OPUS DEI ARMED SUDAN’S CHRISTIAN SOUTH

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Sudan is undergoing a schism, the dividing line being the north-south axis. North is the predominantly Muslim section, with large infusion of Arab genetics into the ancient black ethnicities of the area; south, the Christian section, with predominantly Negroid ethnicities as core population.

A cursory review of history would show us that the Arabs, who were at one time the nexus of world culture, easily reached Sudan and the northern African regions. Egypt, Sudan, Chad and other countries were a bit contiguous to Baghdad and Arabia, and so the Arabs could easily reach the area contrasted to the European lands near the Atlantic during their westward conquests.

We should also be reminded of the era of rise of capitalism when slave trade was a normal predilection of the British, Portuguese and other European powers. Arabs cashed in on the opportunity, raided Negro areas of northern and eastern Africa for the chattel (slaves). In the process, large numbers of Arabs decided to reside in Africa as new entrants or additions to northern Africans of Arab descent.

Let’s fast forward to the present when an authoritarian regime rules the whole of Sudan. Previous to the authoritarian drift of this nation, there were already covert operations by Christian clerico-fascist operators to enforce an agenda of creating a schism in the long run by carving out a Christian south.

The Opus Dei, to note, has been notoriously engaged as partner-operators of fascist forces for a long time. Having had practice in Spain as co-partners of the totalitarian Phalangist regime of Franco, the Opus Dei would later replicate their positioning for global power by arming and financially supporting Christian rebel forces such as the Irish Republican Army and the Croatian Army.

Croatia is an example of a mini-state carved out from a larger entity (former Yugoslavia) via an army that was practically entirely supported by the Opus Dei. For your own study of the subject matter, you may as well begin with the book Thy Kingdom Come by the controversy writer Robert Hutchison. From there you can branch out to other research materials regarding the fascistic group Opus Dei that aspires to be a modern Knights Templar aiming to defend the interests of the Papacy.

In my own country, the Philippines, couples of Christian militias suddenly cropped up in the southern island of Mindanao after the 2^nd world war. The militias went on a rampage of massacre of Muslims there, supported as they were by the big landlords and the Christian Right. A most notorious group was the Tadtad, which revived after long dormancy to help the Establishment contain the rise of the guerilla Maoists and Muslim rebels.

As you can see, Christian ultra-conservatives or clerico-fascists are carving out their own spheres of influence. With so much money stashed in many banks and secret vaults across the different continents, aided by the previous policies of financial and monetary liberalization that permitted unhampered money laundering across borders, the Opus Dei is so powerful today as to be able to create new countries out of regions that are predominantly Christian more so Catholic.

Accordingly, so gargantuan are the tentacles of the Opus Dei, with mafia groups involved in its money laundering, arms trading, and other large-scale crimes across borders. The group was to a great extent responsible for the collapse of the Vatican banks in the 1980s, a crash aided by a mafia Masonic group. That crash led to the domino effect of financial crash of Italy as a whole.

When that crash was investigated by the newly installed Pope John Paul I, the pope was tragically assassinated barely a month into office. It was the same mafia cum Opus Dei operators that were responsible for the assassination of the pope. Now that the pope comes from the extreme Right, the Opus Dei has no worry about further machinations behind the scene.

We should therefore be not surprised if Pope Benedict mouths lines about Christians as the most victimized by terror attacks of a sectarian nature. These are mere cover ups or masks for covert operations being undertaken by Opus Dei and another powerful force, the Society of Jesus, to bring back the power of the papacy in the globe.

In the Philippines, both Opus Dei and Jesuits openly supported the candidacy of the moron blabbermouth Noynoy Aquino, son of the late Ninoy Aquino (husband of former president Corazon Aquino) who was a CIA operative. Both Opus Dei and Jesuits were well positioned in power during Corazon Aquino’s incumbency, so you can see how they have gotten back to power with the victory of their blabbermouth puppet.

Thus, it should not surprise us to find out that Benedict badmouths those who persecuted the Sudanese Christians, as both Opus Dei and Jesuits were behind Benedict’s ascent to the papacy. The involvement of the both religious groups in Sudan’s Christian insurgency and the campaign for an independent Christian Sudan is logically expected.

Now that the Opus Dei has a stronger position in Africa and its puppet state Croatia is in operation, where would the group strike next to enlarge its fascistic sphere of influence and control?

