NDF calls off peace talks

Communist guerrillas shelved peace talks with the government yesterday, accusing President Arroyo of sabotaging the process by endorsing a US government action to go after the rebels’ foreign funding.

National Democratic Front negotiators are recommending to their principals "to hold under indefinite study the (NDF’s) negotiations with the Macapagal-Arroyo government," chief NDF negotiator Luis Jalandoni said in a statement.

The President, who suspended negotiations last year after the rebels assassinated two legislators, "must be held accountable for destroying the possibility of advancing the peace negotiations," Jalandoni added.

The NDF is the political wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), which joined Washington’s blacklist of "foreign terrorist organizations" earlier this month.

Following the US action, the Dutch, British and Philippine governments vowed to launch separate efforts to track down and block the rebels’ assets.

Officials estimate the NPA raises more than P100 million annually from extortion and other illegal activities on Philippine territory as well as from contributions from leftist and other parties and groups in Europe.

The CPP’s armed wing, the 12,000-member New People’s Army (NPA), on Saturday vowed to go after US military advisers in the Philippines and to hit American economic interests in the Philippines.

Jalandoni is among about 30 senior insurgent leaders living in exile in the Netherlands.

He claimed the government was committing "massive human rights violations against the people".

"This constitutes state terrorism of the worst kind," he added.

Jalandoni also alleged that Arroyo "is collaborating with the US in misrepresenting the negotiators, consultants and staffers of the (NDF) as ‘terrorists’ and oppressing them abroad."

Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Blas Ople said Western European "do-gooder organizations" unwittingly financed the CPP-NPA’s reign of terror in the Philippines.

Since he fled to the Netherlands in 1987 after being pardoned and freed from prison, Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder Jose Maria Sison "had played the international system for a fool," Ople said in a commentary published yesteray.

"Human rights having become the secular religion of Europe," Sison "successfully opened the pockets of many kindhearted donors in Holland, Germany, and other wealthy countries of Western Europe," he added.

"He succeeded in convincing numerous do-gooder organizations in Western Europe that the CPP-NPA was the leading force advancing and protecting human rights in the Philippines."

Ople said that in fact the 33 year-old Maoist rebellion "has succeeded in blocking the economic development of the Philippines by sabotaging peace and order and driving away foreign investments, which they consider as criminal incursions of US global imperialism."

With the financial squeeze, the capability of the rebellion to sustain itself "has become more precarious, more fragile," he added.

He urged Sison to return home and turn the CPP "into a social democratic party capable of competing in the peaceful constitutional arena.

This is the way the communist parties of Europe have gone, and it is the right way." — AFP