Jalandoni due today for talks

National Democratic Front (NDF) chairman Luis Jalandoni is scheduled to arrive at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport at 5:40 p.m. today on board a Royal Dutch Airlines flight from the Netherlands.

Jalandoni heads the NDF panel tasked to forge a peace agreement with the Arroyo administration to end a 32-year armed communist insurgency in the country.

Jalandoni will be accompanied by two other members of the NDF peace panel, including his wife Connie Ledesma and former newsman Antonio Zumel.

NDF leader Fidel Agcaoili is also expected to join the group that has officially come to attend a "solidarity conference" on the peace process sponsored by the National Council of Churches on April 18 at the Westin Philippine Plaza.

But while in the country, the NDF group is also expected to meet with government negotiators, led by former justice secretary Silvestre Bello III, to finalize the venue of the peace talks.

The venue of the talks is the only remaining hindrance to the talks which are set to start on April 27. The two panels have agreed to hold the talks in a neutral Scandinavian nation, possibly Norway, Finland or Sweden.

Preliminary backchannel talks have been ongoing between the two panels since President Arroyo tasked Bello to hold "discreet and informal" meetings with the NDF at the Netherlands on Mar. 5 to 9 to re-start the peace talks.

Mrs. Arroyo also ordered a unilateral ceasefire and withdrawal of troops in 11 areas in the Southern Tagalog region as a confidence-building measure and effect the release of Army Maj. Noel Buan who was then in the custody of the NDF’s armed wing, the 11,000-strong New People’s Army (NPA).

In response to the ceasefire, the NPA Friday released Buan who was captured in anti-insurgency operations in the Southern Tagalog region in 1999. – Rey Arquiza