YEARENDER: Peace talks with NPA hit rough patch

MANILA, Philippines - While the administration is gaining headway in peace efforts with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), lawyer Alexander Padilla’s progress in peace overtures with the Communist Party of the Philippines-National Democratic Front (CPP-NDF) are not as encouraging.

The peace process that the administration pushed under the leadership of former government peace panel chairman (now Supreme Court Associate Justice) Marvic Leonen in dealing with the MILF has overshadowed the government’s peace negotiations with the communists.

Leonen’s group inked a framework agreement with the MILF peace panel headed by Mohagher Iqbal during a ceremony at Malacañang on Oct. 15.

The framework agreement will pave the way for the establishment of a Bangsamoro political entity for Muslims in Mindanao.

On the other hand, the peace negotiations between the government and the CPP-NDF have bogged down.

While the government and the MILF have expressed trust in each other’s peace panels, the government and the NDF peace panels have accused each other of failing to show sincerity and implement confidence-building measures to persuade one another to go back to the negotiating table.           

The New People’s Army (NPA) has continuously staged attacks on military camps and installations in Mindanao.

It has also raided mining firms in Mindanao, resulting not only in damage to property, but to the death of many innocent civilians and soldiers.

One of the significant incidents that ripped the possibility of the government and NDF returning to the negotiating table was the NPA grenade attack in Paquibato District in Davao City that injured 47 persons, mostly children.

The government’s committee monitoring the peace negotiations with the NDF has asked the NPA to show goodwill and surrender members allegedly behind the grenade attack in August this year.

The NPA has reportedly paid P5,000 for each of the 47 victims.

Padilla described the payment as a mere “stopgap and diversionary measure.”

No amount of money can absolve the perpetrators of the grenade attack, he added.

Padilla said the only way for the NPA to save face is to surrender the perpetrators.

“The reckless action raised by the NPA is simply not acceptable and such uncivilized and irresponsible act is a grave violation of human rights and will not lead to any meaningful resolution to issues being raised by the communist rebels,” he said.

Padilla said the NDF must go back to the negotiating table to show sincerely in solving the conflict.

“If the group (NDF) sincerely wants to put a solution to the country’s problems, the rightful way would be to go back to the negotiating table with the government and exhaust ways on how to work together in reaching just and lasting peace,” he said.

On Sept. 1, the NPA’s Medardo Arce Command in Southern Mindanao said its operatives threw a grenade at a fiesta gathering in Paquibato District, Davao City.

In a statement, the NPA claimed the grenade was intended for a nearby military detachment, but mistakenly lobbed into  civilians gathered for a circus performance.

Padilla rejected NPA spokesman Rigoberto Sanchez’s statement that those responsible for the Paquibato attacks will be dealt with accordingly through the NPA’s “revolutionary justice.”           

“This revolutionary justice has been exposed as a sham by many including United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston in a Report in 2008, without regard to the rule of law including basic rights (e.g. the right to counsel, to evidence),” he said.

Padilla said countless civilians have become collateral damage in over four decades of the communist insurgency.

“Why has indemnification been raised only now?” he asked.

“For so long as the CPP-NPA pursues armed struggle as the primary means to achieve its goal, there will continue to be civilians caught in the crossfire.”

Padilla asked whether the NPA would join the ranks of tens of thousands of unnamed and uncompensated civilian victims.

“The demands of justice are predicated on a rule of law and cannot be met by one-off payments,” he said.

“The demands of peace must be negotiated peacefully at the table and not through gunfire and the torching of establishments.”

Padilla underscored President Aquino’s unilateral declaration of a ceasefire to mark the United Nations celebration of Sept. 21 as International Day of Peace.

The government monitoring committee said no amount of money can be sufficient to bring the victims, many of who were children, to true justice.

“True and impartial justice demands that the NPA must surrender and subject the perpetrators of the grenade attack to the Philippine justice system,” the government monitoring committee said in a statement.

“The NPA has long maintained that its forces are well-versed in Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (HR-IHL),” but it is doing otherwise.

“In signing the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) through its political entity the NDF, the NPA has in effect held itself accountable to these standards.”