[Philippines, 21 January 2011]

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LOIN EMPOWERMENT: CHURCH CRANKY POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Religious fundamentalism is among the mega-waves of the moment. Secularism, which was a 19^th century wave yet, had reached its full circle around the 3^rd quarter of the 20^th century. From 1980 onwards, with the advent of Islam Fundamentalism and Religious Right (Christian Right, Hindu Right), secularism has been taking the backseat as fundamentalism’s seductive new dogma delivered their devastating blows on erstwhile ‘enemies of God’.

Catholic fundamentalism has been riding along this mighty wave since then, and had already dealt its own devastating blows on perceived God’s enemies: (a) Irish Republic Army partisans killing thousands of children-women-aged ‘collateral damage’ folks; (b) Croatian Army, armed by the Opus Dei, storming the Serbian bastion, killing thousands of ‘collateral damage’ folks, and declaring a separate republic, along a largely contorted notion of ‘nation’ (ethno-nation); and (c) Christian militias armed to the teeth in many parts of the globe, causing enormous damages and misery on the affected folks.  

More such violent genocidal campaigns will be fomented by Catholic crypto-fascists in the months and years to come yet. This is not to count those hundreds of millions of deaths caused by the Crusades, Inquisition, imperial conquests of Catholic powers (Spain, Portugal, Bavaria, Hapsburg, etc). During the Philippine Revolutionary War against Catholic Imperial Spain, no less than half a million Filipinos died, while millions died more due to the forced labor, population resettlements, and abominable cruelties by the Catholic Spaniards.

If we reflect on all of those past genocidal campaigns done by the Catholics, and add the death tolls inflicted by contemporary terroristic adventurisms of Church partisans, we may wonder what ‘pre-emptive right’ do Catholic cryto-fascists possess that render them as indubitably clean, spotless, pure souls who cry wolf whenever issues concerning population control and/or reproductive health are raised, in the name of a new distorted moron one-liner ‘pro-life’.

The same puritanical quacks, none of whom lives a life that is unblemished and sagely worth our emulation, are again in the heat of raising the same fear-based ‘pro-life’ in the electoral campaign in America. Here in Manila, the same puritanical  quacks have been on the rampage over the legislative victory of the long-awaited Reproductive Health Bill, using the same pathetically bankrupt one-liner ‘pro-life’ spiced with highly nauseating lies about “the destruction of Philippine way of life” by the noblesse legislators. Nay, the same quackery has been raised by the fear-mongers to convince Filipino-Americans not to vote for Obama next week, for Christ’s sake!  

Come to think of it, if we examine the underlying logic of the puritanical quackery, we can see the fear of Church Hierarchs & lay leaders in a rapid diminution of church devotees across the coming decades. The political economy of church operations clearly reveals thus: the more people participating in church life, the greater the power of the purse of the Bishops, priests, religious orders, and lay organizations. This reality of political economy explains why the Church today remains very powerful, because it is the world’s wealthiest corporate entity taken in the aggregates, whose wealth no nation or corporate group can ever surpass.

To restate the thesis in another manner: loin power means purse power. Following from that logic, purse power means greater prestige and political power by the Church. A diminished loin power, due to the meteoric ascent of ‘reproductive health’ and/or ‘pro-choice’ discourse in the realms of legislation and administration also means the consequent decline of the purses of the Church operators.

As the issues and defenses are raised across partisan lines, Islamic partisans are mobilizing their forces of engagement, ready to start a World War III in their region, a war that could embroil the entire planet in another 30 Years War and see the eventual erasure of nations in a Post-Westphalia regime. Catholic militias and terrorists are increasing by the numbers across the globe, evidenced in my own country by the return of the infamous Tadtad and Ilaga groups that have regrouped and mobilized to engaged marauding Jihadist terrorists in their Mindanao backyards.

Since the Church is awash with cash, gold bullions, estates, and hedge funds anyway, every Catholic diocese may as well begin arming militias and related partisans who would be tasked to run after Catholic infidels or those who do not follow the faith in the manner so dictated by Paleolithic fogey dogma. In order to defend the ‘pro-life’ line, kill more, bomb more, cause miseries on more people, in the name of God! Praise be to God!

Urbanization is another mega-wave in our planet today, a wave that brings with it the ever-widening individuation of the human psyche. Herd discourse such as those peddled by the Pied Piper puritanical quacks, which induces a retreat to the folk spirit or folkgeist and is tantamount to retrogression of the species, has no place in an increasingly individuating psyche. Spirituality may also increase with time, but this spirituality will be of the ‘seeker’ or ‘freethinker’ type, a spirituality that is not susceptible to mind-bending manipulation by the folk spirit Pied Pipers. 

