RP, NDF panels meet in Norway to salvage peace talks

Government negotiators and their communist guerrilla counterparts have met in Norway in a bid to restart peace talks aimed at ending a 36-year-old insurgency, the two sides said yesterday.

The government team flew to Oslo on Saturday and met with officials of the National Democratic Front (NDF), telling them Manila remained open to resuming attempts to negotiate a political settlement, said panel member Rene Sarmiento.

President Arroyo’s government also offered to return safe-conduct passes to 97 rebel negotiators, bodyguards and consultants.

Mrs. Arroyo had said they faced possible arrest after the rebel leadership declared in July it would no longer hold peace talks on the grounds that her government was about to fall over an alleged vote-rigging scandal.

A congressional committee, however, threw out all three impeachment complaints against the President on Wednesday, effectively ending months-long efforts by opposition parties to oust her from power.

"Nothing definite has been reached and they were still talking when I left," Sarmiento told reporters, adding that he left a day ahead of the other government negotiators.

The NDF is a Netherlands-based organization that is led by the Communist Party of the Philippines and its 8,000-member New People’s Army (NPA).

Successive governments have held peace talks with the NDF since the fall of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in 1986, but without success.

Rey Casambre, a consultant for the NDF in Manila, told reporters that rebel representatives met with government negotiators in Oslo on the suggestion of the Norwegian government, which has been playing an intermediary role.

Casambre said that following the suspension of the peace talks the NDF offered Arroyo a 10-point program to bring a swift end to the civil war that has claimed thousands of lives.

The program included the NDF’s participation in a "clean and honest coalition government" with the President, he said.

It also offered a ceasefire if Mrs. Arroyo met demands that included shifting the country’s foreign policy closer to China, South and North Korea, Japan and Russia, and securing the cancellation of its $50-billion foreign debt.

The government has not commented on the rebels’ offer. — AFP