Category: rodrigo duterte

duterte, joma, peace talks

wrapping up the anti bio of national artist ishmael bernal, trying very hard not to be distracted by president rodrigo duterte’s mind-blowing first days in office, but happening to catch the new prez addressing the armed forces and talking about joma sison like he was the nicest man in the world! that calls for a blogbreak.  joma and ishmael were classmates in UP diliman in the late fifties, and when ishma was claimed by the communist party when he died, his sosyal showbiz friends were so scandalized.

anyway, ishma always thought it was crazy of joma to continue leading a revolution long-distance via the internet, sana umuwi na lang siya.  oo nga naman.  so it was good news that joma was talking of coming home for peace talks, basta may ceasefire at palalayain ang political prisoners.  ‘yun nga lang, joma’s CCP and NPA are on the US state department’s list of terrrorist orgs, and so medyo tagilid, delikado, nanganganib ang pag-uwi unless the president can prevail upon the US to give peace a chance, hope springs eternal.

meanwhile, this piece on the history of the peace talks initiated by FVR in 1992 is essential reading.

Goodby again, this time for good
Paulynn P. Sicam

I’ve said goodbye to government work four times. The first was in 1994 when I retired from the Commission on Human Rights. Working in government was not at all on my radar screen, but when President Cory Aquino called to ask me to fill a vacancy at the CHR, I could not refuse. I was too invested in the struggle for freedom and her presidency to say no.

It was alternately frustrating and satisfying being a human rights commissioner. The cases we handled were horrifying and plentiful, but my work was in human rights education and I felt we made real progress inculcating human rights values in the military and police officers we trained. My group had developed a human rights training module that was interactive and personal, and had caught the attention of other human rights educators, including UNESCO, which gave it a prize in 1994.

Before long, I was back in government. Peace talks with the Communist Party of the Philippines represented by the National Democratic Front were brewing and I was asked to be a consultant to the Philippine panel led by the venerable Ambassador Howard Dee. It was hard work, requiring much discussion, thought and analysis. There I learned that universal concepts such as national sovereignty, democracy and social justice, confidence building measures and safety and immunity guarantees, do not necessarily mean the same on different sides of the peace table.

The much-anticipated formal talks opened in Brussels in June 1995, only to collapse the following day when the NDF refused to show up for the next session until we brought to Brussels their comrade who had been arrested. It would be the first in a series of impasses and adjournments on the issue of release of detained communist leaders that would render the peace talks inutile and fruitless for the next 20 years.

Although the talks proceeded and many documents were signed, it was merely a game of basketball where all we could do was dribble, per President Ramos’ order, to keep the talks going. The strategy suited the Communists well. When the process began in 1992, the CPP-NPA was in deep trouble. It had killed off hundreds of its own people in massive internal purges, and many of its intellectuals had either quit or were expelled for disagreeing with Joma Sison on matters of strategy and ideology.  By the end of the Ramos presidency, the Party had rebuilt itself, thanks to the free movement of its leaders made possible by safety and immunity guarantees given them by government.

President Arroyo was chummy with Bayan Muna, the leftist party list, and she promptly re-opened peace talks after Estrada resigned and she took over Malacañang.  But after two years, the table was in trouble. The EU and the US had issued separate terrorist lists that included the CPP-NPA and Joma Sison himself. When government refused to intervene, the NDF panel walked out of the talks.

A new panel was organized in 2005 and I was invited to be one of three women in a group of five to try and re-open talks with the NDF.  But after several exploratory meetings in Oslo and actual agreement to re-open talks, the same issues festered: terrorist listing and the release of jailed CPP-NPA leaders. By the time President Noynoy Aquino took over, the talks had been on a seven-year impasse.

I was relieved to leave government and the intractable peace process, but in 2011, I was again invited to join the technical committee of the new panel, this time for my so-called “institutional memory.” Although the talks began with a lot of goodwill among friends who had fought against the dictatorship together, it quickly deteriorated into another impasse, on the same issue that the Communists have always insisted on — the release of their jailed leaders. As they did with every panel, the NDF declared that they would just wait for a more open, friendlier government to resume talks with.

