The tragic loss of Alyssa Alano (“Ka Kikay”), two children, and others in the recent Toboso encounter in Negros Occidental confronts us once again with a painful truth: armed conflict in the Philippines continues to consume lives, fracture communities, and delay the healing of our nation. At PeaceBuilders Community, Inc., we believe every human life carries sacred worth. No life should be reduced to a casualty statistic, an ideological symbol, or a propaganda tool for any side. Whether one is a soldier, a farmer, a student, a community worker, or an insurgent, each death represents a failure of systems that should have protected life and opened pathways toward justice.
We Grieve the Human Cost of a Protracted War
For more than five decades, the armed conflict between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the CPP-NPA-NDFP has burdened generations of Filipinos. Entire communities have lived under fear, militarization, displacement, and recurring violence. Children have grown up hearing gunfire instead of opportunity. Young people with intelligence, passion, and courage have been drawn into a war older than many of them.
The Toboso incident is not isolated. It is another symptom of unresolved land inequality, poverty, political exclusion, historical injustice, and ideological rigidity.
As peacebuilders, we refuse to normalize this cycle.
The Greater Responsibility of Power
We affirm that the Philippine government bears the primary responsibility to protect civilians, uphold due process, and address the structural roots of rebellion. The state possesses armed forces, public institutions, taxation powers, courts, and policy instruments. Therefore, it carries the higher burden of accountability.
Any military operation resulting in the deaths of civilians, children, or noncombatants requires transparent and independent investigation. Justice cannot exist where questions are dismissed in advance. Security cannot be built on opacity.
At the same time, peace cannot be reduced to counterinsurgency campaigns alone. If landlessness persists, if corruption drains public trust, if rural neglect remains entrenched, then violence will continue to regenerate in new forms.
The Revolutionary Movement Must Also Reassess
We also call on the CPP-NPA-NDFP to confront the moral and strategic costs of prolonged armed struggle. Any movement that claims to fight for the oppressed must ask whether its current methods still serve the people—or deepen suffering among the very communities it seeks to liberate.
When youth continue to die in the mountains, when families are left grieving, when communities remain trapped between two armed forces, serious reflection is overdue.
Conviction without self-critique becomes dogma. Revolution without renewal becomes repetition.
Peace Is More Than the Silence of Guns
At PeaceBuilders Community, Inc., our framework of Peace and Reconciliation recognizes that lasting peace must be holistic: spiritual-ethical, psychological-physical, socio-political, and economic-ecological. Peace is not merely the absence of firefights. Peace is the presence of justice, dignity, restored relationships, and sustainable livelihoods.
That means:
- Farmers must have secure access to land and fair markets.
- Indigenous Peoples must have protected ancestral domains and self-determination.
- Youth must have pathways to service and leadership beyond war.
- Communities must be free from fear, red-tagging, extortion, and militarization.
- Institutions must become trustworthy to the poor and marginalized.
A Better National Path Is Possible
The Philippines has already seen evidence that negotiated transformation can work. The Bangsamoro peace process, despite difficulties, demonstrated that decades of armed struggle can move toward political settlement, democratic transition, and institution-building.
This should encourage renewed imagination for the communist insurgency conflict as well. Endless war is not destiny. Peace talks, local ceasefires, truth-telling, restorative justice, and structural reform remain viable if pursued with sincerity.
Our Appeal to the Nation
We appeal to government leaders, revolutionary actors, churches, schools, civil society, and citizens:
Do not use the dead to harden camps. Use this tragedy to soften hearts and sharpen wisdom.
Do not recruit the young into old hatreds. Equip them to build new futures.
Do not confuse military success with national healing. A battlefield victory without justice is only an intermission.
The death of Alyssa Alano and others should awaken us. If our brightest youth still die in internal war, then our political imagination has been too small.
The Philippines deserves more than inherited conflict. Our people deserve courageous peace.
And peace, if it is to last, must be built on justice.
