THE peace talks between the Government of the Philippines (GPH) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) have long been stalled and now President Rodrigo Duterte is going right up. He wants NDFP adviser and Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison to come home from his base in The Netherlands to re-ignite the talks.
It’s an interesting move considering that the President’s friendship with Sison was one of the reasons the CPP supported the Duterte candidacy in 2016, giving a semblance of legitimacy to his claim he is a socialist. Now we know he’s not even a progressive.
Sison is old, that is why he has preferred to stay abroad where his age and health wouldn’t be an impediment to the revolution and where he is more effective. He is among the respected Maoists in the world and that image is needed in the CPP’s international work.
Sison, though, is no longer part of the CPP leadership. The party’s day-to-day activities are now being run by a relatively new-look Central Committee, Politburo and Secretariat. That is as far as what I could glean from reports gathered online where the CPP and revolutionary forces are also active. Meaning that the final decisio-making wouldn’t be with Sison.
Will Sison come home? I do think he wants to, personally. But both the CPP and the NDFP will have to consider the risks involved in that. Duterte recently joked about Sison being “killed” if talks won’t prosper, but I doubt if he would allow that when Sison is in the country and he is the president.
If you ask me, I don’t think Sison should come home because his presence here would just be turned into a circus. The peace talks should proceed without outside distraction. That is why the advice has always been for the talks to happen in a neutral country, which in this case is The Netherlands.
Especially now that the talks are in the crucial stage where structural reforms are being discussed. As I have written before, I like the NDFP program that includes genuine land reform and national industrialization. Having stayed in the countryside for years, I have seen how the feudal setup has tied the countryside to backwardness.
The CPP and the NDFP believe that the program can only be implemented by going through armed struggle. But that is too costly especially in terms of human lives. Since 1968 when the CPP was founded, thousands have died both from the side of the rebels and the government.
So if the program, with inputs from the government side, of course, can be implemented via negotiated political settlement, then that would be a triumph of the Filipino people. And if that happens under the current administration, then Duterte can be considered as among this country’s statesmen.
But can the president see through the negotiation when rightist and hawkish elements in the government are setting up impediments to it? That’s a challenge he has to hurdle if he wants to be dubbed as a genuine peace maker.