They seem to have hit pay dirt with President Duterte who calls himself a leftist, a socialist, and a friend of the CPP-NPA. It is looking like the party will finally get its way: the impending release of their jailed leaders, appointments to key Cabinet posts, and virtual clearance from the president to continue “taxing” corporations and ordinary citizens in exchange for leaving them alone.

I leave the peace process for good with mixed emotions. Several generations of negotiators, including members of the present team, have tried to build on past friendships and common histories to reach a peace agreement with the CPP-NPA-NDF, to no avail.  After dealing with the NDF for 22 years, I am convinced that to the communists, the peace process is a one-way street that they are on only to get as many concessions as they can from government without conceding anything in return — until they reach their goal either of a coalition government or total political victory over our constitutional government.

I truly wish the Duterte government and its recycled peace negotiators better success in dealing with the CPP-NPA’s tired old scheme.

Unsolicited advice to President Duterte

Clarita R. Carlos

Twelve years ago, we published and presented the findings of our study on the issues and challenges of bureaucratic reform in the Philippines to a group of legislators, local executives, academics and journalists. In that study, we described the numerous overlaps, duplication, and unclear lines of authority in much of the government bureaucracy, which have resulted not only in confusion but also in great difficulty in transacting business with various government agencies.

Read on…

digging digong

this is my 3rd attempt since his monday presscon to finish a post on president-elect duterte.  i keep getting overtaken by events – the thursday presscon was a zinger, too, and so was the friday decision to stop with the presscons for the nonce, and what about that saturday night thanksgiving speech, oh my gods.

it’s been a week and on facebook ay nanggagalaiti pa rin ang journalist circles over duterte seeming to make excuses for the journalist killings instead of saying … umm, whatever they wanted him to say, i guess, like something pnoy would say, or gma, in their politically correct ways and words that signify nothing really, because the killings went on anyway under their watch.

in a facebook message exchange with jojo abinales, the professor in hawaii who hails from mindanao, he brought up digong’s statements re journalists and thinks that maybe the prez-elect was actually referring more to broadcast journalists, not the writers.

Sa probinsya they are the pundits. So no wonder he cited Jun Pala who was a broadcaster who threatened people, could easily be paid. Kasi I doubt if he reads the newspapers or even Interaksyon or Rappler. But he listens to talk radio like all Chico de Calle … You may have to listen to talk radio for a while. The Tulfo types. Now put that in a Davao context. … Have you listened to his TV show Mula sa masa Tungo sa masa? Some of it is in YouTube. It is hilarious. I think he believes the journalists are like his interviewer in that show. One question lang and he then rants and raves.

yes, that weekly tv show worked for davao, the mayor sharing the latest, speaking his truth, from long immersion in politics, taking the time to explain, even if not in a linear or logical manner because he likes to suddenly backtrack for some history or go sideways for some synchronicity or flash forward for some prophetic promise, and then he’s back to the present, or not.  it works for me, too.  i am loving this exposure, finally, to the mindanao state of mind and to bisaya / dabawenyo the language and culture.

meanwhile, pinag-uusapan pa rin, the alleged pambabastos ni duterte sa isang lady reporter nang  kanya itong sinipulan sa monday presscon.  digong defended the whistling on thursday: “whistling is not a sexual thing,” sabi niya.   actually it is.  that kind of whistle at a woman springs from human sexuality, the male-female dynamic that keeps humanity multiplying, although i would concede, nay, insist, that whistling is the least offensive of sexual signals, and can even be pleasing to the target.  ask any man, woman, lgbt who has been whistled at in a friendly setting.  in my youth it was taken as a compliment, with good humor, because there is no real threat, with apologies to the feminists, lol.  mas problema talaga ang reaction ng asawa o boyfriend o tatay o bro, who tend to go macho and patriarchal and  get offended for their woman and feel the need to speak up to defend her honor.  but was her honor sullied at all?  i don’t think so.  to her credit, she handled it all rather well, cool na cool nga.  but yeah, maybe it’s just me and my sexually liberated (kuno) aging hippie self, haha.

