| Home Kapatiran
Links
Contact Us
Archive
Issue Number 29/30, May 2008
|
Kapatiran Issue
No. 29/30, May 2008
PHILIPPINES 08: Half A Step Forward, Two Steps
Back
- Murray Horton
Kapatiran is now only coming out once a year (although
the Phi-lippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa has a
much more robust presence in cyberspace, posting material
to members and supporters on a daily basis), so it’s
time for our annual update on the Philippines, the New
Zealand relationship with the Philippines, and what PSNA
has been doing. This is what our Filipino friends call a
“situationer” (one of my favourite Filipino
English words).
The 2007 issue of Kapatiran inclu-ded a very long and
detailed article by me updating readers on the previous
several years of the rule of President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo (Number 27/28, April 2007;
“Gloria’s Inglorious Reign Of Terror: Desperate
Regime In Crisis Resorts To State Terror & Mass
Murder”, which is online at www.converge.org
.nz/psna/Kapatiran/KapNo27n28/Kap27n28Art/art126.htm). It
concen-trated on the all consuming human rights crisis
– the heading on the cover, “State
Terrorism”, summed it up most succinctly – and
painted a generally terrible picture.
So where are we at a year later? Well, Gloria is still
very much in power, her six year Presidential term runs
until 2010. She is at the centre of a permanent
political, economic, social and moral crisis, the only
new feature being that the sickness presents new symptoms
every year. As in every other year of her rule (which
dates back to 2001 when, as Vice President, she stepped
into the shoes of the disgraced President Joseph Estrada
who was peacefully removed by People Power 2 from the
office that he had plundered) there have been moves to
impeach her and mass protests of tens of thousands in the
streets calling for her resignation or ouster.
A Pardoned Kleptocrat & A Bomb In Congress
Estrada himself came back from the political wastelands
in 2007. His corruption in three short years in power
(1998-01) was on par with the Marcos kleptocrats, who are
the silver medallists behind Indonesia’s Suhartos in
this Olympics of crime. After his overthrow, Estrada was
arrested and charged with plunder, a non-bailable offence
which at the time carried the death sentence (which has
since been abolished). After an indecently short period
of what the Americans call country club imprisonment, he
was held under house arrest, while an interminable trial
ground on for years through the Sandiganbayan anti-graft
court. In September 2007 he was convicted and promptly
sentenced to life imprisonment, which was definitely a
first for the Philippines (none of the Marcoses have ever
been convicted of anything, let alone spent as much as a
minute in prison). Estrada wasn’t actually sent to
prison but allowed to return to house arrest, to await
his appeal. Gloria didn’t wait for the legal process
to drag on any further, pardoning her predecessor just a
few weeks after his sen-tencing. Obviously she
didn’t want to set a precedent whereby flagrantly
corrupt Presidents could actually be punished for their
crimes – because she would be the next one into the
dock. So Estrada, totally unrepentant for his systematic
theft from the Filipino people, is once again a free man
and back in circulation among the ruling class, which are
very strong supporters of the ancient and noble tenet of
there being one law for the rich (actually, preferably no
law) and one for the poor. He has repaid his
successor’s clemency by joining the public
opposition to her, which is motivated by the flagrant
corruption of her regime (the irony of which must have
escaped him).
Political violence and instability continue unabated. To
give just one of very many examples, in November 2007
there was a fatal bomb attack on the House of
Rep-resentatives itself which killed three people,
including a Muslim Cong-ressman, Wahab Akbar (see Mary
Ellen O’Connor’s article, “A Kiwi In The
War Zone”, elsewhere in this issue, for her personal
account of meeting various members of the Akbar dynasty
on the southern island of Basilan during her August 07
visit there as part of an inter-national women’s
factfinding mis-sion).
Call For Popular Uprising – From A Five Star Hotel
And later, in November 2007, there was the quite bizarre
spectacle involving military rebels on trial for a July
2003 mutiny in the heart of Makati, the “rich
city” of Metro Manila (for details see Kapatiran 23,
November 2003; “George & Gloria: Two Of A
Kind”, by Murray Horton, online at
www.converge.org.nz/psna/Kapatiran/KapNo23/Kap23Art/art102.htm).
These guys have support not only among their fellow
officers and soldiers (which always makes any President
very nervous) but among millions of the Filipino people.
