This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. VII, No. 7, March 18-24, 2007
Analysis The
U.S. government has been criticized for its inconsistent human rights policy and
for using it as part of its proverbial "carrots and stick" strategy chiefly to
gain concessions from governments. It supports tyrannical governments and deals
with states that have gained notoriety for committing atrocities against their
own nationals.
By the Policy Study, Publication and Advocacy (PSPA) Program The breakthrough in
bringing the issue of the human rights crisis in the Philippines to the U.S.
Congress this week has sent some mixed signals: That it would increase pressures
on the Arroyo government to take a decisive action in stopping the political
killings, or that nothing will come out of it. This development is expected to
generate new questions on what other steps need to be done such as making the
Arroyo government accountable upon show of evidence that these cases are part of
a state policy or that the chief executive has done nothing to arrest the
deterioration of the critical human rights situation. Initiated by the National
Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP), the ecumenical and human rights
delegation first visited Canada second week of March where bishops and human
rights defenders met Canadian MPs (members of Parliament). There second leg was
the trip to Washington, DC where they presented the human rights crisis
situation at a three-day Ecumenical Advocacy Days conference. Thereafter,
delegation members testified before the U.S. Senate's subcommittee on East Asian
and Pacific Affairs of the committee on foreign relations and before the House
of Representatives' committee on foreign relations. They also held briefings
with the State Department. The deputy director of the Philippine National Police
(PNP), Avelino Razon, and three other armed forces and police senior officers
were refused entry into the Senate and were told not to "conduct surveillance on
the witnesses." The U.S. Congress hearings were to be followed by meetings with
the UN Human Rights Council, both in New York and later in Geneva. It was apparent that key
committees of the U.S. Congress were keen on pursuing the church delegation's
proposal to review U.S.-Philippine security cooperation and military aid
especially because these were being used to support a brutal counter-insurgency
program leading to violations of human rights. Some officials of the state
department have also suggested that economic and military aid to the Arroyo
government extended by the U.S. and other countries be tied to the Philippine
president's human rights record. The decision to bring the
human rights crisis in the Philippines before the international community
notably major ecumenical bodies, the UNHRC, Canada, the U.S. Congress and other
foreign governments and institutions was actually a foregone conclusion,
achieved at several forums and conferences in the Philippines over the last few
years. The organizations
represented by the delegation looked beyond the limited findings of the Melo
Commission and the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, involuntary or
summary executions, with their assertion that the mounting cases of political
assassinations, forced disappearances, torture and other violations of human
rights were the result of a state-authored counter-insurgency doctrine. To them,
there was also no question that the state's criminal justice system aside from
Congress and even the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) were either
dysfunctional, uncooperative and/or had institutional weaknesses making justice
being denied to the victims and their kin. No legal remedies With no legal remedies to
exhaust because these are non-existent anyway, the NCCP, together with other
church and faith organizations and human rights watchdogs, had to raise the
issue before the international community. Indeed, families of victims,
eyewitnesses, lawyers and human rights organizations found themselves receiving
death threats from the same perpetrators of political crimes; some of them
eventually went missing. They "have agonized over the inability to cross the
bridge toward justice precisely because there is no bridge at all," thus said
the 90-page ecumenical report, "Let the Stones Cry Out" which the delegation
submitted to the Canadian Parliament, UNHRC, U.S. Congress and international
ecumenical bodies. In their meetings with
Canadian and American legislators, the ecumenical delegation asked their
respective legislatures to review economic and security arrangements with the
Arroyo government including military aid to ensure that these do not result in
the gross and systematic violations of human rights. However, the American
legislators should have known all along that the military aid that they allocate
for the Philippines was being used to kill and maim innocent civilians in a
counter-insurgency that was tailored to fit Bush's "war on terrorism." They
should know that U.S. laws prohibit the extension of military aid to governments
known to have violated human rights – a fact which has been consistently cited
about the Philippines in the state department's yearly human rights reports. A
recent report by the U.S. General Auditing Office (GAO) concluded that elements
of the Philippine military were involved in extra-judicial killings and other
violations of human rights. The investigation on the catastrophic results of
U.S. military aid had earlier been asked by various lawyers groups and church
congregations in the U.S. For instance, in June last year, the National Lawyers
Guild, Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Association of
Democratic Lawyers, called for a probe into "the use of U.S. funding for
Philippine military operations against the legal Left that are being conducted
under the guise of the war on terror." Just the same, the
Philippine church delegation's mission to bring this demand to the U.S. Congress
is the first step toward a legislative review of the Bush policy of support to
the Arroyo government under the purview of "war against terrorism" and
"counter-insurgency" program. Moreover, this is timely considering the fact that
Congress, now dominated by the Democrats, is in the middle of intense debates
calling for the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from Iraq. Necessarily, the
debates will also touch on Bush's national security strategy which includes its
"counter-terrorism" operations in the Philippines and military aid to the Arroyo
government. Congressional review However, the congressional
review of the Philippine-U.S. security cooperation, military aid and the human
rights issue will go through the rigors of legislative mill to process the
reactions and positions of key policy makers from the U.S. State Department, the
Pentagon and various intelligence agencies, the U.S. Pacific Command, the U.S.
