Escalating
Political Murders
In The Philippines
By Dante Pastrana
18 October 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
death toll of political activists has continued to mount in the Philippines.
On September 20, eleven gunmen, wearing bonnets, black shirts and combat
boots, barged into the backyard of Christopher Lunar, and shot and killed
the peasant leader in broad daylight.
The 31-year-old Lunar, a
local coordinator of the party-list group Anak-Pawis in the Camarines
Sur province, was the second political activist to be assassinated in
the Bicol region. On August 3, Isaias Sta. Rosa, a pastor for the United
Methodist Church and leader of the leftist Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas,
was shot in his own house in the neighboring province of Albay.
According to Philippine Daily
Inquirer, Lunas was the 251st leftist victim since President Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo took power in 2001. Karapatan, a local human rights
organisation, claims a higher toll, recording 601 killings. Another
140 activists have also “disappeared”. Even worse, human
rights organisations have noted a surge in political murders this year.
Amnesty International reported 51 killings in the first six months alone,
compared to 66 for the whole of 2005.
Top government officials
insist that the murders are a purge being conducted by the Maoist Communist
Party of the Philippines (CPP) against its own members. Police authorities
deny outright that any pattern exists, claiming the murders are simply
part of the normal crime-rate cycle. “Sometimes it falls, sometimes
it goes up,” national police spokesman Samuel Pagdilao told the
press in May.
Of the 110 political killings
admitted by the government since 2001, only four cases have been filed
in court. This “pattern of impunity” finally forced even
the official Commission of Human Rights, an independent constitutional
body, to timidly warn that, while not condemning the Arroyo administration,
“in human rights terms, the government is still responsible, even
if persons in authority are not those behind the killings”.
However, it is not simply
a matter of government indifference. The rising tide of death is the
result of a deliberate and vicious campaign launched by government security
forces, working in tandem with death squads and vigilantes to intimidate
and terrorise a growing protest movement among the rural poor.
The leftist Bayan Muna party-list
group, which in 2001 received 1,203,305 votes and sent three representatives
to the Philippine congress, has been the prime target, with 95 of its
local officials killed. The party-list groups Anak-Pawis and Gabriela,
which separately obtained half a million votes and have a total of three
representatives, have also been targeted. As of March 2006, 23 Anak-Pawis
members and officials had been killed. Gabriela has suffered four fatalities.
The surge of political killings
has been accompanied by a crude campaign by government security forces
of “red-baiting”—branding all leftist party-list groups
and allied rural and other social-civic organisations as nothing but
“fronts” for the underground CPP or its armed wing, the
New Peoples Army (NPA).
This propaganda campaign,
which is similar to the methods used in the 1970s under the Marcos dictatorship,
effectively turns peasants, trade unionists, church, social and human
rights activists into targets of counter-insurgency operations. According
to Amnesty International, some of the victims were placed, “without
opportunity for rebuttal, on AFP [Armed Forces of the Philippines] ‘Orders
of Battle’ [lists of people wanted for alleged subversion].”
The AFP’s open contempt
for basic democratic rights is exemplified by military field commanders
like Major General Jovito Palparan who, according to an Asia Times report,
shrugged off the deaths of leftist activists last year as just “small
sacrifices” and asserted that the “extra-judicial”
killings helped the military in its counter-insurgency campaigns.
Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez
has expressed the same sentiments. According to the Philippine Star,
he told the five leftist party-list representatives accused of rebellion
during the state of emergency in March “to go back to the mountains
where you belong”—that is, to the NPA’s guerrilla
camps. Not to be outdone, national security adviser Norberto Gonzalez
accused Bayan Muna members of “moonlighting” as NPA guerillas
and their party-list representatives of funding the CPP with their congressional
“pork barrels.”
President Arroyo, while less
blatant, obviously supports the campaign. In her July 26 state of the
union address, she condemned political killings “in the harshest
possible terms” but then heaped praise on Major General Palparan
for not “backing down” against rebels, “who kill without
qualms, even their own.” Palparan has been branded the “butcher”
by various human rights organisations for his alleged connections to
more than 500 cases of human rights violations since 2003.
