Bulatlat - The Philippines's alternative weekly newsmagazine

This story was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 8, April 3-9, 2005

GRP-NDFP Peace Talks Doomed?

Unless the Macapagal-Arroyo administration complies with agreements it signed with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), there is no way by which peace talks between the two parties will resume.

By Bulatlat

The Netherlands-based NDFP through its information director, Ruth de Leon, thus clarified April 2 in the wake of reports and feelers that the government of Macapagal-Arroyo is seeking the resumption of peace talks with the underground Left.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo recently replaced Silvestre Bello III as chief of the government negotiating panel with the appointment of Nieves Confesor, labor secretary under President Fidel V. Ramos.

The government and its armed forces also stand accused of being behind the series of summary execution and abduction of political activists and personalities associated with the Left – now numbering 33 since January this year. The underground Left’s New People’s Army (NPA) remains the country’s top national security threat, defense officials say.

The government, the NDFP’s De Leon said in a statement emailed to the Philippine press, “is responsible for having cumulatively built obstacles to the resumption of formal talks in the GRP (for Government of the Republic of the Philippines)-NDFP peace negotiations.”

In connivance with the U.S. and other foreign governments, she said, the Macapagal-Arroyo government has refused to remove the NPA and NDFP chief political consultant Jose Maria Sison from the list of “foreign terrorists” in violation of the principle of national sovereignty in The Hague Joint Declaration, the safety and immunity guarantees in the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) and the basic democratic rights and the Hernandez political offense doctrine in the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL).

Contrary to a commitment it made in 2001, the government has refused to release political prisoners. It has also stepped up human rights violations, De Leon said, “at the expense of suspected revolutionaries, legal personalities and organizations and the broad masses of the people.”

Hit list

Included in the military hit list, she said, are Sison, senior legal adviser UN ad litem Judge Romeo T. Capulong and nominees to the NDFP section of the Joint Secretariat of the Joint Monitoring Commission under CARHRIHL.

The NDFP information director also called the new GRP peace panel as “a phoney negotiating panel headed by Nieves Confesor of the hang-Flor Contemplacion notoriety.”

“This panel is phoney because its sole objective is to prevent the resumption of formal talks by preconditioning these with the pacification and capitulation of the NDFP through a demand for ‘indefinite ceasefire,’” De Leon said.

Peace talks between the two sides were supposed to resume after the May 2004 presidential elections. The talks could not take off however following the NDFP’s protest over the government’s refusal to honor the February 2004 Oslo accord to work for the removal of Sison and the NPA from the “terrorist lists.”

“The NDFP calls on the GRP to comply with The Hague Joint Declaration and all other agreements it has signed in the process of peace negotiations with the NDFP,” the NDFP’s De Leon said. “The GRP should not obstruct, delay or prevent the resumption of formal talks by trying to inveigle the NDFP into accepting capitulation and pacification under the guise of prolonged or indefinite ceasefire or to convert the peace negotiations into ceasefire negotiations which obfuscate and lay aside the people's demands for social, economic and political reforms.”

The NDFP includes the Communist Party of the Philippines and NPA which have waged an armed struggle against the U.S.-backed Philippines government since 1968. Peace talks began in 1986 following the fall of the Marcos dictatorship and, following a long suspension, resumed in 1992. Bulatlat

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