One of their leaders, Antonio Trillanes, was elected to
the Senate in the May 2007 mid term elections, winning 11
million votes, despite the major disadvantage of being in
prison awaiting trial. On that November 07 day Trillanes
and his fellow defendants (including other officers
charged with rebellion and arrested when Gloria declared
a shortlived State of Emergency in February 2006, citing
an imaginary “Right/Left conspiracy” as
justification) simply marched out of the court,
accom-panied by their supposed guards and proceeded to
march right through the Makati scene of their crime, all
the way calling on the people to rise up and overthrow
Gloria.
They marched peacefully into the country’s very
ritziest hotel, the Manila Peninsula, took up residence
and called for a popular uprising from that most unlikely
of settings (thus exhibiting a very touching naivety,
which was their undoing). They were joined by a disparate
group of Gloria’s most vocal opponents, from a
number of sectors, and a large media con-tingent. This
was no coup or mutiny, let alone any kind of revolution,
but a very strange prison break whereby the escapers made
no attempt to get away, instead making themselves very
comfortable indeed in five star surroundings. Gloria was
taking no chances – the military surrounded the
hotel, in the heart of the coun-try’s biggest
tourist area (an NZ friend sent me the hair raising
eye-witness account he received from his son who’d
just arrived in the Philip-pines on that day), smashed an
armed personnel carrier through the main doors and shot
up the lobby for good measure. Fortunately nobody was
killed. Having saturated the place with tear gas, they
arrested and roughed up everyone they could lay their
hands on (a very large number of whom turned out to be
journalists, which spun off into a major story of its
own). The civilians arrested, ranging from politicians to
clergy, some of them household names, have been charged
with re-bellion; Trillanes and his fellow soldiers went
back into military cus-tody and back on trial (with more
charges to come, arising from this whole strange episode,
which was treated as a comic story by the world’s
media). Several of the accused – ones who
didn’t take part in this latest episode – have
since pleaded guilty to the 2003 charges, becoming the
first people ever to be convicted on coup charges in
Phi-lippine history. They were sentenced to life
imprisonment and promptly pardoned.
Mindboggling Corruption
Mindboggling corruption at the very highest levels of
government is a tragic feature of every Philippine
Presidency and Gloria is going for gold in this event.
There have been a whole series of corruption scan-dals
involving her family and associates since she came to
power in 2001 (not to mention the political corruption by
which she stole the 2004 Presidential election. For
details of that see the lead story in the previous issue,
Kapatiran 27/28, cited above). Right now the ferment in
political circles, in the media and on the streets (where
tens of thou-sands have protested about it) is caused by
the very latest mega scan-dal, namely the since aborted
contract with a Chinese company for the National
Broadband Net-work. I remember read-ing all about this in
the daily papers when I was last in the Philippines
(vi-siting the in-laws in Ma-nila, in August 07) and
thinking that this was a doozy, even by Philip-pine
standards – and this was before it had even properly
broken. The contract was deemed sufficiently important
that Gloria left the hospital bedside of her husband,
Mike Arroyo, who was recovering from open heart surgery,
in order to fly to China in the middle of the night to
personally witness the signing and then fly home straight
away. I re-member being astonished to read, buried right
in the middle of a very long report, the bald state-ment
that the Philippine copy of the contract was no longer in
existence having been “stolen” from the
dele-gation’s hotel. I could smell the fishi-ness of
the deal coming right off the page.
In the months since then the true dimensions of this
monstrous crime against the Philippine people have become
apparent – the very same Mike Arroyo, official title
the First Gentleman, was revealed to have asked for a
$US130 million cut from the Chinese company (accounting
for fully half of the contract’s worth). This was
pushing things a bit too far even for the kleptocracy
that has ruled the Philippines for generations (only the
faces change, not even the names as the next generation
of the various feudal dynasties take their turn at the
trough) and one leaked message memorably asked the
recipient to “moderate the greed”. It became
the cause of a major feud within the ruling class,
costing the Speaker of the House his job when he got on
the wrong side of the Arroyos and their mates. Gloria
can-celled the contract (which was wastefully duplicating
other broad-band projects), describing it as
“anomalous”, a textbook example of political
understatement, but the damage to her regime had been
done.
