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Issue Number 27/28, April 2007
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 27/28, April 2007
REVIEW by Jeremy Agar
“THE PEOPLE’S VERDICT
International Solidarity Mission And International
Peoples’ Tribunal, 2005”
A DVD By Kodao
This is the record of the August 2005 human rights
International Solidarity Mission to the Philippines.
Assisted by the Philippines Solidarity Network of
Aotearoa (PSNA), four Kiwis – Tim Howard, Rod
Prosser, Mary Ellen O’Connor and Josephine
O’Connor – took part. The detailed reports by
all four of them appeared in Kapatiran 25/26. December
2005, which can be read online at
http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/KapNo25n26/kap25list.htm
Ed.
“Globalisation, a world without borders. Also, the
spread of violence and war”. That’s the opening
voice-over. We see explosions, we glimpse US President
George Bush. The final sequence is the verdict of a
popular tribunal convened in the Philippines. Presidents
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Bush are found guilty of
human rights violations. These framing motifs are
unsurprising perhaps, but they’re presented only to
set the scene. No time is expended on rhetoric. The
strength of the DVD is everything in the middle, the
evidence gathering, as we follow a hundred international
delegates around the country. It’s detailed and
convincing.
Bush of course is prattling on about his War On Terror,
but the terror on view is meted out by the Philippine
Army, for whom torture, bombing and murder is routine.
Since 1986, when the dictator Ferdinand Marcos was
ousted, the Philippines has been ruled by a series of
rival cliques. From the outside, as their erratic
election cycle occasionally hits our TV news, it might
appear as if the Philippines evolved into a democracy
based on contending parties. This documentary shows us
that the impression is false. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is
not essentially better or worse than her predecessors.
Suppressing Democracy
Philippine ruling factions are united in a common need to
suppress democracy. We are shown five widely dispersed
areas, where the mission investigates allegations of
atrocities. One of them, Tarlac, is the stamping ground
of the Aquino family, whose best known member, Cory
Aquino, was the President who succeeded Marcos. Sugar
interests stand accused of collaborating with local Army
units in the 2004 Hacienda Luisita Massacre. Typically in
the Philippines, around 80% of villagers are landless and
impoverished, at the mercy of the hacienda’s owner.
In all five instances on view the elites’ attempts
to retain a dictatorial control of resources,
agricultural or mineral, is the cause of terror. The
population must be cowed into subservience. As any
relaxation of State power would inevitably lead to the
demand for more freedoms, terror is the preferred method
of government. In the background, unseen here, rebel
Communist guerrillas have long jousted with successive
governments. Two Government tactics are possible, the
carrot or the stick. Those vying for their authority to
be accepted can either win friends, and influence people
by siding with their interests - by definition, in this
instance, an impossibility - or they can scare them into
compliance. In Vietnam, the best known guerrilla war, the
Americans wanted to dangle carrots, calling it
“winning hearts and minds” or WHAM. It
didn’t work because no-one liked the taste of the
carrots.
Gloria and her henchmen are similarly isolated from the
people they want as servile labourers, so their response
is terror. Victims of the terrorists are people who might
question the status quo or inspire resistance. Village
activists, priests, teachers, and trade unionists, and
their families, are killed (this explains why the
Philippines has the world’s worst record for
murdered journalists).
US Military Ever Present In The Background
The US military, not directly complicit in the excesses,
is another one we don’t see. Since popular
opposition forced the US from its Navy and Air Force
bases in 1992 (whose purpose was to do with regional,
Cold War needs) the US role has been indirect. Its
soldiers train locally, but their significance is
cultural and political rather than military. No-one has
to spell out who is responsible to whom. The result:
Bush’s boys are stationed in the Philippines to
fight “global terror”, while Bush’s local
proteges keep the lid on democracy through terrorism.
That is, Bush, Macapagal-Arroyo and their agents justify
their actual terror by invoking a metaphorical
“terror”. As the Philippines has an
long-running Islamic insurgency in the south which
parallels and overlaps the systemic violence throughout
the archipelago, the opportunity to confuse, distort and
lie is that much greater.
To induce shock and awe, the real (State) terrorists
leave their victims where they can be found, so the
question is not whether people are being kidnapped and
mutilated; it’s who did it? The Philippine
government’s view is that the terrorists are the
dead villagers. In 2005, however, the International
People’s Tribunal, after testimony from many
witnesses, including children who saw their parents being
hacked to death, found Arroyo and Bush guilty as charged.
If one term sets the scene and provides the context, it
is the one invoked at the start of this gripping tale:
globalisation. Thereafter, and effectively, the g-word is
not mentioned. The emphasis is on globalisation’s
popular - and much longer established - synonyms. This
film is firmly grounded in the Philippines, but its
democratic language of international solidarity is
universal. So, at the end, as the delegates and their
brave hosts disperse, they’re confident that
“the people united can never be defeated”.
Theirs is a powerful, if harrowing, expose.
Jeremy Agar lives in Lyttelton and is a committee
member of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of
Aotearoa.
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