Is peace adviser spoiling the resumption of talks?

This is the third piece in a row I’ve written about perceivable hindrances to the smooth resumption of formal peace negotiations between the government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines. It had been announced in early December that they had agreed to do so in Oslo, Norway, on Nov. 23.

It looks like these hindrances all emanate from the government side, particularly from statements by the Office of the Presidential Adviser on Peace, Reconciliation and Unity (OPAPRU), headed by Carlito Galvez Jr.

Galvez himself describes the resumption of peace talks as a “restart” or a “do-over.” And a presidential assistant and OPAPRU official asserted: “The talks are new… We are not referring to anything previously discussed before… It’s not what is called resumption of talks…”

Last week, Galvez guested at a weekly media forum hosted by PhilSTAR associate editor Marichu Villanueva, in which he announced that the OPAPRU had started its own peace program, coining it as a Public-Private Partnership for Peace, or “PPP 4 Peace.” It’s a take-off from the government’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps, supposedly the national poverty-reduction program that provides cash transfers  to poor households all around the country.

On Dec. 11, Marichu wrote in her column on this page that Galvez “counts on the ‘PPP 4 Peace’ to jumpstart the post-Joma peace process with the CPP-NPA-NDF.” 

The reference to “post-Joma peace process” pertains to Jose Maria Sison, the NDFP panel chief political consultant in the peace negotiations since Sept. 1, 1992 and who welcomed and encouraged the back-channel discussions that led to the Nov. 23 joint statement. Sison passed away on Dec. 16 last year.

What is the OPAPRU “PPP 4 Peace” all about?

Marichu wrote that according to Galvez, the program is divided into four “core groups that will have 12 members each as ‘mentors’.” These groups “consist of officials from concerned government agencies and the representatives from the Private Sector Advisory Council (PSAC) formed last year by PBBM [Marcos Jr].” The PSAC lead convenor is Sabin Aboitiz, president and chief executive officer of Aboitiz Equity Ventures Inc.

The four core groups, as Marichu explains it, consist of the following:

 The first group will engage in carbon credits and reforestation. It’s headed by the Ayala Corp. with government counterparts from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Department of Transportation. The second takes charge of jobs generation, headed by Frederick Go, president and CEO of Robinson Land Corp. with government counterparts from the Department of Trade and Industry. The third engages in capacitation training, with the Ayala Foundation and government representatives from the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda).The fourth group tackles governance, led by Zuellig Foundation with government counterparts from the Department of the Interior and Local Governments and concerned governors and mayors.

The big question is: How effectively would these groups’ inputs serve to “jumpstart” the peace talks? Mind that the NDFP has repeatedly identified social and economic reforms as “the meat of the entire peace process” that calls for addressing the root causes of the armed conflict, or why there’s an armed conflict in the first place.

Galvez disclosed he was also wooing the support of the 19th Congress. He “thanked profusely the recent plenary approval at the House of Representatives of PBBM’s Amnesty Proclamations” that will involve “more than 7,000 former armed rebels who have already availed of the ‘Balik-loob’ program of the government.”

The NDFP has rejected Marcos Jr.’s amnesty proclamation, asserting that the issue of amnesty has been included in the last of the four-point agenda of the peace talks.

On that same day (Dec. 11), the NDFP issued a statement making it clear that, after six years since the Duterte administration unilaterally terminated the peace negotiations in 2017, NDFP “enters the talks with a clear intention of building on past achievements of the negotiations, including honoring and respecting previous bilateral agreements.”

“Any notion or suggestion of a ‘restart’ or a ‘do-over’ of the negotiations,” the statement pointed out, “practically disregards previous milestone agreements between the GRP and the NDFP, namely The Hague Joint Declaration (1992), the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG, 1995) and the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL, 1998), all of which remain binding between the two parties.”

(Despite the signing of the guidelines for implementing the CARHRIHL, this first agreement on the substantive agenda of the peace talks has not been implemented. Implementation could have tested the sincerity of both parties and resolved many long-standing issues of injustice.)

“The litmus test of the GRP’s sincerity toward [achieving] just and lasting peace,” the statement added, “relies on them honoring the substantive agenda items set in The Hague Joint Declaration.” These included addressing widespread poverty, landlessness and lack of national industrialization – “all of which are already being addressed in the draft Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms (CASER),” the NDFP said.

Attempts by the GRP “to frame this possible continuation of the peace talks as a ‘restart’ rather than a resumption,” the statement noted, raises suspicion “whether there is genuine intent to address the root causes of the armed conflict, or are they primarily just interested to strongarm the revolutionary forces into submission?”

Foreseeing that “only time will tell,” the NDFP reiterated that the peace negotiations are not negotiations for capitulation.” Rather, it asserted, “(they) are a unique opportunity to find mutually acceptable and principled ways of addressing the root causes of the civil war.”

 Emphatically, the statement concludes:

“The NDFP engages in the negotiations on the basis of good faith guided by our genuine desire to address the root causes of the armed conflict. There should therefore be absolutely no talk or insinuation, much less demand, for the NDFP to surrender or for the revolutionary forces of the [Communist Party of the Philippines] and the [New People’s Army] to lay down their arms.”