Things took a potentially sinister turn when an insider
whistleblower, Jun Lozada, turned up. The Government had
been aware that he was about to spill the beans, so they
packed him off overseas on an all expenses paid trip to
dodge a summons from the Senate which was investigating
the scandal. When he flew back into Manila in early 08
Senate officials were waiting at the airport to take him
into its custody to compel his testimony – but
Gloria’s policemen got there first, taking him right
off the plane and away on an all night mystery tour while
they tried to work out what to do with him and got him to
sign a bogus document saying that everything was in
order. He managed to contact the outside world and get
out of the clutches of his uniformed captors (unlike so
many unfortunate victims of State abductions, who are
never seen again, alive or dead) into the sanctuary of
the clergy who duly delivered him to the Senate, where he
told the devastating truth about the whole sordid
scandal. At the time of writing this has still got a long
way to run. But it’s only the most recent, albeit
highly spectacular, example of the corruption by which
the ruling class has bled the Philippines for
generations.
There is nothing subtle about it, no attempt at
concealment. To give another recent example - in late 07,
a large number of central and provincial government
politicians were summonsed to meet the President at the
Palace. As they left they were each handed a brown paper
bag containing up to P500,000 in cash (more than
$NZ15,000). It wasn’t until days later that one (and
only one) of these politicians, a former priest turned
newly elected crusading provincial Governor, made it
public, said that it stank and that he was returning the
money. A handful of his colleagues spoke up, defen-ding
their acceptance of this blatant bribery, saying that it
was for their political “expenses”, it was
coming up to Christmas after all, and that it must be
above board because it came from the President. Words
fail me. In New Zealand we’re used to election
bribes but they don’t come quite so literally, in
cash, in a paper bag, doled out by the leader’s
flunkies in broad daylight, like Mum issuing school
lunches to the kids.
Human Rights: Slight Improvement
Of course, the focus of Kapatiran’s 2007 cover story
was on the human right crisis and that has also been the
focus of PSNA’s work for the last two years, not to
mention that of a goodly number of other organisations,
in the Philippines, NZ and in many other countries. It
has attracted the critical attention of the international
media and foreign governments, including that of New
Zealand (to its credit). A year later the depressing
litany of unsolved and unpunished political murders,
disappearances, trumped up imprisonment, torture and
systematic intimidation of all real or imagined political
opposition goes on. But there is a slight improvement
– it does not continue unabated. The culture of
impunity (by which nobody has ever been charged with any
of these appalling crimes of State terrorism) continues
and the political killings continue – but the number
ac-tually dropped in 2007. Not because there are any less
“enemies of the State” to kill but because of
foreign pressure. That is the conclusion of informed
analysts in the Philippines. There have still been nearly
900 political murders (all unsolved and unpunished) since
Gloria came to po-wer in 2001 but the rate has
noti-ceably dropped. It seems a macabre sort of
achievement to be pleased about (the only NZ equivalent
that I can think of is the annual cold blood-ed analysis
of the road toll, namely whether it has been a
“good” or “bad” year in terms of the
number of deaths).
And there have been some shining bright spots in what is
a pretty bleak situation. Kapatiran 27/28 featured a
cover photo of Congressman Crispin Beltran (universally
known as Ka Bel) in custody (in hospital, for which he
had to pay an exorbitant amount). He was the only serving
Leftwing politician to have actually been arrested in
Gloria’s February 2006 declaration of a State of
Emergency. Attempts were made to arrest his five legal
Left Congressional colleagues (representing three Party
List Organi-sations, which have a guaranteed number of
seats in Congress, to en-sure representation for the
pre-viously unrepresented), but they were all able to
evade arrest and reach sanctuary in the Congress
Building, under the protection of the Speaker. This set
off a major constitutional row in its own right, but the
President backed off from sending in troops or cops to
arrest them. All five, who faced the same non-bailable
charge of rebellion as Ka Bel (and it carries sentence of
life imprisonment) spent a couple of months living in
their workplace until a deal was struck whereby they
could triumphantly march out, without fear of arrest or
imprisonment, to appear in court. But Ka Bel remained in
custody, firstly in prison and then in hospital.
He’s in his mid 70s and has numerous health
problems, some of them arising from his first lengthy
spell in custody (he was a high profile political
prisoner during the Marcos martial law dicta-torship of
the 1970s and 80s), so there were serious concerns about
whether he would come out alive. The Philippine judicial
system is scandalously slow at the best of times.
But Ka Bel lost none of his fighting spirit in his new
role as Gloria’s most high profile political
prisoner and he became a global cause celebre, with an
international Free Ka Bel cam-paign quickly springing up.
