Negotiating panels of the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front are expected to exchange drafts on the proposed bilateral ceasefire and craft an amnesty proclamation as peace talks are set to resume in Oslo, Norway, on Thursday, Oct. 6.

Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process Jesus Dureza said that they hope to come up with a ceasefire agreement that will include joint monitoring, possibly with a third-party overseer.

“The previous ceasefires were unilateral. We need to craft mechanisms to monitor violations and resolve conflicts and issues arising from them,” Dureza explained.

While the unilateral ceasefires declared by both the GRP and the NDF were indefinite in nature, the presidential peace adviser said the government is eyeing a more permanent cessation of hostilities.

“These can only be done if we are able to agree on the more substantial issues of social and economic reforms. These are the more contentious issues and we expect humps and bumps during the peace negotiations,” Dureza added.

Both panels have already crafted drafts on the Comprehensive Agreement on Socio-Economic Reforms (CASER), which is described as the “meat” of the peace talks.

The end of hostilities and disposition of forces—the other substantive agenda of the peace talks—hinge on the success of CASER, along with political and constitutional reforms.

Dureza, however, is confident that the inspiration provided by President Rodrigo Duterte will enable both parties to pull the peace process through.

“He may not be capable of elegant language, as you have noticed, but he has pure spirit and heart in wanting to have peace in the land,” Dureza said on Friday, Sept. 30, at the closing ceremony of the 2016 National Peace Consciousness Month.
Draft amnesty proclamation ready

Government peace panel head and Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III meanwhile said that a draft amnesty proclamation is already ready for submission during the second round of peace talks.

“The list has been narrowed down to just over 400 from a high of more than 500. As per agreement during the formal resumption of the peace talks in August, the proclamation will only cover NDF members currently detained,” Bello elaborated.

He said the president, with the concurrence of Congress, could declare a general amnesty once the peace talks are brought to a successful conclusion.

Bello, however, said both negotiating panels will also have to hurdle issues on political and constitutional reforms in addition to the social and economic reform agenda for the peace talks to succeed.

The Philippine government is confident that it will be able to strike a deal with the communist rebels by August next year.

Peace talks between Philippine government and the NDF have been going on and off over the last 30 years with over 40 rounds of formal and informal talks.

Every time, however, the negotiations are scuttled due to hard line demands from both sides.

In July, President Duterte ordered the release of 22 detained NDF consultants, 16 of them later joined the first round of Oslo talks in August, to fulfill a campaign promise and to jumpstart the peace negotiations.

He also declared a unilateral ceasefire during his State of the Nation Address only to lift it later after the communist rebels ambushed a combined Army-CAFGU patrol.

The president nevertheless re-imposed the unilateral ceasefire on the eve of the August Oslo talks, which the NDF reciprocated with an indefinite and unilateral ceasefire of their own.

(philstar)

Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perez, a.k.a. the “Godfather of the Oslo Accords” has died at the age of 93, after suffering a stroke. For posterity, Perez, was the Israeli PM who signed the “accords” which were no “treaty”.

Shimon Perez will primarily be remembered for the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Those who have followed the Israeli – Palestinian discourse closely will also be remembering him as “The Godfather of the Oslo Accords”.

Perez earned this “honorary title” when he openly admitted that Israel’s long-term strategy aims at negotiating as much as necessary to buy time to implement the plans for a greater Israel.

In 1994 Perez was awarded the Nobel peace prize along with then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

The 1993 Oslo Accords also led to a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, one of the Arab countries that today cooperates closely, although covertly, with Israel in the war against Syria.

The signing of the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan was, however, also no great surprise for those who recall that Jordan previously called on the Israeli Air Force for help when tank units of the Palestine Liberation Army, supported by Syrians, rushed toward Jordan where the Jordanian Army was fighting against the PLO.

Perez has always been a skillful negotiator and he refined the strategy of negotiating as much as necessary to be able to continue the implementation of plans for a greater Israel to the tee. In 2013 Perez would state “We can and should bring an end to the conflict, and we have to be the initiators. Playing hard-to-get may be a romantic position, but it’s not a good political plan”.

That said, Perez never used his considerable political influence to mount a tangible opposition to Israel’s settlement policy and against open statements by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, to the effect that Israel will permanently annex the Syrian Golan Heights, regardless of international law, UN resolutions and the “international community”.