The government monitoring committee said surrendering the NPA members involved in the grenade attack in Paquibato District is the only way for the NPA to prove that it is a champion of human rights and international law.

The government monitoring committee said the NPA’s justice system has never been transparent.

“The NPA’s refusal to submit themselves to the Philippine justice system, does not change the fact that the group is not above international HR and IHL principles and laws, which they and their legal entity, the NDF, continually invoke when they allege violations by the government’s security forces,” the government monitoring committee said.

The government monitoring committee is the counterpart of the NDF-monitoring committee.

Both committees form the Joint Monitoring Committee, an entity that oversees and ensures compliance to CARHRIHL.

Double time

Presidential adviser on the peace process Teresita Deles had vowed to work double time this year to achieve the administration’s goal of a political settlement on all armed conflicts before  2016.

One of the unresolved issues between the government and NDF is the NDF’s insistence in the release of all its members in jail due to involvement in criminal activities.

Jose Ma. Sison said the government is showing neither sincerity nor confidence in continuing to refuse to release all 13 NDF consultants from jail.

Padilla said a screening process has been done by the government, but the disc that supposedly contains the names of the CPP-NPA-NDF’s consultants could not be opened because it is encrypted.

“There is no way that we could properly identify who are the rightful consultants of the NDF and those who are not,” he said.

Talks between the government and the CPP-NPA-NDF resumed in February 2011 in Oslo, Norway after a six-year hiatus.

Padilla was disappointed by the CPP’s call for the intensification of violence.         

“Such a call, no matter what the provocation or reason for it was, only succeeds to make us question the real intent of the CPP/NPA/NDF. The CPP-NPA is waging a so-called armed struggle against the government, but is in truth waging it against the people and would perpetrate a further worsening of the poverty situation of families’ and children’s suffering who bear the brunt of their armed attacks,” he said.

Padilla said the NDF must listen to the people’s cry for peace.

“We continue our call for our counterparts to show true sincerity in their professions of peace and concern for the people by lowering the level of violence as a prelude to peace. The declaration of a ceasefire as a token of good faith has carried the GPH-MILF peace talks to an unprecedented achievement. The same process can help declog the GPH-CPP/NPA/NDF peace negotiations with bona fide political will,” he said.

Returning the peace

Government peace panel member Jurgette Honculada said 80 persons have died daily in the 33 years that the conflict between the government and the CPP-NPA-NDF has existed.

Honculada said the NDF should reduce violence and return to the peace table.

She cited statistics from the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) showing that the conflict between government and the CPP-NPA has claimed the lives of 29,553 people from 1978 to 2010.

“The AFP-PNP over a 33-year period report an aggregate of 29,553 fatalities in the ongoing conflict between GPH and the CPP-NPA categorized thus: 13,412 communists (45 percent), 8,264 military and police (28 percent) and 7,877 civilians (21 percent). This further translates into 80 deaths daily for the period: 36 communists, 23 soldiers and police, and 21 civilians,” she said.

Honculada said that when the government and the CPP-NPA-NDF peace panels met in June in Oslo, both sides raised their bills of particulars.

She said the CPP-NPA-NDF listed over half a dozen issues pertaining to safety and immunity guarantees for their consultants (JASIG), bilateral agreements, the release of political prisoners, terrorist listing of the CPP-NPA and Jose Ma. Sison, and indemnification of human rights victims.

“These issues have been, and will be, addressed elsewhere. The GPH panel focused on a demand to lower the level of violence on the ground, with particular reference to the use of land mines and child soldiers by the NPA,” she said.

“There is no meeting of the minds there. Satur Ocampo wrote in his Philippine STAR column on Sept. 1, 2012. NDF chair Luis Jalandoni echoed this sentiment when he said, in a forum also on the same day, that peace talks must not be reduced to mere ceasefire negotiations,” she said.

Honculada said for the government peace panel, the issues of child soldiers and land mines are not marginal or peripheral to peace negotiations.