PSNA took the initiative in NZ and, as detailed in
Kapatiran 27/28, we got all manner of NZ groups to
conti-nuously lobby NZ’s Prime Minister, Helen Clark
(who met Gloria three times in 2006 & 07, both in the
Phi-lippines and NZ) to personally urge Gloria to release
Ka Bel. We also raised several thousand dollars for his
costs (his hospital bill was hun-dreds of US dollars per
week; to add insult to injury, he had to pay for his own
trumped up imprisonment). Pro-portionately, this campaign
in little New Zealand seemed to have a greater impact
than those in bigger Western countries, and certainly
more so than in any of the Philip-pines’
Asia/Pacific neighbours. We had the advantage that Ka Bel
is well known in NZ because of his de-cades’ long
career as Chair of the militant trade union
confederation, the Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement,
KMU). It was in this ca-pacity that PSNA hosted him on an
NZ speaking tour in 1999.
In the end Ka Bel endured 16 months of totally false
imprisonment. He was in custody throughout and beyond the
entire campaign for the May 2007 mid term elections, at
which the Party List Organisation Representatives are
elected ac-cording to whether they achieve a set
percentage of the total vote (in the three years since
the last mid term election, grassroots and mid-level
activists of the three Leftwing Party List Organisations
with Re-presentatives in Congress – Bayan Muna,
Anakpawis and Gabriela – had been the main targets
of Gloria’s campaign of systematic political
murders). Despite being the targets of these murders and
relentless intimidation of both the Party List
Organisations themselves and those likely to vote for
them (the military occupied whole slums in Metro Manila
during the election campaign to dissuade the inhabitants
not to vote the “wrong” way), those three Party
List Organisations retained their same total of six
Congresspeo-ple between them. They were disappointed that
they didn’t in-crease their numbers (the aim of this
parliamentary strategy of the legal Left is to build a
sizeable enough bloc in Congress to be a real force; they
were aiming for double figures) but in the circumstances
I think that they did extraordinarily well to survive in
Congress at all, let alone retain their numbers. And Ka
Bel was one of those re-elected, despite being in custody
and still awaiting trial, with the very real possibility
of life imprisonment.
Ka Bel Released
In mid 2007 the whole criminally malicious business came
to an end when a court dismissed all the charges against
all 50 or so defendants charged with rebellion from the
alleged “Right/Left conspiracy” that Gloria
used as a spurious justification for her February 2006
declaration of a State of Emergency. The defendants
ranged from Rightwing serial put-schists and military
rebels to the underground and/or exiled leadership of the
Communist Party of the Philippines on the Left, and
included all six of the legal Left Party List
Organisation Representatives and a whole raft of legal
Left activists. It should be noted that the charges
weren’t dismissed as a result of a trial – it
never got as far as a judge actually having to evaluate
the absurd “evidence” that the Government
presented (including that given by hooded witnesses, an
old favourite of all State terrorist regimes). No, the
charges were dismissed before it ever got to trial
because the judges could plainly see that it was all
bullshit and had no hesitation in making their
displeasure publicly known about the courts being used as
instruments of blatantly political repression.
But Ka Bel, and Ka Bel alone, remained in custody while
the Government considered an appeal. It duly did so and
had its face slapped again. The courts had already
ordered Ka Bel released due to there no longer being any
charges against him and he was ordered released a second
time. This time the Government had no alternative but to
do so. He had been in custody from February 2006 until
July 2007 and he wasted no time in being sworn in again
at Congress and resuming his duties as a Party List
Organisation Representative of Anakpawis (Toiling
Masses). He remains a high profile Congressman and a
target of the regime in every sense of the word –
recently he was injured (but not too seriously) in a
Metro Manila traffic “accident” that
justifiably aroused suspicions. And he was targeted by a
representative of Gloria’s party who offered him a
sizeable bribe to sponsor a feeble impeachment motion
drawn up her own party. When Ka Bel refused, the would be
briber doubled the amount on offer (to P2 million). There
is a reptilian cunning behind this – if a
Congressman signs a motion of impeachment, no other
Congress-man can put forward another im-peachment motion
for a year. Glo-ria’s party hacks must have thought
that Ka Bel would have jumped at the chance, but he could
see through this transparent manoeuvre, which he
proceeded to make public and denounce.
