DAVAO CITY—Incoming peace process adviser Jesus Dureza and labor secretary-designate Silvestre Bello will go to Oslo, Norway in mid-June to meet communist leader Jose Maria Sison in a bid to revive the stalled peace negotiations, President-elect Rodrigo Duterte said Saturday night.
Duterte, who has offered Cabinet posts to nominees of the communist movement, admitted that he could no longer offer a “coalition government” to Sison and his comrades because it would jeopardize the bureaucracy.
But Duterte said he will try to be “inclusive” as possible and is willing to free detained communist negotiators and other political prisoners if the talks restart.
Duterte is betting on his close friendship with Sison, his former university teacher who fled to European exile nearly 30 years ago, to bring a swift political settlement to a rebellion that has killed about 30,000 people by official count and impoverished vast swathes of the country.
“I have commissioned [Dureza] to go to Oslo and one of the Scandinavian countries and do the preliminary talks there for a broader framework of the [talks] and to maybe accompany [Sison] in going home,” Duterte told reporters here.
“I maybe president then [and] maybe I may give him a safe conduct pass and those in prison, like [Sison’s fellow communist leaders Benito and Wilma] Tiamzon [who can be freed] because they will have to participate in peace talks,” Duterte said.
Formal peace negotiations with the communist movement stalled in 2011 after the communist umbrella organization, the National Democratic Front, withdrew from the talks because the Manila government refused to grant safe-conduct passes to Communist Party of the Philippines founding chairman Sison, the Tiamzons and other negotiators.
The communist rebels’ demand for the reactivation of the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees for Sison and other NDF political consultants incarcerated by the Aquino administration. The names were on a list compiled during the Estrada administration and stored in an old computer floppy diskette that got corrupted and could no longer be retrieved.
Duterte said that he may allow a release of all political prisoners and the drafting of a new list.
Bello, who will reprise his former role as chief NDF negotiator, said there won’t be any preconditions for the resumption of the peace talks to help end the longest-running communist insurgency in the region.
“I’m very confident that the peace negotiations will resume. I made it very clear to him that if we will resume the peace talks, it should be without any precondition,” Bello told The Standard.
“It’s in the Hague Joint Declarations that the conduct of peace negotiations shall be without pre-negotiations. If there would be ceasefires or release of [political] prisoners, that should be a product of negotiations,” Bello added.
In the same interview, Duterte backtracked on his statement about having a coalition government with the communist rebels, saying that many oppose this plan.
“They will have a share of governance, but it cannot be a coalition government,” Duterte said. “I will place the entire government in jeopardy as there is strong resistance from the police and the military. And [that’s] natural.” With AFP
