Oslo, Hanoi eyed as venue for Duterte-Joma meet

MANILA, Philippines — Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison wants Oslo, Norway or Hanoi, Vietnam as venue for his meeting with President Duterte.

According to Sison, the government peace panel and the National Democratic Front (NDF) have initially agreed during backchannel talks to have Duterte attend the Oslo ceremony for the signing of the interim peace agreement. 

However, Sison said the government backed out and offered Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea to attend the signing in Oslo instead, as reported by ABS-CBN.

Sison said the NDF proposed the capital of Vietnam as a venue in consideration of Duterte’s health.   

He said the government rejected Hanoi and the special envoy of Norway, which served as third party facilitator, cannot make any arrangement there as well. 

“For my soonest possible interface with Duterte, the NDF has considered my meeting at the signing of the interim peace agreement,” ABS-CBN quoted Sison as saying.

Sison noted Duterte had insisted to come home to meet him.  

Sison reiterated he will only return to the country if there will be substantial progress in the peace talks.

Vital parts of the interim peace accord are a ceasefire deal, amnesty proclamation for political prisoners and an agreement on agrarian reform and rural development and national industrialization and economic development, key components of the proposed Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms.

Sison said his premature return to the Philippines would be contradictory to previous agreement to hold talks in a foreign neutral venue.

He said this would also place him and the entire peace negotiation at Duterte’s mercy.

Meanwhile, the CPP urged the people to unite and oppose the national ID system.

The CPP said the ID system has long been proposed by security officials as this would facilitate mass surveillance by looking into the personal information of the bearer.

“Past regimes have failed to push the national ID system confronted with popular opposition,” the CPP said.

They said President Duterte will have greater powers and can institute more “insidious measures” with a national ID in place.

The CPP said the national ID system will practically be reviving the detested cedula of the Spanish empire, which was used to control the movement of people and suppress their democratic rights.

“In the hands of Duterte, the national ID system is bound to be a weapon of suppression, a weapon of mass monitoring and surveillance to track everyone’s movement, and to bribe and arm-twist, especially against Duterte’s political critics and dissenters,” the CPP said.

The CPP said Duterte’s feverish push to implement a national ID is part of his machinations to establish a totalitarian state of mass surveillance, population control, social, political and criminal profiling and mass murder.

“The draft law of the national ID system has been bulldozed by Duterte’s supermajority of political allies in the House of Representatives. Will the Senate pass the proposed ID system with similar dispatch and prove itself to be no more than a rubberstamp than the Lower House is?” the CPP said.

The CPP said many countries have used the system to collect, officially as well as illegally, information for “terrorist profiling” of suspected individuals.

“To conceal its insidious aims and dupe the people to support the proposed identification system, the Duterte regime makes false claims that the national ID will serve to expedite the delivery of government service. Such claims are put to dispute by the fact that the Duterte regime continues to cut the budget for public education and public health and other important social services,” the CPP said.

“How can a national ID system help facilitate the provision of public health when government hospitals are, in fact, being commercialized and privatized in whole and in part? If the priority of government is to provide everyone with free public health, free education, free public housing, public transportation and so on, there is no need for a national ID system for the people to benefit from these,” it said.

The CPP said a national system of identification has nothing to do with the efficiency in the provision of public service.

Neither does computerization make a clean government, they said.

“This is starkly demonstrated by continuing widespread corruption in government agencies which has computerized its record-keeping and processing. Manipulation of election results in the Philippines has become more widespread, albeit less obvious, through automation,” the CPP said.