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Issue Number 25/26, December
2005
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 25/26, December 2005
HUMAN RIGHTS ON
THE AGENDA OF “PEOPLE POWER III”
- Rod Prosser
A ten-year old boy bends
down and scratches the dirt with his fingernails. He is
demonstrating how he was forced at gunpoint to dig his
own grave and sit in it to await burial. I'm looking back
at some of the video footage I shot while interviewing
witnesses of human rights violations in the Philippines.
The boy shows how he was cut with a knife, kicked and
tormented along with other children during a military
raid on a small village of indigenous people in the hills
of Surigao (Mindanao). Luckily a “fat sergeant”
took pity on them and had them released. Thousands of
other people have not been so fortunate.
Arriving in Manila in August 2005, I met up with three
other New Zealanders, Tim Howard, Mary Ellen
O’Connor and Josephine O’Connor and about 80
other foreign delegates from 22 countries. We joined
perhaps 100 local experts to participate in the
International Solidarity Mission (ISM). After a general
introduction and orientation by the incredibly
well-organised hosts, we split into teams to investigate
the aftermath of massacres, torture, displacement and
other forms of serious human rights violations committed
by the Armed Forces of the Philippines in five locations
around the country.
The ISM was convened by Karapatan (Alliance for the
Advancement of People’s Rights), the country's
leading human rights group, and a number of other
progressive non-Government organisations (NGOs) to call
for international solidarity with people fighting
oppression as a result of the alarming emergence of a
pattern of killings of prominent leaders of legal
people's organisations, particularly those who advocate
human rights. Karapatan reported recently that at least
one activist had been killed every week in the first one
and a half months since our visit. One of the victims was
lawyer, Norman Bocar, a local government official from
Samar; another was the regional union leader, Diosdado
Fortuna, from Laguna.
Our visit coincided with Congressional impeachment
proceedings against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for
a very clear case of electoral fraud. There is a
groundswell of support for the call for her ouster.
Daughter of a former president, she jostled her way to
office on the wave of a “people power”
movement, which ousted the corrupt movie star president
Joseph Estrada in 2001 (she was the Vice President. Ed.).
But an analysis of figures reveals that her anti-people
record is even worse than that of fascist dictator
Ferdinand Marcos, who was removed from his palace by the
first “people power” demonstrations in 1986.
The sad thing is that since then human rights violations
have been on a steady increase. And now with the US
“War on Terror” in full swing the situation has
deteriorated dramatically. Since George W. Bush declared
the Philippines the second front in the war against
terrorism, the Philippine military has been given free
reign to operate with impunity. Arroyo calls it a
“calibrated pre-emptive response”.
Muslims
The first group of “terrorists” to be targeted
was the Moro (Islamic) community who make up about 5% of
the population. Unfortunately for these people, most of
them live in the minerally-rich south west of the
archipelago and are inclined to hinder the optimum
operations of transnational mining corporations. Mary
Ellen and Team One of the ISM studied their plight.
Unable to go to the island of Sulu as originally planned,
the group visited Moro communities of internal refugees
in Manila. Demolitions, disappearances, ethnic
discrimination and sexual abuses are their daily lot. The
team visited prisons full of Moro men and boys held in
appalling conditions without charge, no trial and routine
torture. Arroyo calls them “Abu Sayyaf lovers”,
referring to a small terrorist gang set up about a decade
ago by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and
elements of the Philippine military to destabilise Moro
resistance, but which now continues to operate
autonomously and bites the hand which feeds it.
Unionised Workers
Team Two investigated the situation of unionised workers
- obvious “terrorists”. Organised labour poses
a real threat to the semi-feudal economy and must be
genuinely terrifying for the ruling elite. The team
visited Hacienda Luisita in Central Luzon. This hacienda
comprising a population of 30,000 and four towns is owned
by the richest clan in the country, the Cojuanco family.
It is built around massive sugar cane plantations. The
average family there needs about 600 pesos a day just to
survive, whereas they are lucky if they can take home 300
pesos. 6,000 workers struck for higher pay. The response
from Danding Cojuangco, who counts former President Cory
Aquino among his clan, was to call in the army and
massacre a peaceful picket line, in November 2004. One of
the picketers recorded the event on video. In the
unedited footage you can see a happy, peaceful crowd
suddenly being gunned down. Hundreds run for their lives.
Many fall to the ground. Miraculously only seven people
were killed. Dozens were wounded. The military justified
the killings, claiming that the victims were Communists
and NPA (New People’s Army of the Communist Party of
the Philippines) sympathisers. In fact, for months after
the Hacienda Luisita Massacre, the military conducted an
intensified military operation against civilian targets
throughout the surrounding region. Although the NPA was
not involved, one thing the military is right about,
however, is that the NPA does exist. The NPA, is a
popular nationally-coordinated underground guerrilla army
which is conducting a protracted national-democratic
revolution in all regions of the country.
Human Rights Activists
Another sector of the population, more recently
identified as “terrorists” and targets to be
gunned down are prominent citizens who stand up for human
rights. This can be seen most obviously on the small
island of Mindoro in the western Visayas. Team Three were
told to be careful there. Partly because of events in
Mindoro, the Philippines is the current world
journalist-killing champion. A vice mayor, lawyers,
academics and priests were among the many who have been
shot, often in broad daylight. The ISM team were told to
expect harassment despite the mission having been
officially approved by the local authorities. What
greeted them on arrival was a massive intimidation
campaign. Posters, streamers and banners lining their
route from one city to another told them to go home,
accused Karapatan of being terrorists and devils and the
foreign ISM delegates of being used by “lie
experts”. The team saw hired youths handing out
leaflets about “Communist front activities”.
Despite this propaganda campaign and constant military
checkpoints, the team came back unscathed.