This could be the reason why, in the Philippines, amid the much ballyhooed 86% membership of Filipinos in the Vatican church or corporation, the devotees have voiced a predominantly pro-reproductive health inclination according to official nationwide surveys. Obama has got nothing to do with this inclination, the legislators’ pro-active measure on population & development has been in Congress for nigh two (2) decades now, but we do see the increasing individuation among an increasingly sophisticated urban habitué led by the urban boheme & intelligentsia.

The same Catholic puritanical quacks are joined by Christian Right groups in the USA in waging a last-ditch attempt to derail the popular gains of Obama versus his contender McCain as per latest survey. The same sickening discourse, characteristic of mental bankruptcy and mediocre “understanding” (sic!) of the human condition, is being mass-disseminated by a loose alliance of cryto-fascists, all working to subtly use loin power to keep their groups in hegemonic positions in the private sphere.

What nauseating, pathetic buffoons these folkgeist progenitors are! If they have nothing worth talking about, nothing worth their ilk, they better wrap up and mobilize for armed partisans and face their infidels in the Middle East. While the same puritanical quacks, both Islam and Christian, would be busy slaughtering each other, as they did hundreds of years back, the true peace-loving, life-loving,  dialogue-wielding, universal love-driven citizens of Earth would be collaborating in their efforts for lasting peace and development worldwide.

[Writ 27 October 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila.]

BONAPARTISM: ‘TECHNOTRONIC’ CAPITALIST STATE IDEOLOGY

Erle Frayne Argonza

Hail Bonaparte! Hail Empire! Hail new capitalism! Hail oligarchic Gods of Olympus! – Tomorrow’s slogans

Bonaparte is back today, I see him alive again. I don’t mean the personal Napoleon Bonaparte of yesteryears, I mean the state system built by Him the Emperor par excellence. Bonapartism is the hyper-convergence of all totalitarian systems of the past to the present. Old state ideologies are dying, some are already dead in fact (Old Bonapartism, Bolshevism), but a hyper-convergence of the totalitarianisms is happening….That convergence will congeal in New Bonapartism, the state ideology of the era lasting from World War III through those centuries of ‘technotronic’ capitalism of the morrows.

Let me clarify that ‘state ideology’, or the doctrine of state that will justify its essential governance, structures & rules, nay its philosophy, is distinct from mass ideology. The mass ideologies forthcoming may vary from one country to another, such as China’s seeming Marxist-welfare statist fusion, and the rising environmentalism that could be tomorrow’s most popular. Mass ideologies can be allowed to germinate and take hold among the masses, provided that they support the state formation in a ‘social contract’ of corporatism. In the future population of cyborg Manchurian Candidates, mass ideology will be irrelevant and unnecessary, as behavior will be pre-planned and/or pre-programmed, and re-programmable. 

What I am referring to at this juncture is STATE IDEOLOGY or philosophy. As you can see above, this New Bonapartist ideology may not have a foreign policy facet in it, since ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic/national’ has already been broken by globalization. The future state will be a GLOBAL STATE, remember, so the term ‘foreign’ is of noxious impertinence for a globalized or borderless state. ‘Foreign’ could mean, later, those states of intelligences from planets across the Milky Way and elsewhere, but let me not touch on that. I’d focus on the continental and global states, such as the EU, forthcoming North American Union, perhaps an Asia-Pacific Union too, and the Planetary Union or whatever.

Let me go through the essentials of Bonapartism, culling the premises from the pass but re-constructing it for the emerging context. Take note of the following briefer:

·        Centralized, Authoritarian Governance: The former Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Phallangist Spain, and today’s China provided the models for this one. Napoleon Bonaparte only partly succeeded in experimenting on this one, and then he was overthrown. The New Bonapartist state will be sustained, like China’s, and will last for nigh 200-300 years perhaps as far as visible future is concerned. State Terror will be official ‘stick’ mechanism.

 

·        Strong Central Institutions: Centralized authority doesn’t mean strong institutions. This is where China is weak. The Emperor Bonaparte of tomorrow will ensure that institutions will be (a) centralized and (b) strong.  The link between the Continental and Platenary states will be a continuous one. Likewise will the thread of governance between the Planetary state and the local region- and city-states, the building blocks of ‘technotronic’ capitalist society.

