Back to negotiations for the GRP and NDFP?

There can never be a statement that would end with finality in everything that you say in public. I can only say that’s it, I don’t want to talk to you guys, forget it. But you know … three times we attempted to talk sense and it has always failed. I cannot stop; I cannot say I don’t want to talk. That’s not a statement of a leader, of a president.

“This is the first time I will reveal it:  I am sending Secretary Bello. He was a communist and he should go there and talk to them.”

These quotes, reported by the Philippine Star yesterday (Dec. 5), came from President Duterte during a situation briefing on the effects of Typhoon “Tisoy” in Albay.  He was sending Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III to the Netherlands, he said, to talk with Jose Ma. Sison (and the NDFP negotiating panel) to revive the GRP-NDFP peace talks, which he had unilaterally “terminated” in November 2017.

Bello, the President’s long-time close friend and political ally, had been the mainstay member, later head, of the GRP negotiating panel since the mid-1990s until Duterte dissolved the panel early this year.  I talked to Bello yesterday. He sounded relaxed. By now he would be on his way to Utrecht to join the other member of his mission, former GRP panel member Hernani Braganza.  

Cut off from the printed news was the rest of the President’s statements in Albay, which a PhilStar.com online report quoted further. He said:

“You know, you should understand that the quest for, the longing for peace, is always there – not for the military and the police – but for everybody.  The door must be open always, or there must be at least one channel, if everything closes, that you can talk to.”

“I cannot talk about it,” Duterte continued. “I’m sending him [Bello] back to Sison to talk to him… and you will know about it when the right time comes.  If he [Sison] agrees, this is what I call ‘my ‘last card’. When I say ‘my last card’, my time is running out,” he cryptically added.

Note this very interesting coincidence: Exactly a year earlier (Dec. 4, 2018), Duterte did a similar briefing on the impact of Tropical Depression “Usman” in Camarines Sur, a province adjacent to Albay. And more interesting still, he similarly talked about Sison and the GRP-NDFP peace talks.

“At this time,” Duterte said then, “Sison and I do not understand each other. But I’d like you to know that we are keeping the fire burning, and you cannot really close [the door on the peace negotiations]. You cannot afford to close all channels of communications,” he emphasized, “You would have to leave even a small opening.”

That’s exactly how he put it then, after blurting out, “Sison is hopeless, [Fidel] Agcaoili and [Luis] Jalandoni are more difficult to talk with.” Agcaoili heads the NDFP negotiating panel, which hasn’t been dissolved. Jalandoni has been the long-time panel head, now its senior adviser.

So how should we take this recurrent pursuit by the President of high-level peace negotiations which, in pique and rage, he has repeatedly “cancelled” or “terminated”? 

How do we factor in the fact that he has articulated this positive attitude exactly two years apart in timing, both after devastating natural calamities visited the Bicol region, and two weeks before the nation celebrates the joyous spirit of Christmas? 

For instance, how deeply has President Duterte internalized “the wealth of lessons we can learn from the narrative of the Savior’s birth to the calls of compassion, kindness, and reconciliation being echoed throughout the globe [emphasis mine],” which he urged the people to contemplate on in his 2018 Christmas message? “Let these ideals and aspirations guide us as we embrace our fellowmen in the spirit of our shared humanity, and welcome the coming year with much hope and optimism,” he said then.

In that regard, we ask: Does Duterte equate, or differentiate, the compassion, kindness, and reconciliation he invoked with what the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process, headed by retired AFP chief Gen. Carlito Galvez Jr., calls the “Tapang and Malasakit (Courage and Compassion – Duterte’s presidential campaign slogan)” of “many local government units [that] have declared the communist insurgents as persona-non-grata”?

The OPAPP flaunts this as a “significant positive result” of supposed “localized peace engagements” it supervised. These engagements were supposedly pursued under EO 70’s “whole-of-nation” approach to attain an “inclusive and sustainable peace,” through the National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Conflict.

A week ago Duterte reportedly convened the NTF-ELCAC to assess its campaign, aimed at ending the 50-year armed conflict by the end of his term in 2022.  However, he hasn’t disclosed any result. Was he so displeased or unsatisfied that he has to make another turnabout and seek once more, through Bello’s mission, to resume the GRP-NDFP peace talks?  

As Duterte said, we may have to wait for the outcome of Bello’s mission to Utrecht after the latter returns and report to him.  A lot of questions need to be answered.  For one, what is Duterte’s offer to Sison, for him to say, “If he agrees, this is what I will call ‘my last card’”?

A serious, honest-to-goodness resumption of the formal peace negotiation may mean Duterte should undo certain actions he took after “terminating” the talks: issuing a proclamation declaring the CPP-NPA a “terrorist” organization; ordering the arrest of NDFP consultants and filing trumped-up charges against them; unilaterally scrapping the CARHRIHL and dismantling the GRP section of the Joint Monitoring Committee mandated to implement the CARHRIHL; and issuing EO 70 and Memorandum Order 32 that have resulted in more civilian killings and human rights violations, occasioned by the relentless pursuit of the AFP’s “all-out war” against the CPP-NPA/NDFP and progressive organizations and institutions the AFP tags as the latter’s “front organizations.”

Can President Duterte exercise the political will to do all these remedial steps, and more, in order to attain just and lasting peace as his legacy to the people?  

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