Official inquiries
Amid growing public outrage
over the political murders, Arroyo has established two supposedly independent
bodies to conduct inquiries.
Task Force Usig (or Prosecute)
is a case of the suspects investigating themselves. It is a special
police unit headed by the deputy general of the national police. Its
report released during Arroyo’s visit to Europe early in September
proclaimed the government was “not responsible for any abuses
that might have taken place.” The task force found that of 36
killings investigated, the Maoists allegedly committed 16 and the military
just six—conveniently justifying the government line that the
CPP was conducting a purge.
The second body is the so-called
Melo commission. It is named after its chair, former Supreme Court justice
Jose Melo, who began his career as an appointee of President Diosdado
Macapagal, Arroyo’s father. The commission has the narrow remit
of investigating the root causes and recommending “policies to
end the bloodshed,” according to a presidential spokesperson.
Its “independence”
is highly questionable. The commission’s budget of $20,000 was
traced to the president’s office, after it was revealed that the
government had allocated no funding. Additional funds are to come from
the National Bureau of Investigation, the Philippine National Police
and the AFP, but only if the agencies themselves agree.
The Arroyo administration
rejected a suggestion by Amnesty International to expand the commission
to include human rights organisations. The body is mainly composed of
government officials—the director of the National Bureau of Investigation,
the chief state prosecutor and a regent of the University of the Philippines.
Its only non-government member—a Catholic archbishop—refused
to join, saying his membership would compromise the independence of
the Roman Catholic Church.
It is not just political
activists who are being murdered. Amnesty International has drawn attention
to a surge of extra-judicial killings of suspected petty criminals,
particularly in two major cities whose mayors are close allies of Arroyo.
In Cebu city, at least 162
suspected petty criminals have been reported killed since December 2004.
The Sun Star Daily reported the mayor as saying: “To me, as long
as there are fewer robberies and [bag] snatching, it’s not so
bad.” In Davao city, 390 suspected criminals, again mostly petty
thieves, including street children and youth gang members, have been
murdered since 2001. The mayor told the Washington Post: “I’ve
been telling criminals it’s a place where you can die any time.
If that’s a cue for anybody, that’s fine.”
Many unsolved killings of
journalists have also occurred in the Philippines. According to Amnesty
International, 79 journalists have been killed since 1986, with 42 deaths
since Arroyo assumed power in 2001. Nine have already died in the first
seven months of 2006.
The ruthless murder of political
opponents is an attempt to suppress the growing popular hostility and
opposition to the Arroyo administration. Arroyo was installed in power
in 2001 in what amounted to a constitutional coup. A protracted campaign
to oust elected President Joseph Estrada through formal impeachment
on corruption charges failed. With the backing of the military and sections
of the corporate elite, Arroyo was inserted as president with the sanction
of the Supreme Court amid a series of so-called peoples’ power
rallies.
Having come to power, Arroyo,
who repeatedly declared herself “for the poor,” immediately
launched into her agenda of far-reaching market reforms—including
privatisations, regressive taxation and government spending cutbacks.
She won the 2004 presidential election amid allegations of ballot corruption
and has faced two campaigns to impeach her in 2005 and 2006. Arroyo’s
response to her growing unpopularity has been to turn even further to
the right. She is a fervent supporter of the Bush administration’s
bogus “war on terrorism,” has relaunched military operations
against the NPA and backs tough “law and order” measures.
The CCP and other leftist
parties—mostly CPP breakaways—bear a heavy political responsibility
for helping Arroyo come to power. In 2001, they joined the “peoples’
power” bandwagon, demanded the ousting of Estrada and supported
Arroyo as the alternative. Their political backing was crucial in duping
ordinary working people into believing that Arroyo, a scion of the Philippine
establishment, would in some way address their burning social needs.
Once in office, Arroyo rapidly turned on her left backers as she implemented
her regressive policies and cracked down on any opposition.
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