By happy coincidence, Becky and I happened to be in
Manila, on a long planned family visit, just weeks after
Ka Bel was released. So we were able to go to the
official celebration of his release, along with several
hundred other people (if there were any other foreigners
there, I didn’t see them; the whole thing was in
Filipino, which Becky obligingly translated for me). This
was the first time that we’d seen Ka Bel since
he’d been our guest in 1999 – he immediately
asked: “How is Christchurch?” and introduced us
to his colleagues, saying “I stayed in their
home”. It was great to see him again, and he spent
quite a bit of time chatting to me. His speech was the
centrepiece of the whole hours long event – he
brandished aloft the short and polite speech that his
staff had written for him, worried that the Government
would take any opportunity to have him rearrested and
locked up again. Ka Bel duly read that out, for the
record, then spoke for nearly 90 minutes delivering one
of his classic stemwinding militant speeches, with much
clenched fist saluting, to thunderous applause. The
biggest laugh went up when he detailed how, towards the
end of his hospital imprisonment, he had hatched a plan
to escape, disguised as a doctor (he had escaped from his
1980s’ indefinite term of imprison-ment and spent a
couple of years underground until Marcos was overthrown).
Ironically he spoke so long and the event went so much
over time that there was no time for the short speech
that I had been invited to give on behalf of PSNA. No
matter, and anyway, PSNA was among those listed for
thanks by the organisers. Being able to attend that event
was a real privilege and one of the highlights of any of
my several trips to the Philippines (which started 21
years ago).
NZ Protests During Gloria’s Visit
New Zealand had played a key role in the campaign to free
Ka Bel, as I have already mentioned. That reached its
climax in May 2007, when Gloria made a State visit here,
only the second Philippine President to do so (Fidel
Ramos was the first, in the 1990s). To coincide with it,
a number of Auckland activists and unions organised an NZ
speaking tour by the KMU’s Dennis Maga, who was the
organiser of the Free Ka Bel campaign in the Philippines
(PSNA hosted him on his flying visit to Christchurch,
where he spoke at a well attended public meeting). Dennis
really made the lead stories in both the NZ and
Philippine media when he appeared in a cage at a protest
outside the State luncheon for Gloria at Parliament and
denounced her as the worst President that the Philippines
has ever had. He was prominent at the protest at Waitangi
where Helen Clark and Gloria were co-hosting one of a
series of Asia/Pacific Interfaith Dialogues (which was
the reason for one of Helen Clark’s 2007 visits to
the Philippines). Dennis also undertook a number of union
solidarity tasks with NZ workers in Auckland. All of this
drew him, unfavourably, to the attention of the
Philippine authorities. There was some trepidation about
him going home, which he duly did but not for long.
Suffice to say that he now lives in Auckland, working for
the NZ Council of Trade Unions and doing a very good job
organising the swelling tide of Third World migrant
workers in this country.
The Philippines very rarely gets a mention in the NZ
media but its appalling human rights record was suddenly
thrust into the limelight because of the protests during
Gloria’s visits. Gloria, Ka Bel and Dennis Maga were
suddenly all over the TV, radio and papers for a few
days. The murderous nature of the regime even featured in
unexpected outlets such as the daily cartoon in the
Christchurch Press (it’s on the cover of this
issue). And when Becky and I were in Manila in August 07,
we learned from unofficial sources that Clark’s
personal intervention with Gloria during that May State
visit had quite possibly saved the life of one political
abduction victim. Dennis Maga’s NZ union hosts had
publicly highlighted the guy’s abduction, Clark had
apparently heard of it and raised it with Gloria.
Embarrassed, the President had ordered an investigation
and the victim, a pastor, was suddenly surfaced, having
been told by his kidnappers and torturers:
“You’re lucky, you have friends in high
places”. He remains in custody, on trumped up
charges, but he is alive and his whereabouts are known,
which is not the case with many others of the
disappeared.
NZ Human Rights Commission Project In Philippines
The New Zealand government has decided to get directly
involved in the Philippines human rights crisis, as a
direct result from the concerted lobbying of Helen Clark
by PSNA and numerous other groups and individuals. Clark
asked the Human Rights Commission to see what it could
do. In February 2008 (on the deliberately chosen date of
Waitangi Day), the Human Rights Commis-sioners of the
Philippines and NZ signed an agreement for the NZ Human
Rights Commission to run a project, costing nearly $NZ1
million, with indigenous communities in three different
parts of the Philippines – the Cordillera, the
Visayas and Min-danao.
