Press Statement
By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
NDFP Chief Political Consultant
June 14, 2018
It is both disappointing and frustrating that the Duterte regime has unilaterally cancelled the scheduled start of the stand-down ceasefire on June 21 and the resumption of formal talks in the peace negotiations in Oslo a week later on June 28.
The written agreements pertaining to the aforesaid scheduled events have been signed by no less than the respective chairpersons of the GRP and the NDFP negotiating panels, DOLE Secretary Silvestre Bello and Fidel V. Agcaoili, and witnessed by the Royal Norwegian special envoy Ambasador Idun Tevdt on June 9.
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.
It is starkly clear that the GRP under Duterte is not interested in serious peace negotiations with the NDFP. It is interested vainly in obtaining the NDFP capitulation under the guise of an indefinite ceasefire agreements and breaking the provision in the GRP-NDFP Joint Agreement on the Secuirty and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) which requires formal negotiations in a foreign neutral venue and therefore putting the negotiations under the control and under duress of an emerging fascist dictatorship and its armed minions.
Because the GRP under Duterte is obviously not interested in serious peace negotiations, the revolutionary forces and the people have no choice but to singlemindedly wage people’s war to achieve the national and social liberation of the Filipino people.
It is clear to the entire people that a broad united front of all anti-Duterte forces has arisen to effect the ouster of the current regime for its crimes of treason, mass murder, drug smuggling, corruption, intolerable tax burden, inflating prices of basic goods and services, rising rate of unemployment, depreciation of the peso, onerous loans and overpriced infrastructure projects and other aggravated conditions of exploitation and oppression in the country. ###