LABOR Secretary Silvestre Bello III on Sunday expressed confidence the government could sign an interim peace agreement with the communist rebels by June this year.
President Rodrigo Duterte last week asked his Cabinet to work on resuming the peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, the umbrella organization of the communist movement, four months after he called off the peace talks with them.
Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo on Saturday urged the NDFP to comply with Duterte’s conditions for the resumption of the peace negotiations.
“I think the ball is on the side of the Left because the President has given them his conditions,” Panelo told dzMM radio.
“And I think it’s about time they complied. If they’re sincere on the peace talks they should.”
Meanwhile, some Makabayan members are batting for an investigation of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army being placed in the list of terror organizations.
The seven-member bloc filed House Resolution 1807 urging the House committee on human rights to investigate in aid of legislation the proscription of 657 alleged officers of the CPP-NPA and condemn the Department of Justice’s “terror list.”
In February, the Justice department filed a petition with a Manila court asking for the declaration of the CPP and NPA as “terrorist” organizations.
Bello, the government’s chief negotiator, said the peace deal that may be signed in June with the communists would include a unilateral ceasefire.
The communist and government panels, he said, will discuss other contentious issues when they meet in Norway or the Netherlands.
Duterte earlier promised to end the decades-old communist rebellion, but abandoned the government’s peace initiatives in November as a result of what he claimed as repeated rebel attacks.
He said he would resume the pece talks if the rebels stopped collecting “revolutionary taxes” from businesses and torching the equipment of construction firms.