In April, I was one of three PSNA members (representing
both ourselves and Christian World Service) to meet
Rosslyn Noonan, the Chief Human Rights Commis-sioner, at
her invitation, to discuss the project. Details are still
being worked out but she said that this is both unique
for the Commission – it has no other such foreign
project – and unique in the Philippines, in that no
other country’s equivalent organisation is running a
project there. The actual work on the ground is being
done by the Philippines’ Commission – selecting
the indige-nous communities, picking the community
development officers from within those communities, and
ascertaining the priorities of those communities. Human
rights will not necessarily be their top priority. The NZ
Commission is overseeing it from here, with regular field
trips to the Philippines, but no New Zealanders will be
working at the coalface. The Commission is also
developing a relationship with the Human Rights division
of the Philippine National Police, more so than with the
equivalent section of the military. Separate to all this,
there has been talk of getting a former Waitangi Tribunal
judge to assist with the resolution of indigenous land
claims in Mindanao, following up from a 2006 visit that
he made to the Philip-pines.
This is all well and good, but the proof of the pudding
is in the eating. The Philippines has had, for many
years, all the necessary formal human rights
institutions, such as a Human Rights Commission, and the
Government assures the world that its police and military
are already subject to human rights oversight. The
reality, sadly, is the diametric opposite of that. It
remains to be seen what will actually come out of this NZ
project (and Rosslyn Noonan was at pains to stress to us
that “it’s not a panacea”), how it will be
monitored, etc, etc. She has undertaken to include PSNA
and similar groups in regular meetings every few months
to keep us informed.
Another Left Congressman Imprisoned & Freed –
And Charged Again
The systematic human rights abuses and the culture of
impunity which comprise Gloria’s reign of State
terrorism carry on, although no longer regardless of what
the rest of the world thinks. But the brazen nature of
the whole thing is really quite breathtaking. Let’s
just take one very high profile example, from 2007.
Congressman Satur Ocampo is a Bayan Muna Party List
Organi-sation Representative and was a high profile
leader of the under-ground National Democratic Front
(which includes the Communist Par-ty of the Philippines
and its New People’s Army) during the 1970s and 80s
Marcos martial law dictatorship. He spent years as a
political prisoner. As one of the six legal Left
Congresspeople Ocampo was among those charged with
rebellion following Gloria’s 2006 declaration of a
State of Emergency but, unlike his colleague, Ka Bel, was
not held in custody. While he was still awaiting the
outcome of that grave charge (which was dismissed against
all 50+ accused, in mid 07) he was arrested on patently
trumped up charges of murder dating from the mid 1980s.
The military had resorted to one of its favourite old
tricks of producing “bones from a mass grave of
Communist victims” (no forensic examination is ever
done and the same bones, which are much more likely to be
from victims of military massacres, get plenty of use in
different cases), and persuaded a compliant provincial
judge to issue a warrant for Ocampo’s arrest.
He was held in Manila custody and then there was a very
public, very dramatic attempt to fly him, by chartered
plane, to that province where the media reported that the
military had assembled a lynch mob. While the plane was
in the air, a Manila judge ordered his return and, after
several weeks in custody, the Supreme Court ordered his
release on bail. As murder is a non-bailable charge, this
move alone shows what the courts thought of the
Govern-ment’s case against him (he was actually in
secure military custody as a political prisoner when he
was supposed to have been responsible for the murders in
the 80s). Nothing more has been heard of the matter, and
the most important fact about it was that it was just
weeks before the May 07 midterm elections when Bayan Muna
(Country First) was leading in the Party List
Organisation polls. Not surprisingly, when you take into
account that degree of political harassment, Bayan Muna
did not come first but it did well enough for Ocampo to
be re-elected and for the three legal left Party List
Organisations (Anakpawis, Bayan Muna and Gabriela) to
retain six Congresspeople. That provincial judge is still
rubberstamping arrest warrants against political
activists charging them with murder from that alleged
1980s “Communist massacre” – in 2008 a
national leader of the KMP peasant movement has been
arrested and held in custody in that province on exactly
that same trumped up charge.
In April 2008, prosecutors in another province filed new
and different murder charges against Ocampo, his two
Congressional colleagues Liza Masa and Teddy Casino and
former Congressman Rafael Mariano (who did not get
re-elected in 2007). All four were among those charged
with rebellion, and acquitted, in 2006. These latest
charges do not refer to some alleged “Communist mass
grave” but to the much more recent deaths of alleged
defectors from the Communist Party. The slur is that
these elected Representatives are actually Communists who
have recently arranged to have people killed (the
victims’ supposed crime is that they were
campaigning for a rival Left Party List Organisation).