“Children, in the barest sense, are our future; when we imperil them we risk our future. International humanitarian law and Philippine law prohibit the use of child soldiers, a practice staunchly denied by the CPP-NPA but belied by regular news reports, among the latest, that a 17-year-old (recruited when he was 13) was among NPA casualties in an Aug. 31, 2012 Davao encounter,” she said.

Honculada cited that the CPP-NPA-NDF took pains to point out that the NPA uses “command-detonated” land mines (as against “pressure-activated” ones which kill anyone) whose use is allowed by international conventions.

“But land mines do not always obey instructions, time and again killing and maiming hapless civilians, recently a grenade targeted at a military site landed on merry making barangay folk in a Davao fair in Paquibato district, injuring 47; the NPA has belatedly owned up to the deed,” she said.

Honculada said there is an immediate need to “unlearn war” in the country.

“Unlearning war must begin here and now, not who knows when, or with the inking of the final pact. Violence has taken too high a toll on our families and villages and communities, rending them asunder,” she said.

“In the poem Brave Woman by Grace Monte de Ramos, a village woman (perhaps widow?) soliloquizes about her two sons, unschooled and unskilled, joining the army when they were young; and her third and youngest son, abducted at 17 - by soldiers or rebels? She cannot say. As she seeks his bones, she laments that perhaps her older sons have ‘given other mothers sorrow ... Perhaps my (youngest) son had to pay for what they borrowed.’”

Honculada said that “violence has taken too high a toll on our psyches, most especially those who have come within arm’s length of it.”

“The former pastor of a campus Protestant church was one of three children in the 70s serving the NPA as errand boys. His peasant father jailed by the military, his mother in the US to earn money somehow, he had to survive by his wits, thus ending up with the NPA in Isabela, his home province. Decades later, by dint of hard work, struggle and sacrifice, and luck, he became a pastor, as did one of his fellow errand boys. The third took his own life,” she said.

“The inner wounds inflicted by violence take a lifetime (and amazing grace) to heal. The inner demons one cannot always slay.”

Honculada cited that King Badouin I of Belgium has said, “Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace. It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him.”

“This is where GPH is coming from. This is the emotional calculus that compels the GPH panel to raise the issues of land mines and child soldiers and press for reduced levels of violence during negotiations. These do not negate the GPH’s commitment to socio-economic-political reforms. For GPH, seeking peace in the here-and-now is a foretaste or token of the just and enduring peace that we all want. Muting the gunfire during peace talks, keeping children and civilians out of harm’s way, will mean one life, or two or three or more saved, and that will have been worth it,” she said.           

“American peace mentor John Paul Lederach once said, when we choose gunfire as the modality by which we communicate, it becomes difficult to go back to words.”

ABB closure

The Rebolusyonaryong Partido ng Manggagawa-Pilipinas/Revolution Proletarian Army/Alex Boncayao Brigade (RPM-P/RPA/ABB), breakaway group of the NPAs, has signed a closure agreement with the government.

OPAPP Undersecretary Luisito Montalbo said that resolutions of support from various local legislative bodies such as the Provincial Peace and Order Council (PPOC) Negros Occidental affirmed “the signing of the Closure Agreement between the GPH (Government of the Philippines) and the RPM-P/RPA/ABB Tabara Paduano Group (TPG) will not only contribute to the peace and order situation of the province, but most importantly, to the entire region of Western Visayas and the country as a whole.”

“The peace and order councils of Region VI; the provinces of Negros Occidental, Negros Oriental, Aklan, Antique and Iloilo; the cities of San Carlos and Cadiz; and the municipality of Amlan, Negros Oriental have all issued their resolutions supporting the closure track,” he said.

Montalbo said the RPM-P/RPA/ABB, which signed a peace agreement with the government in 2000, will transform itself into an “unarmed, socio-economic organization” with the signing of the closure agreement.

Montalbo welcomed resolution no. 1004 approved by the Sanggunian of the Province of Negros Occidental, adding that the Negros Association of Chief Executives, Inc. headed by Enrique B. Magalona Mayor David Albert Lacson had likewise manifested support.

“The closure track has managed to receive widespread support down to the barangay level in the Visayas region,” he said.

Montalbo however is careful not to be complacent even with the mounting grassroots support.