Reclaiming Peace as Our Birthright - Statement of the GPH Peace Panel in Talks with the CPP/NPA/NDFP
Sisters and brothers, Assalam Allaikum! Peace be with you!
How do we celebrate peace in this month of September and thereafter?
First, we must reclaim peace as our common birthright–young, elderly, middle aged; poor farmers, displaced indigenous peoples, bereft urban poor–everyone without exception.
Four decades of the armed conflict with the New People's Army has left tens of thousands of recorded deaths, roughly half of these civilians caught in the crossfire. Collateral damage is the clinical term which cannot begin to describe the tearing asunder of persons, families, villages, our body politic. Women, children, our lolas and lolos suffer most because they are the most vulnerable. And youth are the first victims of war and the first fruits of peace.
Second, we must honor peace as a wellspring–of our hope, our faith, our aspirations. Peace is a ground from which all blessings flow. Peace must be whole and not piecemeal. Peace without justice and development is false peace, fleeting and reversible. Peace must be anchored on social reforms.
Yet we invest in more arms to secure peace. But violence only begets more violence. We spend millions, billions on fighting the armed conflict at the cost of classrooms and clinics, bridges and basic services. If we let guns dictate our discourse, it will be difficult to find our way back to words, in the words of a peace mentor.
Third, we must build peace from the innermost core of our beings, as the touchstone of our relationships, binding our families and communities. We must combat the skepticism and cynicism that accept violence and conflict as part of the human condition.
Peace building poses a challenge to the imagination, of being open to the unorthodox. A visiting Irish lawmaker said that peace negotiations does not seek absolutes or perfection but starts on a common ground, trusting each other enough ”to leave one's arms at the door”, and enlarging that ground with growing mutual trust and confidence. He also said that roadblocks will always be there but must not be allowed to derail the peace process. That is how the long and bloody Irish internal conflict was brought to an end.
Peace building also poses a challenge to language. It is not simply changing the narrative of gunfire and finding our way back to words. It is also choosing our words wisely and choosing them well. Imagination requires new words for new realities that we seek to shape from fossilized dogma and structures that have overstayed their term. Intemperate and bellicose language does not help.
Indeed, peace building requires a fundamental transformation in our ways of thinking and doing. Can both armies, government and NPA, reinvent themselves as soldiers of peace after decades of making war? Yes they can. One soldier has said that they, facing death daily, yearn for peace more than anyone else. The government now eschews a purely militaristic solution that has driven past administrations down the dead-end of body counts.
Fourth, we must affirm the primacy of the peace process. Keeping faith in the process, we, members of the GPH panel, are committed to staying the course of peace. We therefore ask civil society organizations (including our youth), communities on the ground, everyone who has a stake in the process, to put pressure on both sides to stay at the table, to engage in debates on reforms that will make peace just and sustainable.
Lastly, we share the good news of a unilateral ceasefire declared by the government to celebrate today, the International Day of Peace. Soldiers will silence their guns for 24 hours, signifying that once we have a just and sustainable peace, these guns can remain silent forever.
