Bulatlat - The Philippines's alternative weekly newsmagazine

This story was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 28, August 21-27, 2005

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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