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Friday, March 29, 2024

Peace talks with Reds are useless

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President Rodrigo Duterte did right when he decided against conducting any further peace talks with the communist New People’s Army. 

About a month ago, President Duterte had had enough of the underhanded communist attacks on troops of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and decided to continue the armed fight against the Reds.  When the communists started feeling the onslaught of the AFP offensive, they sought a resumption of peace talks with the government.  Banners and placards in pocket rallies organized by left-leaning groups in Metropolitan Manila demanded—“resume peace talks!”

When President Duterte reopened the possibility of resuming peace talks, the NPA retorted with new attacks against government soldiers.  As a result, the President cancelled further negotiations with the Reds, and denounced the NPA and its leader, Jose Ma. Sison, in his recent State of the Nation Address. 

The President’s speech said it all.  Communism in the Philippines has a failed leadership because its leader is very ill in his comfortable sanctuary in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and he survives only because of the free medical attention he gets there, courtesy of the Dutch taxpayers. 

Truth to tell, pursuing any negotiations with the NPA is useless.  History itself confirms this.

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In 1986, right after then President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino seized power, Aquino ordered the release of Sison, who was detained back then in a military stockade during the remaining decade of the administration of ex-President Ferdinand Marcos.  After that, Aquino directed a veteran Palawan politician, Ramon Mitra Jr., to spearhead peace talks with the NPA. 

 From what Aquino’s publicists disseminated through television several weeks later, the NPA leadership agreed to talk peace with government representatives.  A television news clip even showed Mitra and communist representative Satur Ocampo embracing each other in ceremonies at the Club Filipino.  That was, however, all there was to it—an agreement to negotiate peace under terms to be decided upon later on.    

Nothing truly fruitful happened after that.  Eventually, Sison fled to Utrecht and launched his communist revolution in the Philippines from the luxurious comfort and safety of exile in the Netherlands. 

With its leadership enjoying a luxurious exile abroad, and with communism fast losing adherents and supporters worldwide mainly because of the collapse of the unlamented Soviet Union and its satellites in eastern Europe in 1989, the NPA has been reduced to a countryside bandit organization that survives only from the so-called revolutionary taxes its armed thugs collect by force and intimidation in NPA strongholds.  In essence, the NPA is no different from the kidnap-for-ransom Abu Sayyaf group.    

 Peace talks with communists, whether local or foreign, will get nowhere because of communism’s Godless ideology, and its opportunistic nature. 

Take a look at Russian history.  Czar Nicholas II was hated by the Russian people for his weak and careless leadership.  The communist Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin let the anti-communist White Russians do all the work in toppling the czar.  When the czar was ousted, the communists undermined the White Russians’ efforts to establish a democracy.  After the communists seized power, they relegated the ailing Lenin to the wings, and installed a totalitarian government under the brutal dictator Joseph Stalin.  When Stalin started butchering his own people just to remain in power, the Russian common folk realized that they were better off under the czar. 

 At the dawn of World War II in Europe, Stalin made a pact with Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler.  Together Stalin and Hitler divided Poland between themselves and triggered the war in Europe.  In June 1941, Nazi Germany breached its alliance with the Soviet Union and invaded the latter.  Stalin turned to the western allies for help, and joined the war against Nazi Germany.

As the tide of the war turned against Nazi Germany, and when Soviet troops were just meters away from Poland, Stalin urged Polish resistance fighters to liberate their land from enemy troops.  The Polish resistance did that, and succeeded.  Days later, when Nazi soldiers returned and brutally regained the temporarily liberated territory, the same Soviet troops simply watched and waited for the Nazis to butcher the Poles, before entering the Poland to fight the Nazis.      

After the war ended in 1945, Stalin installed communist governments in the eastern European countries his Red Army “liberated” from the Nazis.  By agreement of the victors of war, Germany was divided into two —democratic West Germany, and communist East Germany.  Although Berlin, the German capital, was located inside East Germany, it was divided into West Berlin, which belonged to West Germany, and East Berlin, which was part of East Germany.

Even after war’s end, Stalin coveted West Berlin.  In 1948, Soviet troops imposed a blockade around West Berlin and laid siege to the city in the hope of starving its people into submission to Soviet authority and slavery.  Fortunately, the United States and Great Britain resorted to the famous “Berlin Airlift,” by which food supplies were sent by air to West Berlin, thus saving the city, its people, and its freedom.  

Being a communist country, the Soviet Union had no tolerance for western-style democracy and freedom.  Hungary and Poland provide examples.

In October 1956, the people of Hungary overthrew their communist government and replaced it with a democracy.  At first, Moscow promised that Soviet troops stationed in Hungary will be pulled out.  Instead of complying with that promise, Moscow launched a surprise attack on Hungary.  Soon after Soviet tanks massacred the Hungarian freedom fighters, Moscow reinstated a communist government in the country.

After Poland experimented with “socialism with a human face” by restoring fundamental freedoms to its citizens in April 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and reinstated its communist government by brutal force. 

History teaches that a deal with communists is no deal at all.  At best, it is pact with the devil’s representatives on earth.

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