Peasants
Tim and Team Four went to Samar, the easternmost island
of the Visayas, to look into the claims of another group
of “terrorists” - those protecting the
environment. Samar has got the largest stands of virgin
forest in the country as well as abundant mineral
reserves. Many local people, mainly landless peasants,
have joined local units of the NPA to protect the forests
and their livelihood against warlords and foreign
interests backed by the huge presence of the Armed Forces
of the Philippines led by General Jovito Palparan,
previously known as the Butcher of Mindoro. Palparan, the
most vicious of all the military generals, has been
rewarded with promotion twice by President Arroyo. When
he arrived in Samar he warned the population that for
every soldier killed he would kill ten civilians. This in
a “freedom-loving American-style democracy”,
which is often thought of in Washington as America's 51st
state. Most of the victims are peasants and urban poor.
But, as elsewhere, the list includes priests, doctors,
social workers and local politicians. Legal activism is
being pushed underground. Not since Marcos' martial law
in the 1970s and 80s have military atrocities been such
an effective recruitment drive for the NPA.
Indigenous Peoples
But the worst “terrorists” of all are the
indigenous peoples, who snub their noses at Western
culture and capitalism altogether. They live high in the
hills and get on with life according to their own rules.
They have been forced to retreat further and further into
the most inaccessible reaches of their tribal areas by
successive waves of colonialism and imperialism for the
last 500 years. Team Five visited the Manobo people in
Surigao in north east Mindanao. This is where Josephine
and I met the boy who was forced to dig his own grave. A
soldier told him “We might as well kill you now
because when you grow up you will join the NPA
anyway”. This happened during a sudden military
operation against the Manobo to clear them out of the way
for mining and logging companies. Due to International
Monetary Fund/World Bank and World Trade Organisation
dictates, foreign companies can demand “easement
rights” from the Philippine government, which
include the construction of access roads to wherever the
resources are, and the removal of uncooperative
“natives”, who are known to be unpredictable in
the protection of their ancestral domains. On orders from
the President, communities of Manobo were bombed for six
days. Then, through the use of torture, blackmail and the
destruction of houses and crops, troops on the ground
rounded up and forced 2,000 people to evacuate the hills
(this took place during May and June 2005). This is the
area known as Andap Valley which has one of the largest
deposits of iron ore in the world and rich reserves of
gold, nickel and chromites. Again, miraculously, only
five people were killed. Thanks to public outrage and the
intervention of progressive local politicians, the Manobo
are now back in their communities. But for how long will
depend on how much national and international solidarity
can be mustered for them. As always the military's
pretext for the attacks was their war against the NPA.
One village, where we stayed, Han-Ayan, was a thriving
self-sufficient community with its own experimental
“learning farm”, a health clinic and school,
which included cultural and environmental education
(I’ve got a nice dawn shot of Josephine carefully
treading her way across a field of beans in front of the
school and a beautiful collection of bamboo houses,
repaired since the military ransacked them). All of these
people’s initiatives were set up and sustained by
the villagers themselves. No community facilities, not
even a barefoot doctor, had ever been provided by the
Government in this well-populated area. For the military,
the mere existence of any one of these projects is proof
that those involved are Communists and supporters of the
NPA.
The list of those who are considered Communists and
terrorists is endless. It is hard to avoid the conclusion
that in the Philippines, all oppressed peoples, classes,
sectors and individuals are targets. We could have had a
hundred teams of investigators spread throughout the
country just to look at the 6,000 documented cases of
human rights violations which have occurred during the
four and a half years of the Arroyo administration.
Nevertheless, the five teams were able to establish a
clear pattern to this horrific national situation and
establish some of the real reasons for it. It is no
coincidence, for example, that many of the worst cases
can be found in and around mining areas.
International People’s Tribunal
The teams reported back to the International People's
Tribunal – a political trial of the US-Arroyo regime
for its crimes against the Filipino people. It was a huge
event witnessed by 1,000 people in a large lecture hall
at the University of the Philippines in Manila. It was
presided over by three internationally respected legal
experts: Lennox Hinds, a law professor from the USA, who
had defended Nelson Mandela; Irene Fernandez, a human
rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize nominee from
Malaysia; and Hakan Karakus, the president of an
international organisation of people's lawyers from
Turkey. The jury comprised delegates from 12 different
countries. Mary Ellen was one of them. Included in the
evidence was video documentation shot by ISM participants
as well as footage taken at the time of some of the
atrocities. Most importantly, several key witnesses also
appeared before the court.
For me, the most moving witness was a small girl who had
heard her parents being dragged out of their house by the
military in the middle of the night. Hiding, so as not to
be detected, she heard her mother asking one of the
soldiers if she could change her clothes since she was
only wearing her nightdress. The soldier replied,
“Don't worry about that. You will be dead soon
anyway”. The next day the lifeless and tortured
bodies of the girl's parents were brought back to the
village. Mercifully, Judge Hinds stopped the testimony
before it became too distressing for the girl as well as
the tearful audience who sat through the ordeal in
absolute silence.
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, as Commander in Chief of the
Armed Forces, was convicted of gross human rights
violations under Philippine law and international
humanitarian law and faces condemnation by the Filipino
people and the international community. While the
People's Tribunal had no standing in the Philippine
Establishment's farcical legal circus, what the mock
trial achieved was that it put the President's human
rights record onto the agenda of the elite's dead-end
impeachment process and beyond that into the
“parliament of the streets” where it could
contribute to her ousting in another display of people's
power – “People Power III”.
Rod Prosser, of Wellington, is a PSNA member and
veteran maker of political documentaries. He has spent
lengthy periods in the Philippines as a filmmaker over
the past two decades.
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