FORMER PRESIDENT Rodrigo R. Duterte acknowledged the historical legacy left by Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria Sison, but said his death “marks the end of an era” of armed struggle.
Mr. Sison, who died at the age of 83 on Friday in the Netherlands where he had been living in exile since 1987, was known for his “radical ideas that affected the course of the country’s history,” Mr. Duterte said in a statement released late Saturday.
“While Mr. Sison and I have had many disagreements — especially in the ways in which he chose to pursue and effect change in the country — I would like to believe that, at the end of the day, we shared the same dream of creating a better future for every Filipino,” the former Philippine leader said.
Mr. Duterte was a student of Mr. Sison at the Lyceum of the Philippines University, where the latter taught English and political science.
Mr. Duterte said he hopes that the communist leader’s death will pave the way for “the end of insurgencies in the Philippines and the revolutionary movement that he has founded as well.”
Peace Secretary Carlito G. Galvez Jr., who held the same position under the Duterte administration, expressed a similar sentiment.
“With the death of Mr. Sison, it is our hope that it will also put an end to the local communist armed conflict that claimed the lives of so many Filipinos and pushed back development in the countryside,” Mr. Galvez said in a statement on Sunday.
Mr. Sison died peacefully at around 8:40 pm on Friday after a two-week confinement in a hospital in Utrecht, according to his party.
Mr. Sison established the Communist Party of the Philippines on Dec. 26, 1968. The group’s armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), has been waging one of the world’s longest-running insurgencies.
Mr. Duterte pushed peace talks with the Maoist movement in 2016, with Norway hosting the negotiations.
But the talks did not last long, with Mr. Duterte and his military officials citing attacks by the NPA rebels. Negotiators representing the communist movement had belied Mr. Duterte’s claims.
“From the time he led the founding of the new communist party in 1968 and NPA in 1969, Jose Ma. Sison was the unrivalled strategist and tactician of the revolutionary movement in the country,” Temario C. Rivera, who heads the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, said in a Facebook Messenger chat.
Mr. Rivera said one of Mr. Sison’s original contributions to revolutionary theory and practice was his analysis of waging a peoples’ war in an archipelago, looking at the combination of centralized leadership and decentralized commands in pursuing the armed struggle.
He said, “His imprisonment and eventual exile did not in any way diminish his preeminent role in the revolutionary movement.” — Kyle Aristophere T. Atienza
