PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte on Monday once again resorted to what observers call cheap potshots against his former professor, Communist Party of the Philippines founding chairman Jose Maria Sison, saying he would slap him in the face once they meet eye-to-eye.
Speaking to soldiers at Mawab, Compostela Valley, Duterte vowed Sison would not be coming home without getting a taste of his ire, after he recently called on communist cadres to emulate the riots of the “First Quarter Storm” to overthrow the Duterte administration.
“Let’s meet, Sison. I’ll slap you. You’ll see. No jokes. Son a bitch, I’ll really slap you. Conceited demon,” Duterte said in his speech in Tagalog.
Duterte slammed the communist rebels for harboring a “bankrupt” ideology, adding “You think you are god…you just kill people.”
The President said the communist party was getting desperate “because there is no second echelon in your organization now.”
The Palace likewise shrugged off Sison’s call for the youth to stage protests against the administration, hoping the CPP founder had enough grandkids to heed his call for mass action.
“Again, we don’t attach too much importance on Joma Sison. I hope he has enough grandchildren to heed this call,” Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said at a Palace briefing.
“The problem with Joma Sison is he is stuck in history. He never moved beyond the First Quarter Storm,” he added.
The First Quarter Storm refers to the series of mass action protests against then President Ferdinand Marcos during the first three months of 1970, shortly after his landslide victory against Sergio Osmeña Jr., son of a former president.
Duterte insisted the communist movement has become irrelevant, adding the public had been questioning the sincerity of their cause.
Duterte and Sison were supposed to have a private phone conversation “within the week,” Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said, but reiterated it “should not be a precondition to the resumption” of the peace talks.
Peace negotiations between the CPP’s political arm, the National Democratic Front, and the government collapsed in November last year, branding the CPP and its armed wing, the New People’s Army, as terrorist organizations.
The government’s peace initiatives talks with the communist rebels appeared doomed after President Duterte said he wanted the communist movement destroyed.
In his speech in Compostela Valley, the President likened the communist insurgency in the Philippines to illegal drugs which has been causing suffering to the Filipino people.
Duterte said he wanted the communist movement destroyed akin to what the government was doing against the proliferation of drugs in the country.
The President appeared to have been agitated by Sison’s call for the youth to hold mass protests similar to the 1970 rally.
“When I said ‘destroy, destroy.’ That’s the rule of war,” he said
“The communist insurgency was causing suffering to the Filipino people,” Duterte said.
Roque downplayed Sison’s call for mass protests against Duterte, saying the President’s former professor was not important person and should move on as he was “stuck in the past.”
“Again, we don’t attach too much importance [to] Joma Sison. I hope he has enough grandchildren to heed this call,” Roque said at a briefing in the Palace.
In an online interview, Sison said called on the Filipino youth to launch huge mass marches and rallies like during the first Quarter storm of 1970.
Duterte terminated the peace talks with the Reds last November, 2017, through Proclamation No. 360, following the NPA’s ambush in Talakag, Bukidnon which left a policeman and a four-month-old baby dead last November 10, 2017.
On December 5, Duterte signed Proclamation no. 374 declaring the Reds as terrorists and have them arrested under the Human Security Act.
He earlier ordered the arrest of non-armed legal fronts for conspiracy to commit terrorism under the HSA, and the re-arrest of those temporarily released as an act of good faith to the peace talks aside from those who are already old.