Duterte cancels peace talks with communist party

AFP PHOTO/MANMAN DEJETO
AFP PHOTO/MANMAN DEJETO

One of President Rodrigo Duterte’s promises during the presidential campaigns last year was to end the long-running communist insurgency by forging a peace deal with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

But it looks like this won’t be happening.

Duterte has signed a proclamation that formally ends peace negotiations with communist rebels, Malacañang said yesterday.

In a statement, Presidential spokesman Harry Roque said Duterte signed Proclamation 360 yesterday afternoon and directed the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines Panel for Peace Talks to cancel peace negotiations with the communist rebels.

“While we agreed to resume peace talks with the aforementioned group and exerted our best efforts to accelerate the signing and implementation of the final peace agreement, the NDF (National Democratic Front)-CPP-NPA (New People’s Army) has engaged in acts of violence and hostilities,” the statement read.

Duterte was known to be on friendly terms with leftists and their armed wing, the New People’s Army, during his time as mayor of Davao City. During the campaigns, he would constantly call himself a “leftist” and boasted of his friendship with the CPP’s founder Jose Maria Sison, who was also Duterte’s political science professor in college.

Sison promised a ceasefire last year if Duterte would be elected president. He told the president this himself over a Skype call.

But it looks like that friendship is over. After Duterte sought to designate the NPA as a terrorist organization last week, Sison called Duterte the “top terrorist in the Philippines.”  Sison said Duterte was responsible for the “mass murder” of drug suspects in his war on drugs.

For the month of November alone, the NPA claimed responsibility for 27 attacks in northern Mindanao, a region still reeling from the effects of the Marawi siege, where a thousand were killed and the city was destroyed in a five-month-long clash with Islamic State-linked terrorists.



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