Embassy and the USAID in Manila and other agencies dealing with the Philippines.
To push the agenda, it will become necessary for the Philippine ecumenical
delegation to sustain vigorous lobbying in collaboration with other sympathetic
ecumenical bodies, human rights, advocacy and even academic groups in the U.S.
This is expected since the Arroyo government will tap its influential lobby
groups in the U.S. Congress to question the credibility and credentials of the
Philippine delegation and to market the line that giving military support to
Arroyo in the context of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency is the best
thing that ever happened to the Manila-Washington special ties. Already, the Pentagon,
through the commander of its anti-drug task force in Southeast Asia, Rear
Admiral Paul Zukunft, has begun a publicity blitz in support of the Armed Forces
of the Philippines (AFP) – the alleged perpetrator of rights violations – with
allegations that the New People's Army (NPA) maintains shabu laboratories in its
areas of operation. Zukunft's story is an oblique support to the AFP's
fabricated lies that the NPA is to blame for the political killings as part of
an "internal purge" – a theory which however has been debunked by both the Melo
Commission and the UN Special Rapporteur, Philip Alston. There is a dynamics of
policy making in Washington, D.C. with regard to the Philippine government not
necessarily between the Democrats and Republicans but between those who believe
in multilateralism and the advocates of unilateralism. In connection with U.S.
foreign policy and global security strategy, those who push for a revival of
multilateralism, i.e., using diplomacy and cooperation with international
institutions such as the United Nations, can be found in some liberal members of
Congress and the state department, which administers its diplomatic mission in
the Philippines. Officially though, the state department has backed Arroyo's
hardline anti-communist stance by including the CPP-NPA in its "foreign
terrorist organizations" (FTO) list. On the other hand, the
advocates of unilateralism, i.e. the "realists" and "neo-conservatives," remain
in the upperhand and are in control of the Bush government including the
Pentagon, and they include many Republicans in Congress and conservative think
tanks that are key players in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the global war
against terrorism. From this clique of war hawks and neo-conservatives come
those who promote Bush's current close security cooperation with the Arroyo
government. Of course, one can argue that multilateralism and unilateralism are
two sides of the same coin: The U.S. government adheres to multilateralism but
reserves its right to use unilateralism as a way of maintaining an independent
foreign policy (Read: aggressive global hegemony). Inconsistent rights
policy In fact, the U.S.
government has been criticized for its inconsistent human rights policy and for
using it as part of its proverbial "carrots and stick" strategy chiefly to gain
concessions from governments. For instance, it has accused of China of having a
poor human rights record as a means of pressuring the Beijing government to
yield to major economic concessions demanded by Washington. Yet, it supports
tyrannical governments and other states notorious for committing atrocities
against their own nationals – reminiscent of its previous support to various
dictatorships from the 1950s to 1980s including the military regimes of Marcos,
Park Chung-Hee of South Korea, General Soeharto of Indonesia, Augusto Pinochet
of Chile, and the Shah of Iran. Today's case in point is of
course the Arroyo government. The state department may report about the knotty
human rights performance of Mrs. Arroyo but Washington continues to extend huge
amounts of military aid and pours more and more of its intervention forces in
the Philippines. It has opposed peace talks with the communists and is extending
military aid to the AFP - even if this results in the gross and systematic
violations of human rights - with the objective of forcing the "enemies of the
state" to surrender. Still, unlike in the
aftermath of 9/11, the upsurge of the anti-war movement in the U.S. and the
Philippine progressive church's renewed linkages with human rights, ecumenical,
academic and immigrant groups in America are new grounds which the struggle for
the defense of human rights in the Philippines can tap to help bring into
fruition efforts to render justice to the victims of human rights violations in
the country. The complaints with the UNHRC will likely open more quasi-legal
investigations and the possible non-renewal of the Philippine government's
membership in the Council when it faces a universal periodic review (UPR) in May
this year. The struggle for human rights will continue in the Philippines but
its solidarity support appears to be boundless and is gaining sympathies not
only in America but throughout the world as well. Posted by Bulatlat © 2007 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.
Crossing the
Bridge
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)
Posted by Bulatlat