 

·        Strong Central Financial Institutions: How could one maintain an Empire without strong global bank, strong global currency, strong securitization system (gold standard will return)? Bonaparte knew well the importance of strong national banking for sustaining his Empire and wars. The Emperor Bonaparte of tomorrow will just need to replace ‘national’ with ‘global’ and the formula is complete. Yes, the gold standard is forecast to return, and is bound to back up the financial-monetary operations of the global state. Yes too, a global currency will be instituted, and will be strong as it is backed up by ‘global gold’ or precious metals/crystals and global reserves instruments.

 

·        Strong Global Army/Police: As instruments of state terror, a () global army and (b) global police will be instituted. No such army nor police exists today, and necessity dictates that they will arise tomorrow. The individuals and units of these ‘stick’ institutions will be loyal only to the global state. Beyond the 2050s, cyborgs and robots will constitute the main forces of these enforcement ‘sticks’.

 

·        ‘Bombard the Old World’ of Nations: Bonaparte’s favorite cliché is coming back. Napoleon’s old world was the kingdom, the nascent world was the nation. Today’s ‘old world’ is the nation-state, and the nations will be literally bombarded. In a sweeping World War III scenario, as much as 90% of the nations of today (of which there are 200+) will be dismantled. Those that will resist will face the wrath of the global state before 2050. Most likely, no more nation will exist beyond 2050. The new world of region-states and city-states will be in place.  This new world will be the New Feudalism, as discussed earlier.    

I guess I need to end there. Just five (5) features, remember. It is so easy to note them. They were Bonaparte’s formula for governance in the past, and they will be the standard formulas for the future ‘technotronic’ capitalist state. In previous articles, I already discoursed that capitalism cannot be revived without totalitarian tyranny, so I didn’t expound on that facet here. Let me now close the article at thus juncture.

Hail Bonaparte! Hail Empire! – tomorrow’s slogans

[23 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila.]

VATICAN WEALTH COULD MAKE OR BREAK AMERICA OR ANY WORLD POWER

Erle Frayne  Argonza

 

In a previous article I tackled the real reason behind the unprecedented respect accorded on the Pope by the officialdom of the USA. As I cogitated in the article, the reason has got to do with the enormous wealth of the Church.

 

In some previous articles, I tackled about the financial power of the Catholic Church in the Philippines, a power that bestows on the Church the status of being the wealthiest landlord-capitalist oligarch in the country. I have also been discoursing, for over a decade now, that Philippine poverty can be fast-tracked if and only if the Catholic Church would be taxed of its properties and businesses, and its estates undergo land reform. 

 

If we take the Catholic Church as an entirety in the planet, with its diverse archdioceses and dioceses, religious orders, banks and related financial institutions, lay clubs with their vast assets, and all the social development groups involved (combining all member of the Church), we have before us a gigantic web of organizations and colossal assets. At the center of it all is the Vatican, with the 2^nd College of Bishops as the top organ of corporate governance.

 

Without doubt, no other corporation on Earth could match the Church organizationally and wealth-wise. And no corporate group, both private and state, would ever clash with the Church concerning policy or the highlighting of church wrongdoings, as this would badly backlash on the bellicose party. Likewise wouldn’t any nation among the ‘open society’ states openly clash with the Church without experiencing the fatal backlash.

 

If we were to estimate the wealth of the Church, we will surely be overwhelmed by the immensity of quantity at hand. The annual income alone from all church and church-related operations, counting both the huge donations and the business operations, would already amount to trillions of dollars. By my own rough estimate, the Church ‘gross domestic product’ would well surpass the USA’s or EU’s.

 

How about the value of the land estates and the buildings (church, schools, businesses, retreat houses, seminar houses, humanitarian & social development, health-related, etc)? current assets from both donations and financing institutions (banks, financial houses)? gold bullions accumulated after centuries of operations, including those taken through plunder of conquered lands? These must run in the hundreds of trillions of dollars!

 

Fellows, the Vatican is indubitably the wealthiest, most powerful global corporation or holding company. With such power, it could make or break any nation for that matter, as it had done secretly on the atheistic Soviet Union.

 

Destroy a nation’s currency, and you would destroy it totally. This is an axiom known to Keynes and economists that includes myself. Knowing this well, the financial operators of the Church did exactly apply this shock operations on the Soviet Union that saw its total irreparable collapse.

