Ceasefire: who benefits
PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte pushed efforts to restart the stalled peace talks between the Philippine Government and the National Democratic Front (NDF) by declaring during his State of the Nation Address (Sona) Monday a unilateral ceasefire. The military, which has long carried the burden of battling the communist-led rebellion, has a more descriptive term for it: Somo, or suspension of military operations.
That Somo declaration has its risks because it is unilateral, which means that units of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) could still be attacked even if they would no longer pull the trigger against units of the New People's Army (NPA), the military arm of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the main group under the NDF umbrella.
While the NDF, through its spokesperson Luis Jalandoni, has promised a “positive reaction” to Duterte's ceasefire declaration, it still has to make the response official, which could come during the reopening of the talks in Oslo, Norway next month. In the meantime, the NPA can still officially launch tactical offensives against government forces, although it may not do so be- cause that would not be good propaganda.
The areas under NDF influence, the organizations under its umbrella and its mass base are among the beneficiaries of the ceasefire declaration because they have long been bearing the brunt of government offensives. Government forces, on their part, can already relax a bit with the taking away of the task that has occupied them for decades, which is to deal with the insurgency.
If the NDF declares its own Somo and the ceasefire holds, the initiative will go the way of the Moro rebellion wherein talks have succeeded in silencing the guns of both the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). That in turn would become the Duterte administration's first major achievement.
While the NPA strength is already way below its peak compared from during the later years of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, it still is capable of mounting destructive offensives, inviting harsh government response. The protagonists in the conflict and those caught in the crossfire would surely welcome this respite from the fighting, not to mention the country that has already benefited from the cessation of hostilities between the government and Moro rebels.