As the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) recklessly and irresponsibly continued to drum up its canard of a “Red October” plot to oust President Duterte (which he first disclosed after returning from official visits to Israel and Jordan last month), he took to visiting three military camps to further woo the support of the soldiers, whose pay he had recently doubled.
He sought to embolden them to “neutralize” all the fighters of the New People’s Army (NPA) they would encounter, with a promise to back them up that bordered on legal brinkmanship. “I will not allow that you will go to jail for [even] a day,” he assured them.
Of late, the AFP has gotten roundly rebuked by both the administrators and student leaders of colleges and universities in Metro Manila. Meantime, Duterte further antagonized the organized labor formations that had recently found growing confidence in working together to end labor contractualization and advancing the overarching interest and welfare of the country’s workers.
The AFP general command got blowback for pointing a finger at 18 schools in Metro Manila as having been “infiltrated” by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the NPA allegedly to recruit students to join the “Red October” plot. But AFP chief Gen. Carlito Galvez has acknowledged that they are “still validating” the disclosure made last Wednesday by his assistant deputy chief of staff for operations, Brig. Gen. Antonio Parlade.
A group of schools demand that the AFP immediately make a correction.
“It puts all students in these colleges and universities at risk because they are now perceived as possible communists or rebels” and “unduly affects the integrity of these schools named,” averred Joseph Noel Estrada, the legal counsel of the Philippine Association of Private Schools, Colleges and Universities and the Coordinating Council of Private Educational Associations of the Philippines.
Defending academic freedom, De la Salle University president Armin Luistro declared that “there is nothing wrong in a university setting where many ideologies are discussed.” But connecting such discussions with the “Red October” plot is an entirely different matter, he said. “It’s a created fear. They’re creating a scenario that’s not even there.”
On the other hand, workers’ leaders strongly reacted against President Duterte’s dismissal of Labor Undersecretary Joel Maglunsod, who they said had been doing his job well. Mag-lunsod, a former secretary general of the militant Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) and Duterte’s long-time friend in Davao, was appointed in June 2016.
Oddly, Duterte announced the dismissal in the same speech, at a military camp in Samar, wherein he sought the soldiers’ support. He didn’t explain why; he simply said, “I am asking Joel Maglunsod to leave.” But presidential spokesman Harry Roque linked the dismissal to Duterte’s crackdown on alleged illegal workers strikes, without putting the blame on Maglunsod. But the chair of Nagkaisa, the labor coalition most accommodating to the President, said Duterte had no one to blame for the strikes but himself. Workers resort to strikes, Sonny Matula pointed out, because they have had enough of contractualization, low wages, inadequate benefits, and high cost of basic commodities.
Back to Duterte’s speech to the soldiers. Seeking to assure them, he declared: “I will take care of you as long as I am in power. I will never abandon you. You will never have any worry at all. Just work.”
What work? He ordered the soldiers to “neutralize” all the New People’s Army fighters they would encounter. (In military parlance, “neutralize” can mean to kill, maim, capture, or force the enemy to surrender.) “We are going for neutralization now. We are not into crime prevention,” Duterte explained. “There is no crime prevention because the crime [rebellion] is being perpetrated 24 hours a day. So you do not need to ask whether there is a warrant,” he added.
But then he ordered the soldiers to shoot first. “Do not worry,” he hastened to add, “If that is the circumstance, I am there for you. And I will not allow that you will go to jail for [even] a day.”
“I will be criticized,” he acknowledged. “But I’m telling you, I’m guiding you [on] what is practical and what is true and legal. That’s legal,” he assured the soldiers.
(Recall that in his brutal “war on drugs” Duterte had assured Philippine National Police (PNP) officers and men that, should they be jailed for carrying out his orders, he would get them out pronto. And in his third state-of-the-nation address last July, he vowed to pursue the drug war in “harsher and more chilling” ways throughout his six-year term with no assurance of ending the problem.)
That’s not all that Duterte promised to the soldiers. All government soldiers would be provided with a pistol, he promised. But there’s a catch: he wants them to use the handguns to kill themselves, instead of surrendering or allowing themselves to be captured by the NPA. He would prefer to have them commit suicide than to be taken alive and “treated like dogs” before being beheaded or murdered by their captors.
We don’t know what’s going on inside Duterte’s head, as he fully knows that the NPA never mistreated captured AFP soldiers or PNP personnel. Many times, when he was mayor of Davao City, he had facilitated the release of such NPA prisoners of war (POWs) in Mindanao. Invariably the POWs publicly stated that while in the custody of the revolutionary army they had been treated fairly, in observance of universally accepted human rights and in accordance with the laws of war.
By opting to terminate the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations and to continue the nearly 50-year war instead, President Duterte evinced no interest, much less a sense of obligation, in implementing the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL), the landmark accord signed in 1998 between the Philippine Government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). The International Criminal Court prosecutor may well consider this matter when it looks into the complaints filed against President Duterte for allegedly committing crimes not just against the Filipino people, but against humanity.
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Email: satur.ocampo@gmail.com
Published in Philippine Star
Oct. 6, 2018
