A HUMAN RIGHTS REVIEW

BY
CHARLES AVILA
["A Human Rights Review" was published as cover article for Vol. 43 No. 4, April 2009 of IMPACT Asian Magazine for Human Transformation.]

THE BASIS OF OUR RIGHTS

In the Church’s Social Teaching (CST) the human person exists as a unique and unrepeatable being. Existing as an “I,” capable of self-understanding, self-possession and self-determination, the human person is a subjective entity, a centre of consciousness and freedom, whose unique life experiences, comparable to those of no one else, entail above all the requirement of simple respect on the part of others. The roots of human rights are to be found here - in the dignity that belongs to each human being.
Some rights are based on human-made law or on the fundamental covenant of a given society. Their violations are thus termed “illegal” or “unconstitutional.”
Human rights, however, may or may not be found in law or the constitution but they exist as essential to the nature of a human being. They can be violated but they can never be abrogated. Can you forbid a bird to fly or a serpent to crawl? In the same manner you cannot, for instance, forbid humans to freely assemble because of the essentially social nature of human nature. Thus the right of free assembly is a human right.
The current world-wide movement towards the identification and proclamation of human rights is a most significant attempt to respond effectively to the inescapable demands of human dignity. John Paul II called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, “a true milestone on the path of humanity's moral progress.”

THE PHILIPPINES AN EARLY ADHERENT BUT…
The Philippines was an early adherent and supporter of the UN Declaration which set out a list of over two dozen specific human rights that countries should respect and protect, inclusive of security rights that protect people against murder, massacre, torture, and rape; due process rights that protect against imprisonment without trial, secret trials, and excessive punishments; liberty rights that protect freedoms of belief, expression, association, assembly, and movement; political rights that protect the liberty to participate in politics through actions such as communicating, assembling, protesting, voting, and serving in public office; equality rights that guarantee equal citizenship, equality before the law, and nondiscrimination; and social (or "welfare") rights that require provision of education to all children and protections against severe poverty and starvation.
All the constitutions of the various Philippine Republics have been notable for their explicit and lengthy declarations of human rights protection. However, war situations – whether with the Spaniards, the Americans, the Japanese, or Filipinos with each other (absent Peace Agreements with Moro separatists or Communist rebels) – have occasioned systematic human rights violations that many groups world-wide find rather alarming.
Studies made by the late Congressman Bonifacio H. Gillego revealed that systematic violations may have started with the United States Agency for International Development’s Public Safety Programs that trained the police and military of many Third World countries, including ours, in the skills and requirements of torture to protect unpopular regimes from the dangers of protest and revolutionary movements. Not to be outdone, many of the latter engaged in similar or worse methods against the “enemy” and among their own ranks.
But given the intensity and length of time of the over-all Philippine practice of human rights violation is it now so bad that it has become part of the culture of conflict in our land?

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
Only lately, the National Security Adviser said he would seek a meeting with European Union Ambassador Alistair MacDonald to seek clarification on a European Parliament resolution asking the Philippine government to end political killings in the country.
“There are killings in the Philippines and we have a policy of ending it. But we don’t have a policy of killings by the government,” he said.
The Philippine mission in Brussels, for its part, quickly reported that, in fairness, a member of the European Commission did point out the significant decrease in political killings in the Philippines during the March 12 plenary debate of the European Parliament.
"These assassinations of journalists, human rights and land rights activists have certainly decreased significantly in number in the past two years,'' said Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Commissioner for External Relations. “The killing of activists dropped sharply from 41 in 2006, to six in 2007 and five in 2008,” the Commissioner said.
The U.S. State Department’s “2008 Human Rights Report: Philippines” authored by its Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor said much the same thing: “In recent years, following increased domestic and international scrutiny, reforms were undertaken and the number of killings and disappearances dropped dramatically.”
However, said the Report, “Members of the security services [meaning, the government side] committed acts of physical and psychological abuse on suspects and detainees, and there were instances of torture. Prisoners awaiting trial and those already convicted were often held under primitive conditions. Disappearances occurred, and arbitrary or warrantless arrests and detentions were common.”
To show that their eyes were not only on one corner of the Philippine theater but on the stage as a whole, the Report continued: “In addition to killing soldiers and police officers in armed encounters, the New People's Army (NPA)--the military wing of the Communist Party (CPP)--killed local government officials and ordinary civilians. There were reports that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the terrorist groups NPA and Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) used child soldiers in combat or auxiliary roles. Terrorist groups committed bombings that caused civilian casualties.”