History books will most probably be written to champion Shimon Perez for his “dedication to the peace process” even before the Oslo Accords. In the late 1980s Perez was involved in covert negotiations with Jordan’s King Hussein. In 1987 these negotiations resulted in the signing of the London Agreement that outlined a framework for an Arab – Israeli peace. The agreement focused on the development of economic ties between Israel and Jordan and largely sidelined Syria and the issue of Israel’s occupation of the Syrian Golan.

And even though, Israel’s Prime Minister at that time, Yitzak Shamir, rejected the agreement, Israel’s and Jordan’s ties had become closer and Jordan’s advocacy for the PLO and Syrians in the Golan became side-issues, to be taken up when it was politically opportune. It is in this regard that Shimon Perez also will be remembered as a great negotiator. The Godfather of the Oslo Accords that have led to decades of “peace process” while the colonization of Palestine and the Golan continued unabated without bringing peace.

Perez became again involved in the “peace process” in the early 1990s, while serving as foreign minister under Rabin. To launch negotiations with the PLO top-leadership and PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat in Tunis. Some students of the Israeli – Palestinian discourse would claim that both Peres and Rabin had to change their mind about dealing with the PLO abroad and that Peres felt that it was futile to keep Arafat in exile in Tunisia since it made co-operation between the two sides more difficult.

Others would note that having the PLO leadership move to East Jerusalem, then force it to flee to Ramallah, transformed the PLO leadership into an Israeli hostage, made it more easily accessible for Israeli military action than it would be in Tunisia, broke the back of the international struggle against the Israeli occupation, and rendered the PLO obsolete as a military factor that could pose a threat to Israel.

What is little known is also the fact that parts of the Oslo Accords remain classified, by both Israel and the PLO, until this day. One of the most important known points in the accords is that Israel would recognize Palestine and that the PLO would recognize the State of Israel. The accords also created the “interim” Palestinian National Authority (PA), which would fulfil functions of government within Palestinian territories including in education, social welfare, health care, direct taxation and tourism.

The accords stipulated that elections would be held within nine months and allowed Yassir Arafat to return to Gaza. Israel, for its part, was supposed to withdraw from Gaza and Jericho within four months. The PLO, in return, agreed remove chapters in its charter that called for the destruction of Israel. One of Perez’ great achievements was that he persuaded the PLO to give guarantees about the Israeli people’s right to live in peace and security while Israel did not make concessions such as guaranteeing the right of Palestinians to return.

When Palestine is concerned, it appears, the difference between Perez and current Prime Minister Netanyahu is like the difference between the good and the bad cop during a police interrogation. In the end, you are more likely to confess to a good cop like Perez, but make no mistake, both are there to put you in jail if they can. For the PLO and Palestinians this “jail” has been manifest in the form of decades of “peace talks, accompanied by an ever more aggressive military occupation. The Oslo Accords were, legally speaking, an interim agreement, not a treaty. How incompetently the Al-Fatah dominated PLO leadership was, like a sleepwalker, and it walked into the trap that had been prepared by Rabin. This blunder becomes painfully obvious when one studies the Oslo Accords carefully and discovers that the Accords did not:

Settle the status of Jerusalem;

Consolidate the right of return for refugees displaces in 1948 and their descendants;

Clarify the status of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza;

Delineate the borders of Israel or of a Palestinian State;

The PLO signed the accords based on the “assumption” that Israel would, in earnest, negotiate a final settlement of these issues within a five-year period. What the PLO received from the hands of Israel was decades more of settlement expansion but no settlement. No final treaty was signed in 1998, as promised.

The prominent Palestinian scholar Dr. Edward Said criticized the Oslo Accords from the get go as “A Palestinian Surrender”. Said’s assessment of the accords as a surrender were as correct as his assessment that the product of the Oslo Accords would be “a Palestinian leadership in disarray”. He was correct in that assessment too. These are the real achievements of the late Shimon Perez. These achievements are part of “theirstory”, the history of the Palestinians. It is unlikely that they will be published in official “his-story” textbooks.

CH/L – nsnbc 28.09.2016

SECRETARY KERRY: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to an important event to kick off a lot of events here in the course of the UNGA week. My co-chair and good friend, Borge Brende, and I are really delighted to welcome everybody here. And we’re particularly happy today that we are able to welcome President Santos of Colombia, and needless to say, we are really grateful to so many members of the Global Demining Initiative for Colombia for coming here this morning at this important meeting.

