AFTER much posturing, the communist rebels last week declared a unilateral Christmas ceasefire, matching the government’s own suspension of military operations that they mocked as “a farce.”
The Communist Party of the Philippines said the unilateral ceasefire would celebrate not only the Christmas season, but also its 49th anniversary.
The temporary ceasefire will be in effect from 6 p.m. of Dec. 23 to 6 p.m. of Dec. 26; and 6 p.m. of Dec. 30 to 6 p.m. of Jan. 2, 2018, a spokesman for the CPP’s armed wing, the New People’s Army said.
“During this period, all NPA units and people’s militias shall cease and desist from carrying out offensive military campaigns and operations against the uniformed armed personnel of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and its paramilitaries, and the Philippine National Police,” the NPA statement read.
But the NPA announcement was accompanied, not by goodwill, but by rancor and suspicion.
Despite the government’s own temporary truce, the communist rebels said they are “only too aware of the AFP’s treachery, attacks and deception.”
We welcome any opportunity to silence the guns, even temporarily, and to halt the killing but we do wonder what is the point of celebrating an organization that has espoused a dogmatic ideology that has failed to achieve its goals of a proletariat revolution in 49 years. Nor do we see any merit in celebrating Asia’s longest-running communist insurgency that has killed more than 43,000 Filipinos since 1969, and that has brutalized extorted people in the name of a political system that has failed in so many other countries.
When the CPP founder declared from his comfortable home in The Netherlands that the government ceasefire was a farce, we need to temper his views in the knowledge that this is a septuagenarian who has spent more than a third of his life outside the country, in a First World nation, while the rest of us wrestle with the day-to-day task of pulling ourselves out of poverty, even as the NPA destroy productive assets and extorted money in the form of “revolutionary taxes” from legitimate businesses.
The biblical quotation from Luke is often misstated as “Peace on earth and good will to men.” The correct phrase, however, is “on earth peace to men of good will.” Try as we might, it is increasingly difficult to see any good will on the communist side of the long-drawn-out war in the countryside.