 

Led by combined mafia-Opus Dei operations, the Church purchased the greater bulk of USSR currency at quite promising sums. Having then run out of bills for daily transactions, the USSR through KGB operators had to buy back the rubles via black market, but this time bought at very costly prices (in US dollars). Until finally realizing that it doesn’t have sufficient foreign reserves and gold to leverage the ruble drain, the USSR collapsed under the deadweight of its own roof. Simple!

 

And that, fellows, is the subtle message of the Vatican to both the American and British oligarchs whose predatory financial transactions and wars are now proving to be catastrophic, that they threaten the heart of Vatican operations itself. And time is now running out on the same oligarchs and their respective states.

 

[Writ 28 May 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]

MANILA PEACE UPDATE: BACK-CHANNEL TALK WITH MAOIST REBELS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

 

[Writ 01 May 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila. The author, a professor at the premier University of the Philippines, was a former consultant and senior official at the presidential palace.]

 

Let me share to you some notes about the efficacy of the back-channel strategy as applied to the Peace Talks. By Peace Talks I refer to the on-going negotiations between the GRP (Government of the Republic of the Philippines) and the rebel groups (National Democratic Front, Moro Islamic Liberation Front). For this briefer, I will focus on the GRP-NDF talks, the NDF being the Maoist movement led by the clandestine Communist Party of the Philippines (founded 1968).

 

The Maoist rebellion here began as soon as the New People’s Army or NPA, the military arm of the CPP, was formed. The Philippines than was predominantly agrarian, landlordism was the main stumbling block to industrial progress, the 1948-launced Import Substitution Industrialization was floundering badly, and mass poverty must have been reaching as much as past the 75% mark. With an agrarian population as base, it wasn’t difficult for the CPP-NPA to justify an armed struggle based on the Maoist strategy of encirclement: build rebel based first in the hinterlands where the enemy forces are weak, then gradually constrict the urban areas (cities, big towns) from the countryside.

 

Almost four (4) decades after the launching of the Maoist rebellion, nowhere is there any site of a victory by the Left rebels. Supposedly, the guerilla fronts have reached past the 3-digit level (160+ as of latest claims by the CPP), but those are largely spread out in rural hinterlands. RP’s population is now around 60% urban and only 40% rural, and urbanization is still spreading fast, mutating the rural landscapes into new mixed-use urban and suburban mini-cities.

 

It is now getting clearer that the Maoist rebellion here has been reduced to a Zapatista-sized rebellion, and its strategy of encirclement has become obviously intractable and nauseatingly archaic. Unless that it shifts in strategy from rural-based armed struggle to urban-based mass movement type, the new Zapatistas of Manila (CPP-NDF) may lose enormous mileage in their campaigns and legitimacy. A rising middle class here will never be able to identify with a movement that tends to diminish the importance of the ‘middle sectors’ in shaping the political wind, most specially in Asia to which Manila is now closely hued to (for many centuries the Philippines was alien to Asia and was more hued to its colonial masters in the West).

 

Often than not, the Peace Talks get stalled. This has been the history of negotiations here. But at least what is clear, as has been shown by the past negotiations with the military rebels and the Moro National Liberation Front or MNLF, is that the GRP talking point is not “surrender all of you or die!” but rather one of negotiated political settlement. It took much time for the GRP to admit to this new precept in peace talks, but state negotiators have to rather take this option as it had proved relatively successful as exemplified by the previous cases.

 

One strategy used by the GRP whenever peace talks get stalled is the ‘back-channel talk’. Often than not, the names of back-channel negotiators are not identified at all in public, or that the information is strictly confidential. Having once moved in the corridors of power as a consultant and later a senior state official at the presidential palace, my very own boss then was among them, and his experiences in the BCT (shortened ‘back-channel talk’) are my basis for assessing the efficacy of the strategy.

I found out, to my own dismay being a patriot who was impatient for results, that the peace talks get stalled every now and then not because of ‘insincerity’ of the ‘other party’ but rather due to the lack of trust by the rebels in the GRP negotiating panel’s composition. One must realize that here in Manila, the ‘nat-dems’ (the Maoist national democrats) had that historical animosities and antipathies with the ‘soc-dems’ (non-Maoist social democrats) who were indeed rabidly anti-communist as any observer would notice. Sadly, before the incumbent president GM Arroyo sat in power, the ‘soc-dems’ were already visible and influential in shaping the contours of peace talks including those held with the Muslim rebels.