The complainants are the widows, backed by a supposed
eyewitness who claims to have been at a meeting where the
accused ordered the murders. This is standard operating
procedure for military intel-ligence, to entice or coerce
people to give plainly fab-ricated evidence against
Gloria’s opponents.
At the time of writing, no arrest warrants have been
issued and Ocampo et al remain free. He claimed it is an
attempt to distract him from leading rallies and
campaigning about the rapidly developing rice crisis that
is enveloping the Philippines in 2008. It is not at all
coincidental that this happened immediately after he and
two other Leftist Congress-people (one of them being Ka
Bel) returned from testifying to the Canadian
Parliament’s Subcommittee on International Human
Rights about the ongoing human rights abuses in the
Philippines.
Chief Justice Renato Puno has had enough of this
non-sense from the Government and its military and police
hitmen. In 2007 he announced that the Supreme Court would
henceforth play a much more proactive role in rectifying
the human rights crisis. He convened and presided over a
national summit to discuss human rights (Ka Bel was among
those who participated) and announced that plaintiffs
could use a new legal weapon against the military and
police, namely a writ of amparo, which allows the
plaintiffs to have military camps searched for missing
people believed to be in the secret custody of the
military (which maintains a whole network of secret
prisons and safe houses). Previously the military would
flatly deny that it held the person being sought and
would defy court orders by contemptuous gestures such as
summonsed officers not appearing in court. The new writ,
which backs up the existing power of habeas corpus
(demanding that the sought person be produced in court)
has actually worked in a few cases, with a handful of the
disappeared suddenly being surfaced and even being freed
(hundreds remain disappeared though, in addition to the
nearly 900 political murders and the hundreds rotting in
prison on trumped up charges. As for torture, it is not
even illegal under Philippine law).
Gloria Gets Dutch To Help Frame Joma Sison,
Unsuccessfully
Not content with attempting to frame its Leftwing
opponents at home, Gloria’s government has taken its
campaign of political persecution global. Joma Sison was
the founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines in
the 1960s and the “highest value” political
prisoner of the Marcos martial law dictatorship. He was
released after People Power 1 overthrew Marcos in 1986
and shortly thereafter went on a world speaking tour,
including NZ (I heard him speak in Christchurch; Helen
Clark, then an up and coming MP in the 1984-90 Labour
government, attended his Wellington meeting). In 1987 the
Philippine government of President Cory Aquino withdrew
his passport and he went into exile in The Netherlands,
where he has remained ever since, as the Chief Political
Consultant of the National Democratic Front (NDF). The
Dutch government has always treated him with disdain,
refusing to accept him as a political refugee and in the
global hysteria after the 2001 terrorist atrocities the
US, the Philippines and the European Union all placed him
on their lists of “fo-reign terrorists”
(ludicrously, along-side such anti-Communist
obscuran-tists as Osama bin Laden). This led to severe
restrictions on Sison’s abi-lity to live in The
Nether-lands – already prohibited from working, he
lost any welfare benefits and housing provided by the
Dutch State and has had to rely on the charity of friends
and supporters. He has won case after case against these
restrictions, including a successful 2007 challenge to
being on that list of terrorists (he was immediately
restored to a “new” list).
So the international campaign of political persecution
was stepped up a gear. In August 2007, Dutch police
stormed the offices and homes of NDF officials (whose
headquarters in exile is in Utrecht), seizing compu-ters
and files and arrested Sison, not on trumped up charges
involving those much used “bones of Commu-nist
massacre victims” but for much more recent killings
of former Communist Party figures who had defected for
various reasons. Although these killings had taken place
in Manila, the Dutch cops asserted that they had been
planned and ordered from Utrecht, so that Sison had
committed conspiracy to murder on Dutch soil. They
announced that he would not be sent back to the
Philippines, but tried in a Dutch court for offences
against Dutch law and, if convicted, spend the rest of
his life in a Dutch prison. He was held in solitary
confinement for several weeks, with all visitors barred
(including his wife and lawyers). It transpired that all
the “evidence” came for Philippine intelligence
sources, with the embittered widows very prominent. The
“conspiracy to murder” charges collapsed when a
Dutch judge threw them out for lack of any credible
evidence and then the State’s appeal was dismissed.
