This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 19, June 19-25, 2005
Government by Repression
While crushing the insurgency is the immediate aim of a policy decision to use
all means including torture, assassination, and the suppression of free
expression, the opportunities for bureaucratic plunder the entry of foreign
mining companies into the country would make available are likely to be the
basic reason behind the government determination to stifle all forms of
protests.
By Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG) "This government," said
Secretary Raul Gonzales, "wants to do its best to observe (sic) human rights,"
but just cannot meet its "obligations," by which Gonzales probably meant its
commitments to international law as well as to its own legal system. © 2004 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.
Posted by Bulatlat
The Arroyo government is in one sense transparent: it is transparently committed
to preventing the dissemination of the recording of the alleged conversation
between President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and COMELEC Commissioner Virgilio
Garcillano. It has threatened whistle-blower former NBI Deputy Director Samuel
Ong with arrest, and warned media organizations not to air or print the tape, or
else. This is by no means new or unusual for the Arroyo administration, however.
Repression has been its response to free expression, and suppression of the
facts and secrecy its answer to a citizenry that simply wants to know, among
others, whether Mrs. Arroyo indeed cheated in the last elections as 55 percent
of it believes.
As if to confirm that the Philippines is entering a period of Marcos-era
repression, Amnesty International reported a few weeks ago the widespread use by
the police and military of torture and ill-treatment to extract information from
crime suspects, and noted the growing number of summary killings, arbitrary
arrests, abductions and torture of suspected guerillas and members of legal
leftwing organizations.
The Secretary of Justice admitted that "there are plenty of human rights
problems" in the Philippines—but argued that they persist because of lack of
resources. This is the same Secretary of Justice who has been loudly threatening
everyone in possession of copies of the alleged Arroyo-Garcillano tapes—which
government agencies themselves made in the course of tapping Garcillano's phone,
in the first place--with arrest or some other form of reprisal.
The Philippines is a signatory to, among other international covenants, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to free
expression and due process. Its own Bill of Rights echoes the same rights, and
Philippine jurisprudence is choked with assertions about the rule of law and the
rights of suspects.
As Amnesty noted, there is "an extensive array of institutions and procedural
safeguards" meant to protect human rights in the Philippines. But "suspected
perpetrators of serious human rights violations" are "rarely brought to
justice."
Not only has the Arroyo government looked the other way as far as police and
military violators of human rights are concerned. It has also rewarded such
suspects —and at one point even reversed policy in behalf of a known Marcos-era
torturer.
The most recent case in which it rewarded a suspected violator of human rights
involves Army Maj.Gen. Jovito Palparan, who has been accused of masterminding
the assassination of legal left-wing personalities in Mindoro while still a
colonel.
Despite the seriousness of this charge, Palparan was promoted to brigadier
general and assigned to the coveted, dollar-earning post of commander of the
Philippine "humanitarian mission" to Iraq. When the mission was recalled in
June, 2004, Palparan was again promoted and given his own command, this time as
commanding general of the Philippine Army's Eighth Infantry Division in Samar—where,
in utter disregard or ignorance of Section 4 of Article III of the Bill of
Rights, Palparan has vowed to eliminate all anti-government protests within six
months.
But not only has the Arroyo government rewarded the likes of Palparan. In 2003
it used the assassination, allegedly by NPA guerillas, of a notorious torturer
of the Marcos period as an excuse to abort then ongoing peace talks with the
National Democratic Front.
These and other instances contradict Gonzales' claim that the Arroyo government
wants to "observe" human rights but is hampered by lack of resources. What is
instead evident is, at best, its indifference to human rights—or, at worst, its
adoption and implementation of an anti-insurgency policy that permits and even
encourages human rights violations.
Every bit of evidence leads to this conclusion. More than 50 leaders and members
of legal leftwing groups have been killed since 2001, when the Arroyo
government came to power. The killings intensified in 2004, when National
Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales labeled left-wing party list groups as
fronts of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
During the 2004 elections the Armed Forces actively intervened not only in favor
of administration candidates but also against left-wing party list groups. At
about the same time the AFP accelerated its campaign to demonize various groups
as "enemies of the state" through a high-intensity propaganda campaign that
included the now infamous "Knowing The Enemy" lecture and presentation which
named journalists' and Church organizations and party list groups as part of the
"legal machinery" of the CPP.
The same presentation did not conceal that the AFP was "neutralizing" party list
and other personalities as part of its campaign against the so-called
"insurgency"—which it absurdly claims is the cause rather than a result of the
poverty of the country. The advent of 2005 witnessed more killings, including
those of priests and lawyers.
Meanwhile, a host of initiatives from the Executive Department as well as
Congress have targeted the media. Five bills supposedly against pornography now
pending in Congress would subject broadcast and print to censorship and prior
restraint as well as subsequent punishment.
The anti-terrorism bills in the same Congress uniformly allow the police to raid
the residences of suspected "terrorists" and to monitor private communications.
Public affairs programs have been told to submit their scripts to the Movie and
Television Ratings and Classification Board before they are aired, even as the
government condones the killing of journalists by ignoring them. The police
habitually refuses to issue rally permits in violation of Article III Section 4
of the Constitution, and also habitually uses unrestrained violence to disperse
rallies.
While crushing the insurgency is the immediate aim of a policy decision to use
all means including torture, assassination, and the suppression of free
expression, the opportunities for bureaucratic plunder the entry of foreign
mining companies into the country would make available are likely to be the
basic reason behind the government determination to stifle all forms of
protests. The areas where human rights violations by the military have
intensified are not only areas where leftwing party list groups have substantial
mass followings. They are also potential mining sites in addition to being NPA
strongholds.
What amounts to a human rights crisis reminiscent of the martial law period is
driven by a material motive premised on ridding those areas mining companies are
likely to exploit of protests and other "inconveniences". Basic to the current
policy is the refusal to heed popular demands for reform on a broad range of
issues, among them an end to government corruption and the institution of social
and economic policies that will address galloping poverty and social inequity.
Despite its pretensions, it has been evident for some time that the Arroyo
government was never committed to reform, its interests being solidly based on
the perpetuation of the status quo of subservience to foreign interests, and the
mass poverty, mass injustice, and mass misery the semi-feudal and semi-colonial
state it now presides over has perpetuated. Under these circumstances, only
repression and suppression of the truth can be its response to a restive society
and people. It is in the furtherance of its own narrow interests as well as
those of its foreign patrons that the Arroyo government is borrowing heavily
from the Marcos era book of repression.
The Arroyo government must heed the lessons of history. Posted by Bulatlat
June 13, 2005