The government conveyed its decision to suspend all backchannel talks with the NDF pending the three-month review of all signed agreements. But the two parties can communicate if necessary.

Exiled communist leader Jose Maria “Joma” Sison opposed a proposal to seek a review by Congress of draft agreements between rebels and the government as a condition for formal talks to start, saying this was one of President Rodrigo Duterte’s tactics to sabotage the talks.

Formal resumption of negotiations between the government and the NDF was supposed to take place on June 28 in Oslo, Norway, but Duterte called it off last week to give way to public consultations.

Reacting to presidential spokesperson Harry Roque’s announcement Monday Duterte no longer wants a third party facilitator in the peace talks between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the NDFP, Sison said the president is “willfuly and maliciously killing the peace negotiations by breaking the standing GRP-NDFP agreement on foreign neutral venue and dismissing the third party facilitator.”

Revolutionaries do not negotiate under the terms and conditions “of an emergent fascist dictatorship and in a place where mass murders are occurring with impunity,” said Sison, chief political consultant to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), the CPP’s political arm that is negotiating with the government.

In light of Duterte’s order to his negotiators to consult the wider public, Sison challenged the NDFP and GRP panels to divulge the results of four backchannel talks since March. “I urge the two negotiating panels to release to the public and to the press the written and signed agreements of June 9 and 10 signed by the chairmen of the GRP and NDFP negotiating panels and by the members of their respective special teams,” he said.

Agcaoili revealed that even before Dureza’s announcement to postpone both the “stand down agreement” and the resumption of formal talks on June 21 and June 28, respectively, the GRP has already told him and the Third Party Facilitator (TPF), the Royal Norwegian Government, of its unilateral decision.

“Duterte and Dureza want nothing but the immediate capitulation of the revolutionary movement under the guise of an indefinite ceasefire and killing the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations,” he told ABS-CBN News from Utrecht.