It never even got near to a trial or even to the Dutch
equivalent of our depositions hearing where a court
decides if the prosecution has enough evidence to justify
a trial. Normally multiple murder cases take years to be
heard – the case against Sison collapsed within
weeks, he was unconditionally released and resumed his
previous life, going back to fighting the restrictions
imposed on him as a “terrorist”. The
Philippines had managed to per-suade a biddable Rightwing
Dutch government (which is playing a pro-minent role in
the “War On Terror”) to do its dirty work for
it but, as in so many such frame ups at home, it
didn’t even get close to making the charges stick.
Maybe that’s why it prefers the cruder tactics of
murder, abduction, torture and false impri-sonment,
rather than anything invol-ving an actual trial, with
evidence and witnesses.
And note that exactly the same template is being followed
in the 2008 murder charges against Congressman Satur
Ocampo – widows of alleged “Communist
defectors”, backed by “eyewitness”
accounts of alleged conspiratorial meetings where murders
were or-dered, being used by military intel-ligence and
their allies in the legal system to try and smear
Gloria’s opponents, maybe even get lucky and get
them tied up in a trial on these trumped up charges. The
aim is not really to get these people locked away for
life - although that would definitely be a bonus for the
regime – but to seriously harass and intimidate them
and neutralise them politically by means other than
murdering, abducting or torturing them. It is another
form of State terrorism.
Systemic Change Is Needed, Not Just A New Face As
President
So, to conclude, this is where things are at in 2008 in
the strictly nominal “democracy” that is the
Philippines under Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. I’ve
highlighted two areas of major sys-temic abuse, namely
those of cor-ruption and human rights. There has been a
bit of progress with the latter, in that the appalling
rate of political murders has slowed down a bit, but
certainly not ceased, and the regime feels the need to
mollify its nume-rous foreign critics by being seen to do
something about it (as long as it doesn’t involve
actually stopping the State terrorism). And talk of
progress in human rights is strictly relative. For
instance, Ka Bel should never have been arrested, charged
or im-prisoned in the first place, so to describe the
dismissal of the charge against him and his release as a
victory for human rights is one which can only be
understood in the paral-lel universe of the Philippines.
Gloria would have liked it if he was convicted and put
away for life for rebellion (unlike Estrada, there
wouldn’t have been any pardon) but in any event he
was taken out of circulation for nearly a year and half
and it was but one of the many tactics she used to try
and cripple her opponents. Legal niceties don’t come
into such brutal power equations.
I haven’t even touched on the economy, with its mass
unemploy-ment, dependence on the money sent home by the
10% of the population who are working over-seas (there is
currently a growing wave of Philippine middle class
pro-fessionals and skilled tradesmen emigrating to NZ,
complete with their families – which raises a whole
other story of exploitation in this country), huge
disparity in wealth distribution and resulting poverty.
There is the scandalous situation of the Philip-pines
having become the world’s biggest rice importer (for
a variety of reasons, including the lack of land reform,
concentration of land owner-ship in the hands of a tiny
number of feudal dynasties, inefficient pre-In-dustrial
Age farming practices, and the conversion of prime rice
growing land into more profitable subdivi-sions or golf
courses). In 2008, there is a global shortage of rice,
the price has gone sky high and exporting countries are
keeping more for their own people rather than selling it
to the Philippines. Like all insecure rulers, Gloria
fears food riots and has taken a number of measures, for
public relations photo opportunities, to try and reassure
Filipinos for whom rice is their staple daily food.
There continues to be mass opposition to Gloria (over and
above the decades’ old wars being waged by both the
Communist and sepa-ratist Muslim guerrillas) but numbers
have not yet reached those which successfully threw out
Marcos and Estrada. Gloria came to power herself as the
result of People Power 2 and she has most definitely been
no improvement on Estrada. Filipi-nos realise that what
is needed is not simply a change of face at the top,
replacing one mass murdering crook with another (which is
a suc-cinct but accurate summary of the whole history of
government by the traditional ruling class) but a
com-plete systemic change, and a new direction for the
country, one in which the interests of all the Filipino
people come first, not those of a tiny handful of rich
landowners and poli-ticians who treat the nation’s
wealth as their own and who back up their plunder with
institutionalised vio-lence. That is a long, hard
struggle but one in which they are confidently engaged,
because they know that there is nowhere to go but up.
Murray Horton is Editor of Kapatiran and Secretary of
PSNA. He has visited and lived in the Philippines several
times over the past two decades, most recently in 2007.
Go to top
|
