BY KAREN PAPELLERO AND LISA ITO
Bulatlat
ELECTION WATCH/BREAKING NEWS
May 14, 2007 – 11:01pm

CEBU CITY—Foreign observers from the Peoples’ International Observers Mission (Peoples’ IOM) , said that the Philippine Army overstepped their authority for accosting and harassing them twice at a checkpoint in the northwestern coast of Cebu earlier this afternoon.

The People’s IOM team in Cebu was stopped at a military checkpoint in Brgy. Ginabasan in Asturias while travelling en route to the municipality of Tuburan earlier this afternoon. The checkpoint was manned by troops from the 78th Infantry Battalion of the Philippine Army and headed by a certain Sgt. Ronald Pastrana.

he foreign observers and the Filipino delegates were held for around ten minutes and were forced to give their names to the soldiers before they were let go. While returning from their mission area in Tuburan, the team passed the same road and were again accosted and stopped. This time around, soldiers held the team for 15 minutes and took photographs of the delegates without their consent.

“I think the military overstepped their authority. They did more than visually search us. They got our names and took our pictures,” said Elizabeth Hendrickson, from the English Lutheran Church in the United States, in reaction to the incident.

Minerva Gutierrez, a member of the political party Quebec Solidaire in Canada, agreed with Hendrickson’s observations.

“I felt that [the soldiers were] aggressive and disrespectful due to their questions and the fact that they seemed to have no valid reason for holding us the way they did,” Gutierrez says.

Hendrickson believes that the military’s actions were unwarranted.

“If [the soldiers] did not have a valid reason, they should not have stopped us in the first place,” she says.

Hendrickson’s team was on its way to witness the election conduct in Tuburan when the two incidents happened.

“Mostly, they hindered our trip [to the mission areas]. They were trying to delay people from getting to places where we wanted to observe the elections,” Hendrickson said.

“I wasn’t surprised with the checkpoint. But I was just frustrated with the way the military could overstep the bounds of what they are allowed to do,” Hendrickson ended. (Bulatlat.com)

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