There are going to be a lot of meetings – too many, maybe – and conversations this week with UNGA. But I think here today and now, this event really is one of the most meaningful, one of the most important, one of the most personal to all of us in many ways because we are gathered to take a finite step in doing what the United Nations was founded to do, which is be able to build lasting peace in various places in the world, and ultimately, in the world altogether.

So we come together at a very pivotal moment and a profoundly heartening moment.

Under President Santos’s leadership and after four years of very tough back-and-forth negotiations, Colombia, as we all know, has reached an agreement on a peace plan with the rebel group FARC, ending a war that is the longest war, lasting war, on the planet – nearly 50 years, half a century, which claimed an estimate 220,000 lives. And I personally am very grateful that all of the nations here – that we together, and particularly I’m grateful on the part of the United States that our Special Envoy Bernard Aronson – Bernie Aronson was able to be helpful to support Colombia in this historic undertaking. And many of the people around this table here contributed in so many different ways to this endeavor, as President Santos knows. I very much personally look forward to attending the signing ceremony next week in Cartagena.

Last February, in Washington, President Obama joined President Santos in announcing Paz Colombia, which is a new strategic framework for our bilateral engagement. And I can say to all of you I was – I remember in 1998, ’9, we were working in the United States on what was then called Plan Colombia – a billion dollars at the time, a lot of people had doubts it would make a difference. It was a hard fight, but we got it, and with the spirit of the people of Colombia, frankly, it did make a difference. It could not have done so without the courage of the leadership of Colombia that stood up and literally reclaimed their country from narco-terrorists and from terrorists.

So as a core element of the implementation of this peace plan, the United States and Norway are pleased to be co-chairing this Demining Initiative. And our goal, obviously, is very, very straightforward. I’m sure all of you have traveled, as I have, to various parts of the world. I can remember being in Cambodia quite a few years ago and seeing a little kid pushing himself on a small cart down the street. He had no legs. And I went to the prosthetic center there and I watched people being fitted for these rudimentary prosthetics. And this was years after the war had ended, and so unexploded ordnance and particularly mines continue to take thousands of lives. It’s absolutely extraordinary. War continues to kill, from the current war, for years to come despite the hostilities themselves being ended and over.

And so I think in Africa, similarly, I’ve seen men and women balancing food baskets as they navigate on makeshift crutches through crowded alleyways. And in Bogota, I talked with members of the armed forces and I actually played sitting volleyball with them at a recovery center, where these soldiers who had lost their limbs, were wounded by mines that had long been forgotten and abandoned by the people who put them there. And I’ve heard testimony from peasant families about children whose lives were lost.

So, different countries, different times, different individuals, but the exact same tragic story.

As President Santos will attest, the Demining Initiative is both a humanitarian necessity, but it’s also a boost to peace. This is one of the things that will help to give confidence to the people of Colombia that the world is invested in this and we are serious about it. Now, I know some of you may be familiar with the case of Ferney Cifuentes, a 14-year-old Colombia boy who was helping his father herd cattle in Montecristo when he stepped on a landmine and he was fatally injured. Ferney is one of more than 11,000 Colombians wounded or killed by landmines and unexploded ordnance over the past 25 years. So demining is going to allow Colombia’s campesinos to reclaim valuable farmland for productive uses as an alternative to cocoa leaf production – land which is now off limits because of the existence of the landmines.

Demining is an essential part of rebuilding in the wake of what has been this longest-running war. And more than 20 countries and the EU have joined the initiative. So we’d like to see more, especially in places where the Colombian Government and the FARC have decided to work together, which in itself is a remarkable statement.

So we know from decades of experience it takes time, it takes money, and it takes experts and hard work in order to identify and clear mines, and to educate the local population about the dangers. So whether in Colombia, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Africa, there are best practices that we all know; there are no short cuts. So our goal is to solicit additional financial and technical aid from all sources in order to help Colombia reach its Ottawa Convention goal of being landmine-free by 2021. And the United States is pledging an additional 36 million and we hope that others will come forward as well. Minister Brende and I hope that each country represented will make a meaningful contribution towards this goal.

So my friends, everybody here knows what we have to do. And in a world where we see Syria and we see terrible events like yesterday, but schools being bombed, children being bombed, barrel bombs being dropped, a continuation of war, the world really needs to see the global community step up and be consequential in showing leadership to end this seemingly endless sense of deterioration and chaos. And what we do here today can be important not just to Colombia, but can be important to setting a tone for this week of UNGA here in New York.

Borge. (Applause.)