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The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) slammed Malacañan’s announcement of an executive order for localized peace negotiations, calling the scheme “pretend talks.”
After local National Democratic Front formations have rejected peace negotiations with local government officials, the CPP itself strongly spurned the offer, saying President Duterte will only use these to “pretend to want peace while actually waging total war against the people.”
Read: Revolutionary groups reject ‘local peace talks’ scheme
Malacañang yesterday announced it will soon issue an executive order to pursue “localized peace talks” instead of formal negotiations between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) abroad.
“So-called localized peace talks are a sham, a waste of people’s money, and are doomed to fail. It is a worn-out psywar tactic to project victory to conceal the continuing failure of the AFP to suppress the people’s resistance and stem the steady growth of the NPA (New People’s Army),” the CPP said.
“The civil war will continue to rage despite local peace talks,” the group added.
Earlier, NDF-Panay and the Cordillera People’s Democratic Front issued statements rejecting localized peace talks between local revolutionary groups and the GRP.
Duterte’s “localized peace talks” dovetail with such corruption-riddled programs as the “balik-baril program,” the Comprehensive Local Integration Program and the recent surrender campaign, the CPP pointed out.
“Only local government officials and military field officers are happy with the ‘localized peace talks’, a money-making racket with hundreds of million of funds that will surely end up in their pockets,” the CPP in a statement Friday (June 13) said.
The underground party accused AFP field officers of being overzealous in their effort to conjure the illusion of “mass surrenderees” where hundreds of local residents are being rounded up in AFP-occupied villages and later misrepresented before the public as “surrenderees”.
“They have overdone their surrender campaign as they have declared close to 8,000 surrendered since January, after having claimed earlier this year that there are only 3,000 NPA members,” the CPP said.
The group added AFP’s are being funded directly by Malacañan.
“The Party declares that the [NPA] and all revolutionary forces are united under the Party’s central leadership and unequivocably support the Negotiating Panel of the NDFP in its representation of all revolutionary forces in negotiations with the GRP,” it said.
“Surely, this pretend ‘localized’ peace talks will not involve even a single genuine revolutionary force. Duterte will certainly be negotiating only with its own shadow,” the CPP said. Reposted by 
