Nuisance

The communists did not see it coming. No one did.

Last Thursday, President Rodrigo Duterte issued Proclamation 360 terminating peace talks with the CPP-NPA-NDF. The decision to terminate was in response to the communists’ continued atrocities, including systematic and widespread extortion, even during the period government entertained the talks.

If it is any relief for the communists, Duterte did not carry out his threat to classify the CPP and its allied groups “terrorist.” Such a classification would unleash all the armaments of the global anti-terrorist effort upon an insurgency that had clearly outlived its relevance. The CPP-NPA circuit is classified by the US as a terrorist organization.

CPP leader Jose Ma. Sison responded to the proclamation with the usual virulent Maoist verbiage. Against the evidence, he blamed the collapse of the talks on the Duterte government. With a leap in logic, he raises the specter of mass murder being undertaken with the talks terminated – as if these talks were the only factor reining in the government from its worst tendencies.

Spokesmen from the various communist front organizations joined the chorus. With their propensity for peddling conspiracy theories, the leftist spokesmen claimed the termination of the talks was part of some grand scheme hatched by Duterte supporters to impose a “revolutionary government.” That scenario is the latest bogeyman introduced by the leftist groups to continue haranguing the government.

The road to Proclamation 360 very likely began when NPA guerrillas ambushed a unit of the Presidential Security Group on its way to help secure the President who was visiting frontline troops in Marawi. Fortunately, the presidential guards were riding a bulletproofed van. Duterte took serious offense at this incident and recalled the government panel negotiating with the communists.

Over the past few months, communist gunmen intensified their campaign of violence against government security personnel. They selected vulnerable targets: Marines in the market to buy supplies; isolated police outposts; off-duty soldiers who were unarmed.

Meanwhile, they continued their rampage of arson across most of Mindanao. They burned industrial equipment and buses. They attacked the lightly armed security units of plantations. All these are obviously intended to reinforce their extortion activities.

Duterte warned agribusinesses and mining companies, the usual targets of communist extortion, against handing money over to the guerrillas. Otherwise he would take them to task for providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

Futile

Talks with the CPP-NPA have been going on, intermittently, for over two decades. Not once did the communist panel make a confidence-building gesture.

Instead, they took a very instrumentalist attitude towards the talks. For them, it was simply another platform to support their propaganda effort or a means to extract concessions from government such as winning the release of their detained comrades.

They also used the talks to win international recognition and constantly angled to perhaps have a crack at the status of belligerency. They scored big when they somehow got the government of Norway to offer its good offices and host the negotiations.

In the long history of negotiations, the CPP-NPA never once conducted a campaign down their ranks to prepare their cadres to accept a political settlement. There was a basic duplicity in their approach to the talks. They never ideologically accepted a peaceful settlement to the obsolete insurgency.

Meanwhile, the decrepit leaders used the illusion of a possible negotiated settlement to leverage for continue asylum in Europe. More and more of them, those who outlived their usefulness in the field, congregated in Holland. The have transformed Utrecht into a retirement village for outdated communist cadres.

The peace talks were an important platform for the decrepit cadres of a failed revolution. They were able to project the semblance of usefulness on the negotiating table even if they had lost effective control over units on the ground.

While the talks went on, people like Joma Sison were able to win some amount of media visibility, pretending to speak with authority on matters that have entirely escaped their grasp. Without the talks, they will be relegated to complete obscurity in the cold winter of a foreign land. There, unwilling to return home to face the music, they can only contemplate their own mortality.

The movement they claim to lead has degenerated into nothing more than political nuisance. It is a movement that lives on the propagation of class hate and thrives entirely on conspiracy theories. It feeds off some cynical, thoroughly discredited ideology that attributes everything to ill will.

It is, nevertheless, a costly nuisance. People die for it or die because of it everyday. Marginalized communities are kept marginalized. The Maoist insurgency is like the Marawi siege in slow motion. It brings destruction and harm through the many years of a “protracted people’s war.”

Duterte might not have enough in the armory to finally quash this straggler of an insurgency. It is a movement of the deluded with enough fanaticism to persist on arid ground. It is composed of cadres willing to die and also willing to kill at the slightest ideological pretense.

But Duterte might manage to keep this destructive movement contained to cause least damage to the national economy. This is a movement of hate fueled by extortion. It cannot be convinced of its own obsolescence.

At the very least, this malignant movement should be kept from holding whole communities hostage. They could march the streets all they want. But murder and arson are way over the bounds of free expression.

The cancellation of the talks is a step in the right direction.