Duterte’s preconditions to peace negotiations are crazy and clownish mouthing of the same rubbish
Duterte must be crazy or clowning in reiterating the preconditions he made so many times before. My educated guess is that the CPP, NPA and the people would rather intensify their revolutionary armed struggle than submit themselves to such silly and humiliating preconditions
The preconditions amount to having the armed revolutionary movement commit political suicide before even going to the negotiating table and submit itself to surrender talks and possible slaughter in the venue offered by Duterte. He is practically mouthing the same rubbish by repeating preconditions that he dished out so many times before.
Duterte has no intention of engaging the NDFP in serious peace negotiations. He continues to be hell-bent on keeping the peace negotiations terminated and on imposing a fascist dictatorship on the Filipino people. He has been escalating the abduction, torture and murder of suspected revolutionaries and even mere critics of his treasonous, brutal, corrupt, misogynist, inflation-generating and mendacious regime.
It must be obvious to the people that the Duterte regime is spending huge amounts of public and private money in the billions of pesos to pay for all sorts of propaganda, including unbelievable poll surveys, fake news by official agencies and troll armies, TV-radio ads, ubiquitous tarpaulins, paid crowds and so on in order to misrepresent his losing candidates as winners.
At the same time, the regime is engaged in all kinds of mass intimidation, including red tagging of bishops, priests, social activists, teachers, journalists, lawyers, human rights advocates and legal oppositionists and the actual escalation of murders by the Duterte death squads in the style of Oplan Tokhang.
Duterte is conspicuously on the path of fraud and terrorism in the current electoral campaign period. He controls the Comelec and the military and he is openly boasting though in veiled terms that he will use these to get the number of senators needed to railroad the charter change for a bogus kind of federalism and to counter the possibility of his being prosecuted for genocide and other massive human rights violations before the International Criminal Court.
All people who stand for national sovereignty, democracy, social justice, real development and decency must do their best to expose the evil character of the Duterte regime, to defeat its candidates in the May elections, to rise up against it when it undertakes its scheme of using fraud and terrorism against the parties and candidates of the opposition. Remember that the Marcos fascist regime in 1986 fell precisely because it used fraud and terrorism to fake the results of the 1986 elections.###