THE CHR SPEAKS
Post-Edsa Philippines saw the establishment of an independent government agency called the CHR or Commission on Human Rights – an idea later adopted by other countries of the ASEAN region.
The CHR said they investigated 173 new complaints of killings in 2008; 67 of these cases were classified as politically motivated. Personnel from the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) were suspects by the CHR in a number of the killings of “leftist activists” operating in rural areas.
A nongovernmental organization (NGO), Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP), alleged the summary execution of four individuals by government forces.
The PNP itself had its own investigative Task Force Usig which recorded 146 cases of killings since 2001, six of which occurred in 2008; 90 cases were filed in court, with one conviction during the year.
If all these numbers sounded so unbelievably few, at least one human rights organization, Karapatan, claimed that there have been more than 900 killings since 2001, with both state actors and nonstate actors as suspects. It recorded 69 victims of killings in 2008.
To show that they did not relish all these reports of killings and disappearances, the national police announced that in 2008 it had expanded human rights training among its own personnel and could now claim a network of 1,636 human rights desk officers at the national, regional, provincial, and municipal levels.
Not to be outdone, the Judiciary, through the chief justice, pointed to the writ of "amparo," as having provided citizens with court protection, contributing, therefore, to a reduction in killings.
Can we really believe all these reports about implementing and enforcing some reforms? Are there enough funds for the CHR and the government witness protection programs or are they still complaining? As of this writing, the CHR Chair was busy sourcing international funds to support her work at home.
The constitution prohibits torture, and evidence obtained through its use is inadmissible in court. However, police and army were alleged to have routinely abused and sometimes tortured suspects and detainees. Even ordinary civilians easily accept that excessive force and torture remain an ingrained part of the arrest and detention process. Common forms of abuse during arrest and interrogation reportedly include electric shock, cigarette burns, or suffocation. Aren’t we light years away from a culture of human rights observance?
There are CHR reports that prison guards physically abused inmates; that abuse by prison guards and other inmates was common, but prisoners, fearing retaliation, refuse to lodge formal complaints. Women in police custody were particularly vulnerable to sexual and physical assault by police and prison officials. Many believe that suspected Abu Sayyaf Group and New People’s Army members in captivity were particular targets for abuse.

FLASHBACK – THE COMPLEXITY OF BLAME
Our penchant for the comparative approach to self-knowledge knows no limits. One dubious claim to shame we came upon a couple of years back was our murder rate: second only to Iraq’s. Far second, true enough, but shamefully serious nonetheless. Today a DPWH Undersecretary can be murdered in broad daylight and it is dubious whether popular outrage will easily follow or whether a just handling of the murder case would ever be possible.
A few years back, Amnesty International reported 51 political killings (first half of 2006), compared to 66 killings in the whole of 2005. The PNP’s Task Force Usig that was looking into the waves of unexplained killings but faced difficulties for understandable lack of victim cooperation had already reported 122 party-list members killed since 2001 and 74 journalists murdered since 1986 (22 since year 2000).
Usig was superseded by “Melo”, the independent fact-finding body headed then by the former Supreme Court Justice, now COMELEC Chairman. Some highlights of the Usig transfer report to Melo included the pattern of increasing incidence in the killings of leftist activists: 9 in 2001, 10 in 2002, 5 in 2003, a big jump to 20 in 2004, a further rise to 32 in 2005 and by 2006 some 35 in all.
The report said that of these 111 killings the Communist New People’s Army (NPA) was responsible for at least 23, the government military was a suspect in 6, and 10 still under investigation pointed again to the NPA as main suspects. One Bayan Muna leader earlier reported to have been killed by a policeman turned out to have been slain by his own uncle. Eight others, also reported earlier to have been liquidated by the military, were actually killed by the NPA as part of the internal purge then to cleanse their ranks of “counterrevolutionaries” and spies. The AFP revealed the names of the eight.
Other suspects included these types: rogue military and rogue police, paramilitary forces or auxiliaries of police, relatives and friends of victims of killings by rebel forces, “reaffirmist” and “rejectionist” Marxist-Leninists intensely at war with each other, extreme rightist elements and destabilizing politicians, landlords resisting agrarian reforms, personal enemies of those subjected to violence, and organized crime syndicates including drug traffickers, pirates and mercenaries (or “guns for hire”). The Melo had quite a handful, to be sure.
And who were the “usual victims”? There were those perceived as members of groups engaged in armed rebellion against the state, and low-profile persons (not necessarily active combatants) present in rebel formations or encampments who got caught in the cross fire (yes, Virginia, there is a civil war in this archipelago, no ceasefire between insurgents and the State, and a failed series of peace talks with Muslim separatists). There were also former members of rebel groups and movements who have since repudiated or left those groups and movements, judges, informants and others involved in government internal security operations, members of competitor political formations, media practitioners who had seriously offended groups or individuals in relation to either political or personal matters or both, miscellaneous personal enemies and suspected criminals.

