MONKAYO, COMPOSTELA VALLEY – Rumored presidentiable Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte said some generals are not too happy with his pronouncement that he would “end the war in the country” by forming a “coalition government with the revolutionaries.”
“I told them about the federal system and how the resources of Mindanao only benefit the corrupt in Manila,” said Duterte in a press conference after the release of Compostela Valley jail warden Jose Mervin Coquilla Monday.
Duterte declined to give names of the generals who talked to him at the Villamor Air Base.
Duterte said he told the generals “not to fear (coalition government) because it only means that we have a united and good government.”
He said he told the generals that “it would be better for us to part ways before I let such a system to go on.”
Asked what particular aspect of the “coalition government” which the generals feared, Duterte said “it has something to do with things they do not understand.”
“The Communist Party is a party name but it’s socialism that they espouse. If we look at China, the United States has a debt to them worth three trillion dollars,” he said.
Duterte said that in the coalition party, he would let revolutionaries handle land reform.
He said that land reform and food security “is not simply the distribution of lands” saying that “if you give farmers land, you have to support them by giving seedlings to plant and cheap farm implements,” he said.
Ka Caloy of the NPA’s Comval-North Davao South Agusan Sub-regional Command, in a speech before the release of Coquilla said “oppression and poverty” are the reasons why the revolutionary movement is building their own “people’s revolutionary government” in the hinterlands.(davaotoday.com)
