A reply to The FREEMAN editorial on December 16, 2019

President Duterte and Professor Sison may have expressed willingness to resume the GRP-NDFP Peace Talks but how serious is the former and how does it sound to the latter? To sum up last year’s conditions for resuming peace talks, the terms mean surrender. And what is the point of talking if the enemy surrenders prior to dealing with the common good? What is really the ‘enabling environment’? Cessation of hostilities? Haven’t we learned from Colombia’s FARC? Such condition is the agendum after the economic and political reforms. Hostilities remain if the state ignores the root causes of armed struggle. Militarist approach had proven itself futile. Why not encourage the public to get involved in weighing the Comprehensive Agreement on Socio-economic Reforms (CASER)?

To undermine the resumption of peace talks due to an NPA attack that costs civilian lives is simplistic, confusing, and an argumentum ad misericordiam. When President Duterte expressed willingness to resume peace talks, the expression is not coupled with unilateral or bilateral ceasefire. Thus, both forces are not compelled to immobilize. The president’s “gesture of friendship” came after series of reports divulging NPA attacks against the state forces. Prior to this recent tension, tens of lives lost from the attacks of state agents against the progressive people’s organizations accused of being communists. If they really were, do they deserve such barbarous death from the hands of law enforcers? Aren’t we supposed to condemn also the unnecessary and unjust killing of civilians by the police and the military?

As to what the state hopes to attain in peace talks, does it really consider the common good? If so, how can there be such consideration under neoliberalism? Can there be common good in a neoliberal, global, monopoly capitalism? The First Principle says otherwise. Social justice grounded on the common good undermines armed struggle. Demonizing the CPP-NPA-NDFP is useless. Peasants or not may opt to armed struggle so long as they consider the ‘superstructures’ bourgeois which their lived-experiences validated.

Yes, we have brilliant negotiators in our government. But that does not mean militarizing the bureaucracy especially the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process. In so doing, the atmosphere is not amiable to the peace process. Since we do not want casualties during the peace talks, there is, then, a need to call for bilateral ceasefire. Any party who violates is accountable before the International Law.

Lastly, the peace talks is not about Sison. As to his stay in the Netherlands, he has written lengthy statements about it which are accessible online. He’s aging like his student. With or without them, resume peace talks!

Noe M. Santillan

Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Social Studies

University of the Philippines Cebu.

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Claims regarding future SRP jobs

Two million or 2,380,000 new jobs on 50 hectares of SRP land? Ridiculous claim. Manhattan Island (Borough of Manhattan, City of New York) has 2.3 million jobs on 9,300 hectares. Google it.

That someone would make such an outrageously exaggerated (and physically impossible) claim regarding SRP development raises questions about their competence. If they are competent, then one must question their integrity.

Sorry to be a bearer of discouraging news.

I do not recommend a life of indolence, sloth, and idleness, but it has worked for me.

To put this in physical perspective, 50 hectares is 500,000 square meters. There would have to be four to five jobs for every square meter of land area.

Ray Broyles

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Why China  needs Tibet?

In 1913 the 13th Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatso rejected Chines control over Tibet by proclaiming: “We are a small, religious and independent nation.” He reformed judicial, penal and educational systems and negotiated with foreign nations.

But in 1950 the People’s Republic of China und Mao Zedong invaded Tibet and asserted “China’s right to rule over Tibet.” From 1956 to 1959 an uprising led by Buddhist monks was finally subdued. Entire villages, numerous monasteries and the capital Lhasa were laid to ruins. Around 86,000 Tibetans were killed many of them executed. The Chinese “diluted” the population by infiltrating 300,000 ethnic Han, 200,000 of them into Lhasa where only 100,000 Tibetans were left to live.

The Communists hold a vast majority in the government of the “Autonomous Region of Tibet”. In 1959 they forced the last Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso into exile to India. He retired from politics in November 2011.

Usually it is the greed for mineral ores that pushes China to subjugate free peoples like the Uighurs, Mongols, Zhaung, and Hui, or claim sovereignty over the entire South China Sea. Tibet has copper, lithium, chromium, rare earths and gold. But since about 2010 the Chinese find it easier and cheaper to source its minerals in Africa and South America and ship them over the oceans to China. According to Gabriel Lafitte in his book “Spoiling Tibet” the Tibet minerals play a minor role in feeding the world’s factory. Nonetheless, China is set to exploit Tibetan minerals as never before. Clashes with the protesting Tibetans are crushed brutally.

China has in mind a far more precious treasure than minerals: It is water. Apart from the two rivers, Yellow River and Yangtze, that flow through China the border-crossing rivers Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween and Mekong originate on the Tibetan Plateau. By diverting these rivers the Chinese can dry out their neighbors India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.

Today more than 100 dams are being built across the Plateau. Exploiting hydro-electricity will permit China to switch off the coal fired power stations. And more important to replace polluting cars by electro cars. Xi Jinping’s vision is to make China the first climate-neutral nation in world.

Very likely the Chinese are planning to use the abundance of water to irrigate the big desert Taklimakan in Xingjian. They have proved capable of blocking the Yangtze River and forcing it into a new bed when they were building the Three Gorges Dam that has lifted the river’s level by 100 meters. The staircase ship locks lift ships up to 280 m length up to the 660 km long storage lake. So ocean going ships can reach Chongqing, the world’s biggest city with 32 million inhabitants and growing fast.

Do not marvel if the Communists’ megalomania realizes the unimaginable; to move mountains and build artificial islands. They have the power to trample on the rights of other people. Xi’s policy is: China alone and overall in the world.

Erich Wannemacher

Lapu-Lapu City