President Rodrigo Duterte has signed Proclamation No. 360, effecting the mechanism terminating the peace negotiations with the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New Peoples' Army, Malacanang announced late Thursday night.
In a statement, presidential spokesman Harry Roque said that the President have already directed the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process and the government peace panel to cancel all future meetings with the communists.
“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-CPP-NPA has engaged in acts of violence and hostilities,” Roque said.
“We find it unfortunate that their members have failed to show their sincerity and commitment in pursuing genuine and meaningful peaceful negotiations,” he added.
Saying that the President has walked “the extra mile for peace,” Roque insisted that Duterte wanted to leave a legacy of peace under his administration despite efforts to no longer pursue talks with Communist rebels.
“Rest assured that he will continuously pray that we may all find the peace that we seek for our beloved country in the fullness of God’s time,” he said.
Duterte’s pronouncements came after he ordered the arrest of all the legal fronts of the communist New People’s Army for allegedly conspiring against the government.
In previous speeches, Duterte warned that he would be dealing soon with the communist insurgency once the Marawi siege is over.
He added that the communist rebels will be treated as outlaws, since they are helping to topple the government or promote violence, inviting the “legal fronts” such as the NDF to declare their “revolution” against him.
In response, communist rebels said they have no choice but to intensify the protracted battle to topple the Duterte administration — Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder Jose Maria Sison said Thursday as he tagged President Rodrigo Duterte as the Philippines’ “number 1 terrorist.”
“The Filipino people and revolutionary forces waging the people’s democratic revolution have no choice but to intensify the people’s war through extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare in rural areas and partisan or commando operations in urban areas,” Sison said in a statement.
“The legal democratic forces and broad opposition have no choice but to develop the underground and encourage endangered activists to become fighters in the people’s army.”
Calling Duterte a “mass murderer, political swindler, a sycophant to foreign powers and a corrupt bureaucrat” — his once former professor slammed the alleged move of the present administration towards a “fascist dictatorship.”
“Duterte is the No. 1 terrorist in the Philippines,” Sison said. “He is culpable for the abduction, torture and mass murder of an increasing large number of poor people suspected drug users and pushers, peasants and indigenous people in suspected guerrilla fronts and Moro people suspected of aiding the Dawlah Islamiyah from the time of the indiscriminate bombing of Marawi City to the present in several Bangsamoro areas.”
The President, he said, is now worried to death by his own fear “that anti-Duterte officers within his own army and police are inclined to act in the name of the people and unite with the broad opposition and mass movement” to topple his administration “in the same manner that the Marcos and Estrada regimes were ended.”
Sison also slammed Duterte’s “utterly malicious and shameless” threats against suspected revolutionaries and legal social activists, whom he accused of conspiring against him.
“Duterte´s bloodlust and mania for mass murder are boundless. He expects to wipe out through arbitrary arrests, torture, indefinite detention and massacre of suspected revolutionaries and legal social activists … to set up a fascist dictatorship in the service of US imperialism and his fellow oligarchs among the big compradors, landlords and corrupt bureaucrats.”