“The positioning by President Duterte and the hard talk by Joma should be viewed as part of their respective projections. Maybe both of them are tired of war and want to end it if they could.”

Along with those names are his many personas.

A political science professor, an author, a communist.

Joma, a leader and servant of the people.

To his fellow communists of old, Jose Maria Sison was a despised figure. For some of them, he still is.

He had caused the great split that weakened the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP-1930), now just a ghost of its old self after its former youth arm — the Kabataan Makabayan (KM) — led the great split with Joma in 1969 and gave birth to the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing New People’s Army (NPA), in which Ninoy Aquino had a hand in its formation from yet another split with the already weakened Huk army of the PKP.

To his former CPP mates who became victims of the great deadly purges of the late 1980s to the early 1990s, Joma could no longer be trusted. Their split from the CPP-NPA weakened the movement, too. It is what it is now, maybe just half of its peak strength in the middle of the 1980s when it had the chance to take power from government.

Quite a number of wrong decisions and miscalculations wasted that chance for the Maoist communists to advance. It wasted its gains from the martial law years when the CPP-NPA proved itself as the main opposition — albeit underground — whose support was always sought by the oppositionists who tried to openly challenge Ferdinand Marcos despite the challenges and threats to their lives.

Joma had made the CPP-NPA the main force which should have brought down Marcos when the PKP-1930 just collapsed with even more wrong decisions and greater miscalculations, politically and substantially, that made it surrender its old place to the university professor it had developed and later learned to despise.

But whatever contempt his old peers felt for him was buried by Joma’s successess, both in the home front and in the internal political arena.

Joma had become the main man of the Philippine communist movement. He had taken over Crisanto Evangelista, the PKP founder and father of Philippine communism, and the Lava brothers, who took over the PKP-1930 soon after Evangelista’s death in a manner not dissimilar to the Kims of North Korea.

The death of Ninoy and Edsa stole from Joma’s gains. The only thing Joma reaped from Cory Aquino’s presidency was his relative freedom.

He is free, but away from his comrades. He had taken political refuge in The Netherlands. While he projects himself as the leader of the CPP-NPA, talks within the party point to Joma’s losing much of his influence on those he had left behind, fighting in the hills.

The CPP-NPA also has a seemingly autonomous party and army in Mindanao, making the party relatively fragmented, affecting the on-and-off peace talks, which are being revived again.

As of this writing, Joma is said to be contemplating returning to the country to spearhead the peace talks with government. President Duterte had long claimed him as his friend and was his student at the Lyceum before the First Quarter Storm and Marcos’ declaration of martial law.

Other sources claim Joma is also contemplating retiring his place on top of the Philippine communist movement. But that is subject to debate, even internally within the CPP-NPA-NDF.

The positioning by President Duterte and the hard talk by Joma should be viewed as part of their respective projections. Maybe both of them are tired of war and want to end it if they could.

But more than Joma’s fans and non-fans in the various shades of the Philippine communist movement, the military will play a crucial role in what would be the outcome of the talks.

Five decades of fighting had created a very wide chasm between goverment and the Maoist fighters.

Distrust of each other marks every skirmish between them. There would be no end to the bloodletting in the near future. The animosity is that deep – it would take more years for their wounds to heal.

But Joma has his own place in our history.

He had tried to give the Filipino people what he thinks is just and right. He had achieved it in the liberated areas the NPA held, still hold and may have lost years ago.

But as to how far he can go, only time will tell.