PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo announced a new policy to put an end to the CPP-NPA insurgency in two years. Peace at last?

It is difficult to understand the people on the issue of insurgency in the country. Many groups are complaining at the way the problem has dragged on for years without reaching a successful resolution. They blame government for the soft stand on what will get it resolved. In the meantime losses in terms of properties, infrastructures, livelihood and lives have piled up.

All administrations have taken the path of negotiation in solving the problem that has left many orphans, kept many in poverty and in constant fear for their lives especially for those living in the countryside. All has failed to secure a final settlement up to this time. Thus the announcement of the President immediately caught the attention of everyone.

If the problem has dragged on despite the negotiations, that is because there can be no settlement in a negotiation where one party does not bring its heart to the negotiating table. Social and political pressures have also caused the many “indecisions” of government in the past. This is not to mention the personal and political interests of decision-makers on the matters that have influenced the current situation and condition of insurgency in the country today.

In making the announcement, Pres. Arroyo must be fed up at how things have turned out in the government's program to address the problem of insurgency. Now she is determined to solve insurgency during her term. In fact, she has given the Department of National Defense two years within which to solve the problem. The ten years that defense officials were earlier asking were too long according to her.

She must have realized how the CPP-NPA-NDF (CNN) were just using the peace negotiations to further their sinister plots to topple government. If the CNN really wanted to end the insurgency they would not demand for things government is not in the position to give like removing them from the list of terrorist organizations in the world that the U.S. and the European countries have tagged them. Only reasonable conditionalities can make negotiations work but not when one party is clearly just using it to its advantage.

As usual many left-leaning and the so-called cause-oriented groups will howl on this new directive from the President. They will warn of the escalation of human rights violations. They will warn of summary killings and disappearances. They will condemn the President for this.

But for those who have been in the business of counter-insurgency for years, they will feel relieved with this announcement. For those working for peace in the province of Bohol , this is the policy they have been waiting for. This is the decisiveness they have been hoping for from government especially if what the President meant is the very formula that they have been employing in Bohol with much success.

The “all-out-war” against the NPA that Pres. Arroyo has announced, to our mind should not be the punitive action that we normally perceive it to be. This is not the “search-and-destroy” formula that many would think it to be. Rather this is the approach that the Bohol Peace and Order Council has always enunciated. This is the approach that has won for Bohol the Peace and Development Award of the Galing Pook Foundation and the Most Outstanding PPOC Award of the National Peace and Order Council.

This is the formula that integrated development in the peace efforts and injected with a humane face the military operations to bring the insurgents into the fold of the law. This is not the all-out-war that people know of. On the contrary, this is the all-out-war against the causes of insurgency but not against the insurgents.

NOTES: I have been out of action, so to speak, for the last three months since my near death experience that I discussed in my previous columns. So when I went to the Tagbilaran Port to meet my brothers who were arriving from Cagayan de Oro, I was embarrassed to see families of beggars with eight children in tow and in various degrees of undress, approach passengers, especially foreigners who are disembarking from fast crafts or proceeding to the passenger terminal prior to boarding their crafts at the Tagbilaran Tourism Port. I need not discuss the negative effects of this to the tourism industry in Bohol . So I will just call on the Chair of the SP Committee on Tourism and the President of the Bohol Tourism Council to do something about it.