Ex-U.S. Attorney General, Police Chief,
Author and SC Justice Endorse People’s Tribunal
A former U.S. Attorney
General, a former police chief of Portland, Oregon, a noted linguist and
foreign policy scholar and a former justice of India’s Supreme Court are
among the more than 100 personalities and institutions that endorsed the
International People’s Tribunal which indicted President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
for human rights violations committed under her watch.
BY ALEXANDER MARTIN REMOLLINO
Bulatlat
The International
People’s Tribunal (IPT) that found President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
guilty of crimes against humanity last Aug. 19 was endorsed by more than a
hundred international personalities and institutions. These include Ramsey
Clark, former U.S. Attorney General; known Tom Potter, former police chief
and now mayor of Portland, Oregon; and Noam Chomsky, a noted linguist and
U.S. foreign policy scholar.
The endorsers of the
IPT include journalists, academicians, Church people, trade unionists,
civil rights advocates, and even members of the business community.
Born in 1927, Ramsey
Clark is a former U.S. Attorney-General under President Lyndon B. Johnson
in the mid-1960s. He is a recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and a
prominent figure in the U.S. civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
During his years in
the U.S. Department of Justice, Clark supervised the drafting and
executive role in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil
Rights Act of 1968. As Attorney-General, he opposed the government’s use
of wiretaps.
In 1992, Clark
founded the International Action Center (IAC), a U.S.-based network of
activists against imperialism, militarism, fascism, and corporate abuses.
More recently, he has been affiliated with VoteToImpeach, an organization
pushing for the impeachment of U.S. President George W. Bush. He has been
a staunch opponent of both Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003).
In 1987, Clark headed
an international solidarity mission that investigated the human rights
violations of the Aquino administration.
Civil rights activist
Tom Potter on the
other hand was born to a poor family in
Bend,
Oregon. For the next six years, the Potters lived in a tent in a small
town outside Bend.
Potter’s father died when he was six, after which the family moved to
Portland.
He distinguished
himself as a community leader and civil rights activist even as he worked
as a police officer in Portland for more than 20 years, eventually
becoming its chief of police in 1990. As police officer, Potter
distinguished himself for his community-based approach to crime-fighting.
His leadership of Portland’s police force is credited for the drastic
reduction of the city’s major crime rate despite the population’s speedy
growth.
He has also served as
executive director of an institution working for homeless children. He was
elected Portland mayor in 2004.
Frequently-read author
A noted linguist and
foreign policy scholar, Noam Chomsky is cited in a 1992 tabulation of the
Arts and Humanities Index as the most frequently-cited author alive, as
well as one of the eight most frequently-cited thinkers of all time – just
behind Greek philosopher Plato and German psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund
Freud.
Chomsky became a
linguistics instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
in 1955, and has taught there ever since. He was appointed full professor
in the MIT Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1961.
Also a political
activist, Chomsky is known for having organized in 1965 a citizens’
committee to promote tax refusal as a protest against the Vietnam War.
Four years later, he published his first book on politics, American
Power and the New Mandarins.
By 1980, he was
recognized as one of the most influential critics of U.S. foreign policy
as well as the most distinguished figure of American linguistics. As of
2004, he has authored 33 books on linguistics and more than 40 books on
politics.
The IPT, which
convened at the Film Institute of the University of the Philippines (UP)
in Diliman, Quezon City, was part of the week-long International
Solidarity Mission (ISM) that investigated several human rights
allegations against the Arroyo administration.
Activist lawyer
Also among the IPT’s
endorsers is Jitendra Sharma, an activist lawyer.
Sharma, a former
justice of the Indian Supreme Court, Sharma is the president of the
International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), a worldwide
organization of lawyers campaigning against racism, colonialism, and
economic and political injustice.
IPT
In a brief interview
with Bulatlat, Prof. Lennox Hinds, who sat in the IPT’s Presidium
of Judges and was a lawyer for former South African President Nelson
Mandela, explained how the IPT came to be.
According to Hinds,
an IPT brings together international personalities who have experience in
international humanitarian law from different countries to serve as judges
and members of a College of Jurors.
“The findings and
verdict have no real effect in that neither the President of the
Philippines nor the President of the United States are going to be seen in
handcuffs,” he said.
Hinds described IPT
as a public education instrument. “So if you have 500, 600, 700 people who
listened to the evidence, observed the evidence, and saw with their own
eyes and heard witnesses who testified, it has an impact on them,” he
explained. “It is part of an over-all campaign to educate the population
about what is happening within its midst.”
“The fact that you
bring in international personalities means that you have people who are
more detached from the general population and can make a decision without
being emotionally embroiled in it,” he added. “So you have people here
from all over the world. They’re sitting up here and they are hearing and
seeing the evidence and they make a judgment.”
The judgment, Hinds
said, is to be used as a political tool. “It is sent around the world and
so on and so forth, and the impact then is on world opinion,” he
explained. “First of all it is domestic opinion then world opinion,
because people in the world have seen evidences and will cause the
government being indicted to have problems in its foreign relations.”
Second indictment
for Arroyo
A total of 4,207
cases of human rights violations committed by the Arroyo administration
from January 2001 to June 2005 were presented to the IPT that convened at
UP Diliman. The cases affected 232,796 individuals, 24,299 families and
237 communities. At least 400 were victims of summary execution, while 110
were victims of forced disappearances. Twenty of those killed were human
rights workers.
The cases range from
extra-judicial killings or summary executions, assassinations, massacre,
disappearances, torture, forced evacuation and displacement, illegal
arrest and detention, and other violations constituting crimes against
humanity.
The IPT that convened
at UP Diliman last Aug. 19 is actually the second IPT to indict Arroyo.
Last year, Arroyo was
indicted for war crimes in an IPT held in Tokyo together with U.S.
President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and former
Spanish President Jose Maria Aznar. Arroyo, Blair, and Aznar are all
supporters of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. Bulatlat
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