One of the most veteran guerrillas in Asia is ready to negotiate a conditional delivery of weapons in the coming months. An operation with ingredients of dissolution and defeat, but also of resolution and rehabilitation, after a 55-year pulse in the State - now democratic, formerly dictatorial - with 40,000 deaths behind it. Everything indicates that the Philippine Government will resume the peace talks in the first quarter of 2024, abandoned in 2017 due to the knock on the door of the then president, Rodrigo Duterte. It was announced on Tuesday by the Government of Norway, which acts as a mediator, with the Netherlands.
"There is a common vision for peace", assured the host, the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Espen Barth Eide, who on Tuesday disseminated the pre-agreement, as the Government and guerrillas also did in separate press conferences. Despite this, it had been signed on Thursday at the Oslo City Council, as a framework "to negotiate the end of the violence, attacking its causes".
One of the triggers for the detente is the death, eleven months ago in Utrecht, of José María Sisón, founder in 1968 of the Maoist-oriented Communist Party of the Philippines (PCF), core of the "people's war". Sisón, who as a poet used the pseudonym Dear Warrior, was in Holland shortly after his amnesty, at the end of the eighties. Although Duterte recognized the anti-imperialism of Sison – who had been his teacher – and at the beginning of his term he appointed a minister of Agriculture similar to him, in little more than a year he went on to declare the war
The New People's Army (NEP), the name of the armed wing of the PCF, would count today with around 4,000 men and women. At its height, during the opposition to the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos father, it reached 26,000. Manila claims that hundreds of guerrillas have come down from the mountain in recent years in exchange for help and means of subsistence.
Both the military and political fronts are under the umbrella of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, based in Holland and which brings together both legal and clandestine entities, and which acts as an interlocutor for the Government, since the NEP is considered a terrorist organization. The progress would not have been possible without the amnesty last week, by President Marcos, of several rebels, among them members of the NEP-PCF. The pre-agreement would mean an amnesty for those convicted of crimes of "rebellion, sedition and unlawful assembly", but not for those serving prison terms for crimes of blood or kidnapping.
This is the culmination of contacts that began in Holland at the beginning of 2022, before being finalized in Norway. The same sponsors from seven years ago. The negotiator Julieta de Lima, widow of Sisón, could not specify when there will be a formal round, but it is taken for granted that it will be the first quarter of the year. The key will be, he said, "immunity for negotiators", the "release of political prisoners" and that the movement ceases to be categorized as "terrorist". The foundations were being created for the conversion of the National Democratic Front into a legal party, following the experience of guerrillas in Latin America.
