Jose Ma. Sison is just an “armchair general,” Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said on Friday, slamming the exiled founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines for his “ineffective” directives made overseas after nearly 8,000 communist rebels have returned to the fold of law.
In a Palace press briefing, Lorenzana acknowledged the leadership of Sison when he founded the CPP and its armed wing, the New People’s Army.
“Jose Maria Sison, maybe he was a good leader before in the 1970s when they started CPP-NPA in 1968 up to 70s and early 80s. He was able to organize from a small group in Pampanga, then they ventured in Northern Luzon until they reached nationwide. Maybe he was good then and he was able to militate people. They were active back then against the government, especially with [former] President [Ferdinand] Marcos,” Lorenzana recalled.
According to the Defense chief, communist rebels reached their prime back in 1980s when it had at least 25,000 fighters all over the country. The CPP even used the dire poverty in different areas of the country such as in Bicol, Samar, and Negros to encourage people into rebelling against the government.
But after Sison left the country in 1987, the top communist has since lost touch with his men on the ground, Lorenza said.
“He has been far from the country for so long. He left the country in 1987. He has not come back here, he hasn’t returned. Is he still attuned with what’s happening on the ground? I don’t think so,” he said.
“He makes himself relevant by having the peace talks in Norway. Remove that concept, he will lose his relevance,” he added. “That’s why the President is right to have the peace talks here. Why do we have to involve the other countries in our local problems?”
According to Lorenzana, Sison plans to make the decades-old riff between the government and communist rebels to reach the international scene.
“It’s part of their strategies. They want to internationalize the issue even if the issue is not an international issue in the first place. It is our problem here in the Philippines,” he said.
Asked to describe Sison’s leadership two days after the CPP celebrated its 50th founding anniversary, Lorenzana said Sison is just an armchair general.
“I call that an armchair general. He’s not going out of his chair and keeps on directing from there, which is not very effective,” he said.
“I have more respect for these fighters on the ground even if we are fighting them. I have more respect for them because they are here having a hard time. They have their own set of ideas that they’re trying to fight with their own better ideas,” the DND chief said.
Meanwhile, Lorenzana stated that some 8,000 rebels have already surrendered to the government this year, attributing the “success” as a result of the localized peace talks.
“For the whole year, 8,000 rebels have surrendered, and we gave them assistance from the government like housing, livelihood, schooling of their kids, and medical care,” he said, emphasizing that the government has provided solutions to the previous grievances of the rebel returnees which the CPP-NPA instilled in their minds.
“The government now is trying to address the problems one by one. We give lands to the landless. We provide jobs by tasking the TESDA to go around and train people to have their skills and productivity of the people honed,” he added.
The Department of Agriculture helps the farmers with the agriculture industry, Lorenzana said. The Department of Trade and Industry, meanwhile, goes “all around” to improve or to explore the investment in the area.
“Even our ‘Build, Build, Build’ is actually jumpstarting the economy of our countryside by building roads, bridges, airports, all these infrastructures that the government is trying to build in all over the country,” he said.
The DND chief said the government provides rebel returnees “a complete package” so that they can live also normally within the communities.
Lorenzana even underscored that the number of surrenderees only show that the communist leadership has no control over their men on the ground, attributing the localized peace talks to the dwindling number of active fighters.
“The mere fact that there are a lot of people bringing down their arms, surrendering to our troops and then trying to fit in into their communities is a good sign that our localized peace talks are working,” he said.
“The strength of the active fighters, the cadres are dwindling down. I believe that the recruitment of the fighters is also down,” Lorenzana added.
For his part, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III, who also chairs the government’s negotiating peace panel, said on Thursday that the government will push through with localized peace talks in 2019.
Peace negotiations between the government and communist rebels bogged down in November last year after President Rodrigo Duterte signed Proclamation 360, putting an end to peace negotiations with the NDFP.
Duterte then has imposed a number of conditions prior to the revival of the talks.
Sison, however, rejected the government’s push for localized peace talks, labeling it as a “cheap trick” which has failed many times.
In early December, in a bid to ensure an efficient and effective strategy to address the decades-old communist insurgency in the country, the President ordered the national task force seeking to end the local armed conflict with communist rebels.
In his Executive Order No. 70, the President directed the government to create a national task force to end local communist armed conflict, aiming to institutionalize the “whole-of-nation” approach in inclusive and sustainable peace and adopt a national peace framework.
The said EO provides that the national framework on peace, anchored on the whole-of-nation approach, aims to come to grips with the root causes of insurgencies, disturbances, and tensions such as poverty, historical injustice, social inequality and lack of inclusivity.