 

In 2004, barely had the presidential election campaign commence when the peace talk stalled again. The usual bitter reason raised, as per information coming straight from the rebels to their contacts in the GRP other than the peace panel, was the ‘soc-dem’ presence in that (peace) panel (notably the intelligence top-gun Norberto Gonzales, and another ‘soc-dem’ cabinet member Ging Deles). Before that, in the 1990s, there was the complaint against the ‘opus dei’ negotiators. You see, the NDF can never really trust these negotiators who hinge their loyalty to their Vatican-led spin doctors.

 

The ‘nat-dem’ line is that the ‘soc-dem’ and their predecessors the ‘opus dei’ are clerico-fascist, are rabidly anti-communist and will never trust communists or Marxists of whatever rainbow hue they possess. The cleric-fascists supposedly opt for a total destruction of anything Marxist, much more of Maoists, and cannot be trusted in any way in peace negotiations. Of course, in the open mass media the typical line of the Maoists is that GRP is insincere, a line that the MILF rebels likewise echo.

 

That’s why it pays for any incoming president in particular to review the composition of the peace group that s/he inherits from a previous president. Well, the fact is that all the presidents from Corazon Aquino through Gloria Arroyo owe their victories in one way or another to the support of the ‘Jesuit mafia’ (to whom the ‘soc-dems’ owe allegiance) and the ‘opus dei’ (RP’s version of generalissimo Franco’s phalangists). So nary a president can just consign church players to roach-ridden dust bins, rest assured.  

 

A remedial measure adopted by a president here, which the incumbent particularly and that of the flamboyant Fidel Ramos found efficacious, was the use of BCT negotiators. And the result was even more stunningly successful whenever a BCT negotiator was a former comrade of the Left. Many senior-level officials since the 1990s yet, the rank going to as high as cabinet level, were former ‘nat-dems’ including dozens of former CPP cadres no less. They may have left the underground, but they were still in good faith with their former movements which they never antagonized in any way.

 

As the presidential poll got nearer in 2004, the BCT negotiator then, who is personally known to this writer, got himself busy moving in and out of the country to see the NDF officials face-to-face. There was this particular official session between the NDF and GRP, which the BCT negotiator witnessed, and to the shock of the attendants the NDF officials pulled out pronto even before the session even started. But the rebel officials never left the venue, they simply cuddled at a particular nook and discussed their moves right there.

 

As usual, among the GRP panelists were around three (3) ‘soc-dems’ and one ‘opus dei’, and so the knee-jerk Pavlovian response of the rebels was to back off, as if they perceive some hostile man-eating Martians across the bargaining table. Seeing the urgency of a mediation response, the BCT official immediately admonished the GRP panelists to stay and wait while he moves on to massage the rebel side. He then went over to his former comrades, muscled enough courage and confidence to deal witRih them, and pronounced his lines that fruitful things can come out of the session if only the rebels returned to the table.

 

Well, voila! The rebel officials did return to the table, though without a hint of trust shown to the GRP panelists. The panel wasn’t exactly an entirely ‘socdem’-‘opus dei’ tandem, as the BCT official had pointed to the rebels, and so it was a matter of competent communication of their positions that would matter the most at that historic moment.

 

I was myself very busy then with the presidential campaign, being a consultant and spokesman for the incumbent exec who was running for another 6-year stint when the talks resumed. And I was so exuberantly elated at the rebels’ return to the table. The BCT negotiator, being my direct boss in the campaign (he was also among the top coordinators for the ‘parallel campaign machinery’ of GM Arroyo), then narrated the series of events which never came out of the news.

 

Not only did the rebels return to the ‘nego’ table (nego = negotiations, negotiating) as a result of the success of confidence-building spawned thru the BCT strategy. A week before the presidential poll, the top rebel honcho Jose Maria Sison officially announced that the NDF was supporting the GMA-led team in the elections. ‘Joma’ (as Sison was fondly nick-named) even released a formal memorandum to all CPP cadres and members, to openly vote for Arroyo in her presidential bid.

 

We now have new faces among the GRP panelists here, and the political winds have quite changed since 2004. The GRP-NDF war had resumed, peace talks continue but without verve and mutual trust. But BCT had more than amply proved to be a worthwhile strategy for peace negotiations. We should all look forward to its further application in many cases of conflict resolution—from rebellion-related to labor-related conflicts (settling strikes, lock-outs, barricades).