President Rodrigo Duterte urged the decades-long armed struggle to surrender in exchange of lands in his speech at the launch of the new provincial capitol and distribution of land certificates in Palo, Leyte on March 17.
Based on the Presidential Communications Operations Office’s (PCOO) press release on March 18, Duterte said that the insurgent’s prolonged decision to submit to the government delays the progress of land distribution that he claims will resolve the ongoing conflict.
“But if they take their time and wait to decide, then the problem there is I’m about to step down from the Presidency,” Duterte said.
“But if I stay a bit longer, then they will get to experience it, I’ll distribute lands. We have to end this stupid war,” he added.
However, according to the spokesperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) Lorrain Badoy, 24,000 NPA have already surrendered since 2016, a 6,000 increase from June 2021.
These numbers are a huge leap in comparison to the 2015 report by Armed Forces of the Philippines showing only 340 members of NPA being neutralized, including surrenderees.
Data from the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) showed that despite the administration’s claims to address the root cause of armed struggle through agrarian reform, their land distribution has been marked as the lowest since 2005.
According to the Agricultural Indicators System from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), the Duterte administration only released a total land area of 14,147 to 22,758 hectares every year.
Meanwhile, Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) Chief Information Officer Marco Valbuena dismissed the claims made by the NTF-ELCAC Spokesperson Lorraine Badoy on the 24,000 “NPA surrenderees” in a CPP Information Bureau release last April.
Valbuena cited these surrenderees as “civilians” and “unarmed peasants who have been subjected by the military to relentless harassment and suppression.”
“Making up these inflated numbers of surrenderees is a desperate attempt of the NTF-ELCAC to make themselves look significant,” Valbuena said.
On the other hand, Duterte stated his hopes for the next administration to continue the NTF-ELCAC in his March 21 “Talk to the People."
“It’s [NTF-ELCAC] a very good program. It has helped a lot of the rebels find their way into the mainstream of society at makisali kayo,” Duterte said.
Previously, NTF-ELCAC faced criticisms from activists, human rights defenders, and legislators due to its red-tagging of organizations and institutions.
Last September 16, Cordilleran students and progressive groups have experienced a red-tagging spree in an online webinar entitled “Cordillera Youth for Peace Convergence: Orientation on the Communist Terrorist Group (CTG) Youth and Student Recruitment”, which was sponsored by the said taskforce and Commission on Higher Education.
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