Gov’t, Reds hold another round of informal talks

TARLAC CITY — The government peace panel is set to hold another round of "informal talks" today with self-exiled leaders of the National Democratic Front (NDF) in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, Gov. Jose Yap Sr., the panel’s senior consultant, disclosed.

Yap, who left for Oslo yesterday, said the five-day "backdoor" negotiations with leaders of the NDF, the political wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), are expected to jump-start formal talks meant to peacefully end the 34-year-old Maoist insurgency in the country.

Leading the government panel is former Justice Secretary Silvestre Bello III.

Two weeks before the backdoor talks, however, guerrillas of the New People’s Army (NPA), the CPP’s armed wing, staged at least two attacks on government positions in this province.

The first rebel assault was carried out in Barangay Lubigan in the upland town of San Jose, where the insurgents commandeered three dump trucks of the provincial government and used them to raid the village’s police outpost then being manned by only two police officers. A civilian was wounded by a stray bullet during a brief gunfight.

In the second attack, the NPA tried but failed to overrun a detachment of the Army’s 69th Infantry Battalion in Barangay Maamot, also San Jose town.

It was early last October when the government panel started holding backdoor talks with Jose Ma. Sison, the CPP’s founding chairman, and Luis Jalandoni, head of the NDF peace panel.

President Arroyo suspended the peace process in mid-2001 after the NPA assassinated Reps. Rodolfo Aguinaldo of Cagayan and Marcial Punzalan of Quezon. — Benjie Villa