UNITED FRONT AGAINST ARROYO
The political opposition quite understandably and quite simplistically blamed the government for these killings. The blanket character of the accusation could only give comfort to the guilty – individual persons or groups, whoever they might be. After all, as the Germans say, the devil is in the detail, and any blanket accusation ultimately indicts no one.
“Reaffirmist” Marxist-Leninists (e.g. the groups Bayan Muna, Anakpawis, and Gabriela), themselves no babes in the political woods, met with more than modest success in getting international groups and media to criticize the Arroyo administration for inadequate action on the issue. An essay in Time magazine one time brought back the analogy of “the darkest days of the Marcos dictatorship” and “the practice of red-labeling that sends a wrong signal to the military”. The propaganda drive moved even major American companies to write President Arroyo to please protect the workers of their local subcontractors – a plea that must have irked the Napoleonic lady no end.
Her government was saying that communist rebels were behind many unexplained killings – and these rebels were outside the law. The government was running after them and so, please understand, said her National Security Adviser: “The government does not appreciate any back seat driving as it pursues these armed elements. One cannot rejoice over being simultaneously criticized for having no political will to stop the killings, and for pursuing armed rebels who are precisely prime suspects in many of these killings.”
He cited a document entitled “Paglilinis Bushfire” which contained orders from CPP to the NPA to cleanse its ranks of suspected infiltrators. He explained that the spate of killings of militant leaders the government was investigating bore the trademark of the “Sparrow” unit of the Alex Boncayao Brigade, the urban hit squad of the NPA. Beyond paper documents, the adviser pointed to the existence of mass graves containing the remains of hundreds of former rebels in Southern Leyte, the Caraga region and Bukidnon who were victimized by the NPA’s “Oplan Ajos” and “Oplan Venereal Disease” – operations directed at purging their ranks of suspected government agents and informants.
If this kind of talk sounds so out-of-date today, one may have to listen to no less than the internationally known writer and self-confessed former communist party member, Dr. Walden Bello who cried in sorrow when he wrote that “the CPP is not the party of open-minded revolutionaries that we were once part of in the dark days of the Marcos dictatorship”. Its “leftwing fascism”, Dr.Bello emphasized, is now “one of the basic problems of the Filipino people.”
Like Professor Joel Rocamora who wrote a history book of assassinations of leftists by leftists a few years back, Dr. Bello sadly admitted to the real existence of Operation Ahos and other purges conducted by the party that resulted in hundreds of deaths from the 1980s to the early nineties – way after Edsa I or, more accurately, following the internal strife that resulted in their non-participation in the successful urban insurrection of 1986.
Dr. Bello does not mince words, calling the CPP and the NPA “a mafia in the service of megalomania”, “murderous folk” who have already had the distinction of being the first revolutionary movement ever to massacre their own cadres before coming to power.”
One must not forget that the anti-Sison CPP (the “Rejectionists” or “RJ” vs. the pro-Sison CPP who are called “Re-affirmists” or “RA”) took with them not only the cadres of Metro Manila and Rizal province, but also the Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB). These are assassination squads who in the late 1980s killed more than 200 police and military personnel in Metro Manila and neighboring provinces in non-combat situations, such as while they were directing traffic, washing their cars, eating in a restaurant, etc. Like today’s assassins, the ABB Sparrows then also worked in pairs, riding on motorcycles.
It would not be reasonable to be blind to the probability that some of the assassinations since 2003 were done as revenge for the assassination of RJ leaders Lagman, Kintanar and Tabara. Most of the salvaged militants belonged to organizations perceived to be loyal to Sison: Bayan, Bayan Muna, KMU, and Gabriela.
Thus, there is enough reason here to state that government soldiers or police should not be the only likely suspects in “unexplained killings”.

