READER'S VIEWS: Will there be a just and lasting peace?

The peace talks between the government of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines opens today until August 26 in Oslo, Norway. The five-day peace negotiations will tackle on social, economic and political issues as well as the mode for an interim agreement.

As part of its confidence-building measure, the NDFP has declared a seven-day ceasefire throughout the country starting on Sunday to bolster the upcoming peace talks hosted by Norway."We hope this ceasefire declaration will be reciprocated by the government as a show of all-out determination to move forward the negotiations," the NDFP said in a statement. "To further bolster peace negotiations, the NDFP is also open to the possibility of a longer ceasefire period," it added.

President Rodrigo Duterte declared a unilateral ceasefire last month but ended it just five days later when a band of New People's Army waylaid and killed a government militia and wounded four others. However, he later restored the government's unilateral cessation of hostilities ahead of the peace negotiations with the NDFP.

It is estimated that the longest running communist insurgency in this part of the world has already claimed more than 30,000 lives, dislocated thousands of civilians from their homes and made orphans and widows from both sides of the equation.

Both negotiating panels expressed optimism for reaching a political settlement after 30 years of failed negotiations starting from Cory Aquino regime.

To reciprocate its sincerity on the negotiations, the government has released twenty of the NDFP peace consultants who will participate in the peace talks. Among those freed and allowed to leave for Oslo were Benito Tiamzon and  Wilma Austria, chairman and secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines  respectively. The couple were nabbed in Cebu while assisting  the rehabilitation of the victims of super typhoon Yolanda.

The armed conflict in the country is deeply-rooted on the fundamental problems of poverty, social injustice, landlessness, oppressive and exploitative system of governance. These problems affect the poor and underprivileged sectors of society who comprised the vast majority of the population except those few who lord it over the nation politically, economically and socially.

The civil war does not only involve the government and a small group of ideologues who are out to topple it. If that was the case, the rebel forces belonging to the CPP-NPA-NDFP could not have spread throughout the archipelago. The armed struggle waged by these rebels could not have lasted for more than 48 years with no sign of let up nor was it reduced to inconsequentiality.

There were peace negotiations elsewhere in the world that were successfully carried out to a just conclusion. Among these are: the Frente Sandinista LiberacionNacional (FMLN) and the Contras in Nicaragua; the government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union in Guatemala; the Farabundo Marti Liberacion Nacional in El Salvador, among others.

After many years of bloody armed conflict in the country, there might just be a light at the end of the tunnel for a successful peace negotiation that will result in a just and lasting peace.

Rene F. Antiga - Banilad, Mandaue City