeating the lie that the NPA had 25,000 fighters in 1986 and that there are now only 4,000 to 5,000. The fact is that the NPA had only around 6,000 high-powered firearms in 1986-1987. As it continues to seize the initiative and intensify the people’s war, the NPA is set to surpass its previous peak strength in the 1980s within the current presidential term of Mr. Aquino, if it is not cut short by an upheaval of mass protests before 2016,” the CPP said.
NDF talks can proceed at local level—senator
IF peace talks with the NDF cannot advance at the national level, the government may consider pursuing it at the local level, a senator suggested on Tuesday.
Sen. Teofisto Guingona III, chairman of the Senate Committee on Peace, Unification and Reconciliation, made the statement in a text message to reporters, when asked about the pronouncement of Padilla that the negotiations are bogged down because of the demands of the NDF leadership.
“If peace talks with the CPP-NPA cannot be achieved in the national level, then we can try it on a local level,” Guingona, whose 78-year-old mother was wounded in an NPA ambush, said.
Responding to the same question, Sen. Panfilo Lacson said the government is unlikely to give in to the list of demands set by the NDF leadership as a precondition to pursuing peace talks with the Aquino administration.
Lacson said he was shown the list of the demands last year.
“I couldn’t see how the effort can succeed or even take off. Essentially, it was a not-so-veiled effort to share power with the duly constituted authority and control of our forests and other areas rich in natural resources. In short, they want to share power and control the country’s resources,” he said.
Padilla told the radio station dwIZ on Tuesday that the NDF’s demands include the removal of the Aquino administration’s flagship Conditional-Cash- Transfer (CCT) Program, the Payapa at Masaganang Pamayanan (Payapa) Program and the release of all political prisoners, among others.
KMP leader hits Aquino for ending peace talks
A LEADER of the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) on Monday criticized the Aquino administration for “closing the doors to peace and genuine agrarian reform” for ending the peace talks with the CPP-NDF.
KMP Deputy Secretary-General Randall Echanis, also an NDF consultant and member of the Reciprocal Working Committee on the Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms (RWC-Caset), said the decision to end the peace talks show the government’s lack of interest to end the more than four decadeold insurgency problem.
Echanis urged the Aquino administration to return to the negotiating table to pursue the peace talk and work for genuine agrarian reform.
Echanis was reacting to a statement issued by Padilla, chairman of the government panel negotiating with the CPP-NDF, declaring that the government no longer wants to return to formal negotiations.
“We cannot wait forever for the other side if they continually refuse to return to the negotiating table without preconditions. The government will be taking a new approach to pursue peace,” Padilla was quoted as saying in a statement posted on the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process web site.
He said the government is open to a renewal of talks but under a different framework and needs to see sincerity and political will on the part of the CPP-NDF and “an end to the senseless violence they are inflicting on our people especially on innocent civilians.”
Echanis, however, said “the real reason behind Padilla’s statement is the government’s lack of interest on the next substantive agenda on social and economic reforms.”
“It is the government that is not sincere in achieving peace,” he said.
Echanis said the Aquino administration’s refusal to return to the negotiating table is “linked with its lack of interest to discuss genuine land reform and national industrialization to address the root causes of the ongoing civil war.”
He said the release of detained NDF consultants is not a precondition or a confidence-building measure for the resumption of the talks, but an agreement that the government and NDF had entered into and signed in February 2012. He said it is only right that the government complies with such agreement.
“The government is only making hype over the so-called preconditions by the NDF as a convoluted excuse for its incompetence to address the root causes of the civil war,” he said.
Echanis said the government panel and its propaganda mill are turning the table against the NDF when, in fact, it is the one that is not really sincere in achieving peace and genuine agrarian reform.
The KMP called on the Aquino administration to comply with previous agreements entered into by the government and return to the negotiating table with the NDF.
“We strongly call on the Aquino administration to resume peace negotiations with the NDF, start with the substantive agenda on economic reforms to address the centuries-old landlessness of farmers across the country. Only with genuine land reform can peace be achieved,” the KMP leader said.
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