THE CARDINAL REMARKS
Reasoning with whoever cared to listen a couple of years back, on the occasion of the consecration of the Bishop of Bangued, the Cardinal Archbishop of Manila asked that critics put the killings issue in proper context, never forgetting that charges of this kind had for many years now been the mantra of many rebels and oppositionists. The very term “extra-judicial killings” was coined by anti-government forces in their propaganda campaign to infer that government deliberately set up the killings to silence administration critics. The Cardinal, not naively, cautioned all and sundry that, big as our problems are, Filipino patriots should not easily call on foreigners to investigate our own shortcomings.
Taking off on a related parallel line, former Jesuit Provincial Superior Father Romeo Intengan said military officials should address suspicions that a small group of soldiers is behind the slaying of members of groups belonging to the extreme left by conducting a thorough investigation. The Armed Forces should take steps to unmask rogue soldiers who could be behind some of the unexplained killings of militants. He cited the Alston and the Melo commission reports which found that soldiers are involved in some of the extra-judicial killings.
POLITICAL USES OF THE KILLED
One famously anonymous editorial writer asked whether the US congressional inquiry into killings in the Philippines constituted interference in Philippine political affairs, and gave an unequivocal NO for an answer. He gave two reasons. First, he said, the US has always been interfering in our internal affairs. There’s nothing new. We’ve been there before. Secondly, he argued, the killings “crisis is out of control. GMA can’t stop the killings.” Maybe the US government can?
Imagine, if you can, investigations into killings in the Philippines being conducted by a legislative committee in Japan, or another one in Taiwan or Korea and one more in neighboring Malaysia or Indonesia. There would be such a howl in this country as to cause a war on these foreign lands interfering in our internal affairs – our killing affairs. The inimitable Senator Miriam at one time announced her intention to investigate US killings in Iraq and Afghanistan - just to underscore the effrontery of a foreign government that would treat ours like it were their vassal state, forgetting that we have our own Commission on Human Rights, and a Constitution that is so predominantly Human Rights oriented, and that we even had a special “Melo” investigative commission - just to show we were at least worried that foreigners were telling us not only that we had become the most corrupt nation in Asia but that we were also the most murderous nation on earth. Are we really all that - so murderous and so corrupt?
It’s okay, some seem to say, if it’s the U.S. – not any other - that makes a spectacle of us in their august halls, for the U.S. has always been part of us, still is, and may well be so for a longer time hence. We may even have to credit it for all the bad habits we are being accused of lately. They taught us well.
Who, after all, sent 126,468 soldiers to fight the nationalist Filipinos in 2,811 battles, spent $500-million to kill roughly 600,000 Filipinos - one-sixth the total population of Luzon at that time – so that they could be in a better position to uplift and civilize and Christianize the Filipino Catholics?
A Republican Congressman quite proudly said after a visit here at that time: “Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and whenever and wherever they could get hold of a Filipino, they killed him.” And the doctrine was not dubbed “human rights violations”. It was called “benevolent assimilation” – lest we forget, lest we forget.
What did senior State Department official Eric G. John say before the congressional subcommittee investigating our sinfulness against the fifth commandment? “As you know,” he said, “the United States has a long and warm relationship with the Philippines dating back more than a hundred years. The Philippines is a vibrant democracy, and one of five U.S. treaty allies in the Asia-Pacific region. Our soldiers fought heroically side-by-side in World War Two and are working side-by-side today to combat international terrorism. The U.S. is the Philippines’ largest investor, trading partner, and provider of foreign assistance. Our relations are undergirded by significant people-to-people connections in the form of the more than three million Filipinos resident in the U.S. and the more than 100,000 American citizens living in the Philippines.”
Then Mr. John said: “Extrajudicial killings, committed by the security forces, the NPA, or others, were common during the Marcos dictatorship …Over the past one to two years, however, we have seen a troubling increase in reports of extrajudicial killings. We take this problem seriously, and are committed to helping our Philippine allies in bringing those responsible to justice.” Really, how?
His testimony was long but most cleverly had a line or two or even more to warm the cockles of both leftist and rightist hearts – both the administration that heard him say, “We are encouraged that President Arroyo has taken several steps to address this problem” and her critics that heard him say, “President Gloria Macapagal - Arroyo should do more to deal with security forces involved in political killings and she must bear ultimate responsibility for her troops' actions.” Indeed, even killings easily become grist for the political mill. A former Chinese Premier once said of a former U.S. President that there were only two things he hated about the man - his face.
Be that as it may, one should never hope to see the end of trans-border concerns over human rights violations – precisely because they are that, violations of the rights of human beings deriving not from their nationalities or state systems but from their very nature as humans. Human rights know no national boundaries. To think otherwise is to welcome back the non-human national isolationisms that made possible the “national” atrocities of Nazism, Stalinism, Pol-potism and such.
For our part, if this review has taught us anything it is this: end the war situation now. Abuses will not cease. They may even increase until we ink a peace pact soon with both the MILF and the NDF. The methods of non-violence are not easy but they have been shown in many other places to be the most effective. Peace should not only be our goal. Peace is also the way.