MANILA, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) -- After having forged peace with the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in March this year, the government of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III may reopen formal peace negotiations with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) early next year.
Both Jose Maria Sison, CPP founder and consultant of the National Democratic Front (NDF), and Teresita Deles, presidential adviser on the peace process, have confirmed back-channel negotiations to restart the stalled talks.
On Friday, in his video message on Facebook, Sison said that formal talks between the NDF and the Aquino government may resume in the second half of January next year.
The NDF, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, is the political arm of the CPP which is negotiating with the Philippine government while the New People's Army (NPA) is the armed wing or guerrilla unit of the CPP. The NDF is headed by Luis Jalandoni, a former Roman Catholic priest. Both Sison and Jalandoni are living in exile in the Netherlands.
Deles also confirmed that both parties are amenable to returning to the negotiating table to end more than four decades of the insurgency.
"Friends of the peace process have been shuttling between the two parties to explore possible parameters for restarting talks at the earliest time possible," Deles told the local media.
Peace negotiations between the Philippine government and the CPP-NPA-NDF have been off-and-on since the l980s.
In his Facebook message, Sison confirmed that back-channel talks to "prepare the agenda" for formal negotiations have been ongoing since September and agreements on a ceasefire and social and economic reforms may be finished before President Aquino steps down in 2016.
Despite reassuring statements from both Sison and Deles, the NPA has threatened to launch more attacks in the coming year, which analysts here said, were aimed at strengthening its bargaining position in the upcoming talks.
"(We) must seize and control the initiative by launching more frequent and sustained tactical offensives with occasional blows to the head of the enemy," the NPA said in a statement released on the eve of the NPA's 46th founding anniversary on Friday.
According to the military estimates, since its inception in the mid-70s, the NPA's insurgency has claimed some 30,000 lives, including combatants and civilians.
The NPA's strength has dwindled to 4,000 armed militias from a peak of more than 26,000 in the late 1980s, according to the military.
Negotiations under Aquino faltered after the government turned down the rebels' demands that their detained comrades be released.
The military declared a month-long ceasefire with the NPA for the Christmas holidays and Pope Francis' scheduled visit in January. The rebels said they would observe a shorter truce.
But on Tuesday, the NPA claimed that the military has reneged on its own declaration of a "suspension of military operations" ( SOMO) by deploying more troops in Southern Mindanao.
On the eve of the NPA's 49th anniversary, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) called on the rebels to abandon the use of armed violence as a way to solve the country's problems.
"It has been proven that nobody is a real winner in bloody armed conflicts. We are witnesses to the endless misery experienced by our own people who are caught in the crossfire," the AFP said in a statement.
The AFP said that in 2014, many civilians were victims of the atrocities carried out by NPA guerrillas around the country.
There were at least two violent attacks on civilian ambulances that claimed the lives of hapless civilians, all in the hinterlands of Southern Philippines.
In May this year, the hostage-taking of civilians in Mabini, Compostela Valley, traumatized the people who were held at gunpoint for many hours. In November, a grenade attack hurt several people in Masbate.
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