Promises by the Philippines’ popular new president to tackle poverty and corruption could boost upcoming peace talks with rebels and make irrelevant the country’s communist insurgency, which turned 42 yesterday, the government’s negotiator said.
Guerrillas of the New People’s Army — one of Asia’s most resilient Maoist forces, enduring decades of military crackdowns — celebrated the anniversary in their jungle camps with a vow to intensify attacks.
Behind the scenes, however, negotiators on both sides have already agreed to resume talks after six years — fruits of the political goodwill and optimism that followed the May election of reformist Philippine President Benigno Aquino III.
Photo: Reuters
Aquino represents “the new dynamics” of the Philippines, chief government negotiator Alexander Padilla told reporters last week.
Padilla said that Aquino, who enjoys support across the political spectrum as the son of revered democracy icons, would inject honesty, good faith and a strong advocacy for reforms and human rights into peace talks that have often been undermined by mistrust and weak public support.
“This could be the best opportunity for the other side to really come up with a political settlement,” Padilla said of the talks, scheduled for February.
Engendered by the Cold War in the late 1960s, the rural-based insurrection led by the underground Communist Party of the Philippines has emerged as this Southeast Asian nation’s most serious security menace, stoked by decades of poverty, agrarian unrest, government corruption and misrule. Five presidents have failed to crush the Maoist rebellion, which has killed at least 120,000 combatants and civilians.
The party dates from its split from an older communist group at a conference on Dec. 26, 1968, in northern Pangasinan province. That date was also was the 75th birthday of Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
Washington has blacklisted the Communist Party and its armed wing, the 5,000-strong New People’s Army, as terrorist organizations, blaming them for separate attacks that killed four US military personnel in the 1980s.
The rebels walked away from peace talks brokered by Norway in 2004, suspecting then-president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s government of instigating their inclusion on US and EU terrorist lists.
Since assuming office, Aquino has begun tackling pervasive government corruption and human rights violations blamed on state security forces that have helped breed the insurgency.
Padilla said the president understands the rebels’ concerns. His mother, former president Corazon Aquino, led a 1986 “people power” protest that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose martial law declaration in 1972 provided the fodder for the rebel movement as students, farmers and the middle-class swelled its ranks to about 25,000.
After restoring democracy, Corazon Aquino opened talks with the rebels, but they soon broke down. Battle setbacks, factionalism and surrenders have sapped their strength, but they still claim a presence in each of the Philippines’ 81 provinces.
The NPA operates a shadow government in areas under its influence, conducting trials — and sometimes executions — of policemen and village officials accused of harming people.
The rebels also collect “revolutionary taxes” — and punish business establishments refusing to pay.
Benigno Aquino won rare praise from the rebels when he recently ordered the dropping of charges against 43 health workers who said they were abused in military custody after being arrested as suspected insurgents 10 months ago.
Padilla said the rebels — faced with the collapse of many communist states that supported and inspired them, and with a popular new national leader seen as addressing social inequities — may soon fade to irrelevance if they persist on waging a protracted war.
He said that even hardline leftists have been elected into Congress after abandoning their armed struggle.
Rebel spokesman George Madlos said oppressive conditions in the country that have fostered poverty, corruption and rights abuses had remained under Aquino.
“We will continue to wage the revolution because it’s right and we’re in a position to intensify attacks,” Madlos said in a statement last week.
Despite sporadic fighting, including the killing of 10 army soldiers in a Dec. 14 rebel ambush, both sides have agreed to resume formal talks on Feb. 15 to 21 in Norway’s capital, Oslo. They also agreed to a Christmas truce through Jan. 3.
The military, meanwhile, has softened its counterinsurgency strategy, which has been linked to extrajudicial killings of hundreds of left-wing activists and suspected rebel sympathizers.
The new six-year program unveiled last week seeks to wean away civilian communities from the rebels and includes support of advocacy groups from outside the government in addressing human rights concerns.
The Communist Party has criticized the new plan. In a statement this week, it said it “will keep on engendering the revolution until the entire rotten, puppet, reactionary system is brought down.”
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
OUTRAGE: The former strongman was accused of corruption and responsibility for the killings of hundreds of thousands of political opponents during his time in office Indonesia yesterday awarded the title of national hero to late president Suharto, provoking outrage from rights groups who said the move was an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses and corruption that took place during his 32 years in power. Suharto was a US ally during the Cold War who presided over decades of authoritarian rule, during which up to 1 million political opponents were killed, until he was toppled by protests in 1998. He was one of 10 people recognized by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in a televised ceremony held at the presidential palace in Jakarta to mark National
US President Donald Trump handed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a one-year exemption from sanctions for buying Russian oil and gas after the close right-wing allies held a chummy White House meeting on Friday. Trump slapped sanctions on Moscow’s two largest oil companies last month after losing patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his refusal to end the nearly four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. However, while Trump has pushed other European countries to stop buying oil that he says funds Moscow’s war machine, Orban used his first trip to the White House since Trump’s return to power to push for
LANDMARK: After first meeting Trump in Riyadh in May, al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House today would be the first by a Syrian leader since the country’s independence Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa arrived in the US on Saturday for a landmark official visit, his country’s state news agency SANA reported, a day after Washington removed him from a terrorism blacklist. Sharaa, whose rebel forces ousted long-time former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad late last year, is due to meet US President Donald Trump at the White House today. It is the first such visit by a Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946, according to analysts. The interim leader met Trump for the first time in Riyadh during the US president’s regional tour in May. US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack earlier
RSS