DAVAO CITY – Communist rebels have accused a senior government official of muddling efforts to restart stalled peace negotiations with the Aquino government.
Daniel Ibarra, a spokesman for the New People’s Army, said presidential peace adviser Teresita Deles is trying to scuttle the resumption of the talks by peddling lies and black propaganda against the rebel group.
Ibarra said Deles has strongly accused the NPA of murdering an army officer and 2 others during an ambush on December 29 in Compostela Valley’s Mabini town and breaking a yuletide cease-fire.
“Indeed, presidential peace adviser Teresita Deles is standing on feeble ground when she qualified the December 29 ambush as a breach of the GPH’s (Government of the Philippines) unilateral truce. She peddled such a falsehood to discredit the revolutionary movement in an attempt to scuttle the resumption of the GPH-NDF peace negotiations and further muddle the substantive issues that should be resolved in the peace talks,” he said in a statement sent to the regional newspaper Mindanao Examiner.
There was no immediate statement from Deles, who heads the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process.
Ibarra also criticized the Eastern Mindanao Command and the 10th Infantry Division of covering up the true situation on the ground that led to the killing of First Lieutenant Ronald Bautista, Private First Class Albert Amor and militiaman Renel Baluca.
Lieutenant Genera Aurelio Baladad, chief of the Eastern Mindanao Command, said the three were travelling on a motorcycle in the village called Candinuyan when rebels ambushed them. He claimed that all of them were in civilian clothes and unarmed, and on their way to visit their families when the rebels ambushed them.
Baladad said the rebels even stripped the dead of their clothes and belongings before escaping in the hinterlands with the victims’ motorcycle.
But Ibarra denied this and said the rebels recovered a gun and a fragmentation grenade from the slain Bautista, who headed some 80 soldiers belonging to the 71st Infantry Battalion in Candinuyan on the day he was killed.
“Bautista was not returning home to reunite with his family during the Christmas truce in Bohol, as claimed by the military spin doctors, but like his men, was armed with handgun and grenade when he was ambushed by the people’s militia. Bautista and his companions were not preparing for holiday break, but were geared towards full combat operations in the villages of Palali, Mascareg and Linaw and Darot.”
“Bautista and his troops manned a military detachment in the village of Anitapan to conduct combat operations and witch-hunting of peasant leaders in Palali, Panamin and Mascareg, even during the period of GPH truce declaration and Christmas holidays,” Ibarra said.
He said the attack was part of the guerrilla war of the masses campaign to foil the sinister plan of the 71st Infantry Battalion and the 10th Infantry Division to impose no man’s land in Mabini town, specifically in the villages of Darot, Linaw, Mascareg, Palali, Manasa, Anitapan, Panamin and Candinuyan where Australian miner One Asia Resources is planning to operate.
“One Asia Resources is one of the big foreign mining corporations that are financially backing up the 71st Infantry Battalion triad operations of non-combat, intelligence and combat activities in order to suppress the people’s resistance to large-scale mining and human rights abuses. One Asia Resources is hell-bent in pushing through with its exploration and exploitation in the area this year,” Ibarra said.
“Under the deceptive cover of a GPH month-long ceasefire, the ongoing deployment, combat manoeuvre, build-up and continuing Peace and Development Outreach Program operations of the 71st Infantry Battalion and 10th Infantry Division are actually clearing to pave the way for the operation of Australian-owned One Asia Resources,” he added.
He said the ambush was a legitimate military action in retaliation to the long list of human rights violations by the military. “It is a legitimate politico-military operation by the masses that have long suffered and bore the brunt of fascism and economic dislocation as a result of foreign large-scale mining,” he said.
Ibarra warned that NPA rebels would launch more attacks against government troops who are acting as private armies of foreign and large-scale mining operators in the region.
The NPA has been fighting for many decades now for the establishment of a communist state in the country.
Government peace talks with the NPA collapsed in 2004 after rebels accused then President Gloria Arroyo of reneging on several agreements, among them the release of all political prisoners in the country and the removal of the terrorist tag on the Communist Party of the Philippines and its political wing, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, and the NPA.
Manila also suspended the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees after the peace talks failed. (Mindanao Examiner)
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