i didn’t vote for duterte but i certainly respect the incontrovertible win of this rogue mayor from mindanao who dares challenge the church and the oligarchs and the drug lords that have long ruled our lives (and  look where we are now).  so his putanginas don’t bother me – kagalit-galit naman talaga ang sitwasyon.  no filter, no holds barred, no hypocrisy, is good, even if it takes getting used to.  ang nakaka-tense, yung death threats, but then again drug lords do deserve death for dealing deadly drugs.

media peeps just have to be better prepared to ask follow-ups immediately, right then and there, for the sanity of us all, instead of being rendered speechless by the unexpected from digong and then raising a howl later, like losers.  and yes to a communications team that would, for starters, go on damage-control mode right after a presscon, answering questions, explaining contexts, whatever, until media peeps get the hang, beyond soundbites, of the new prez, or until digong metamorphoses, as he threatens, into a different version of himself once he is president.  or maybe he was joking?  abangan.

cut PNoy some slack, and digong, too

i don’t know what the Left is up to, but between jose maria sison all the way from europe and satur ocampo here at home along with the makabayan bloc in congress, they sure are making a lot of noise, making kulit the presumptive prez about charging and arresting the incumbent prez (and his dbm sec) for plunder once the latter steps down.

come on, guys, cut PNoy some slack.  why can’t it wait?   it’s just another month and a half.  let’s give him the space to exit with some dignity naman.  talo na nga ang manok niya, konting simpatiya naman.  surely you know how that feels.

and take it easy with presumptive prez digong, too.  all this whining about digong’s “neoliberal” 8-point economic program is premature.  right now the duterte camp’s priority, i would think, is to calm the market.  which is good.  so give him, and nation, a break naman please.

unless, of course, the idea is simply to agitate, strike everywhere na lang, never mind that, given the disgraceful antics of COMELEC and smartmatic, there’s enough agitation already over the counting of votes, not to speak of bongbong marcos’s strong showing.  i can’t believe nga that you guys don’t seem to care how many votes your candidates truly got, kahit pa talo na.

or is all the noise in aid of distracting us from the fact that you guys lost this one yet again and risa didn’t.  but isn’t that balanced out by joma sison’s direct line to duterte?  naguguluhan tuloy kami.  lousy PR, guys.

you had it coming, this from duterte spokesman peter tiu laviña, no less, who i am told knows whereof he speaks, especially with regard to the extreme Left.  his statement in full, publicly shared on facebook 12 hours ago:

A mistake not corrected becomes an error. A mistake may not be intentional, but to commit the same could be fatal. Leftist groups have rejected the hands of friendship and cooperation by the incoming Duterte administration by mouthing their usual criticism of others but not undertaking their own criticism, self-criticism.

They made a patented error in reading the national situation and made a grave one in pulsing the mood of our people. They did it in 1985 and did it again in the 2016 election. They boycotted the election in 1986 and went with another candidate 30 years later. For groups that claim that they are patriotic, nationalist and anti-imperialist, many were aghast in their decision to go with someone who abandoned our country and once pledged allegiance to the US.

At least their units in Mindanao which were more grounded did not go with the selfish, myopic and opportunist posturing of its national higher organs. In their desire to push one of their national officials to be senator, they rush to a hasty decision rejecting calls to wait for the maturing of the political situation before deciding. Having done these mistakes, they want to continue with their old ways of critiquing, critiquing, critiquing. I am truly sorry for these leftist groups which will be left out in the march of history with their dogma and belligerent styles and methods of work. They need to right their wrongs and stop becoming roadblocks to genuine change. They should bring down their utopian dreams closer to reality. Sustained gains even little by little here and there to advance the cause of the masses are better than none at all. To perpetuate the sufferings of the masses is treasonous, a betrayal to serve them.

Their ways of pressuring others with the barrel of the gun and noise by the minority are now passe.

Here is an unsolicited advice to them – dialogue with the incoming government instead of mounting black propaganda to be heard. And listen to your units in Mindanao. Otherwise, you will be proving to be yet another bunch of trapos.