Last month, President Aquino found himself on the line in an interview for Radio New Zealand, in which a reporter questioned his administration’s spotty human rights record. Aquino promptly dismissed such allegations as having come from the ‘’leftist community’’ who are ‘’good at propaganda’’ and then went on – with subsequent help from his spokesman Edwin Lacierda – to point to the low poll ratings of Teddy Casińo, a senatorial candidate and a staunch critic of the president, as evidence of the lies of the Left.
For a while local media appeared to agree, preferring to direct public attention instead to new business deals sealed with New Zealand investors. Any indication of opposition to Aquino’s comments were hushed up, apart from a few articles and letters openly criticizing the president from human rights groups here and abroad.
That the foreign press seems to care more about human rights violations in our own country is telling of the level of impunity Filipino society and its leaders are now willing to tolerate.
A few days before the interview, soldiers had shot and killed the pregnant wife of B’laan tribal warrior Daguil Capion, and shot and killed his sons 13-year-old Jordan and eight-year-old John, before dragging their bodies out into the open (a cultural taboo) until Daguil’s surrender, presumably as punishment for his family’s vocal opposition to mining companies ripping apart their ancestral lands in Tampakan, South Cotobato.
That a massacre in the hands of the military under Aquino’s own watch occurred a few days before he was busy denying the reality of such events is telling of the President’s ignorance of the difference between propaganda and the hard truth.
Indeed, when an untold number of church workers, indigenous leaders, environmentalists, students, union leaders, and civil society activists including Karen Empeño, Sherlyn Cadapan, Jose Burgos, Jr, Isidro Olan, Gerry Ortega, Fr. Fausto Tentorio, Wilhelm Geertman, Anthony Licyayo, Joey Javier, Rudy Dejos and countless others through the decades have been slain or rendered missing as a direct result of their fight for human rights … does that count as propaganda?
Apparently.
Following the President and his speaker’s logic, then, independent observers like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the European Union, the Catholic Church – and the U.S. State Department – are now Communist fronts. All agencies detail numerous human rights abuses committed under his presidency, as well those under his predecessor whose perpetrators have evaded conviction. They, like the voices on the Left they are so eager to malign, hold the AFP, not the NPA, largely responsible for many unlawful killings.
But what Lacierda and President Aquino fail to understand is this: there is no better barometer of an administration’s commitment to rid itself of a legacy of corruption and impunity than to crack down on the murders of Filipino citizens committed by the military troops sworn to defend them under its watch.
The failure of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines to at least condemn such atrocities speaks volumes of the callousness with which he treats his Office. Even if it were not directly involved, the State as a signatory to international human rights conventions and the citizens’ mandate is nevertheless imbued with the responsibility to act to prevent such abuses from ever happening again.
Yet after almost ten years of Arroyo, the President and his cohorts seem to have convinced themselves that a mere change of power at the top can transform a culture of impunity now so firmly entrenched within the national psyche. Perhaps they have convinced themselves that they can do no wrong and that they alone hold the monopoly to the truth.
Perhaps Aquino needs a reminder. Here is a run-down of the latest “leftist propaganda’’:
As the third anniversary of the Maguindanao Massacre looms, it is best to start with this closing highlight of his much-loathed predecessor’s sordid human rights record. Three years after the worst ever single mass killing of journalists in world history, justice has been slow – with legal proceedings stalled and witnesses slaughtered. While 96 of those accused of the killings have been arrested (pending trial), as of August, 101 remain at large and the principle suspects walk free. If speedy justice and accountability on this issue are concerned, Aquino’s own record is little different.
The Maguindanao trials are in stark contrast to the amount of time it took the justice system, or at least the executive branch of government, barely a year to get rid of former Supreme Court Justice Renato Corona. But if a ‘reformed’ Supreme Court offers hope for future cases to be dispatched with better efficiency – think again.
Notes Shawn Crispin, senior Southeast Asia representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ): ”The fight for justice has simultaneously intensified in rhetoric and bogged down in the technicalities. Legal stalling tactics, a fractured prosecution, and slow-moving courts have conspired against a speedy trial. Despite the case’s high international profile and pronouncements by President Benigno Aquino that justice would be swiftly served, the Maguindanao prosecution has conformed to a disturbingly familiar pattern for media killings in the Philippines: A journalist is killed; local law enforcement officials are lax or complicit; witnesses and complainants are intimidated, bribed, or attacked; the defense employs stalling tactics to break the will and resources of victims’ families; the case goes unsolved and the culture of impunity is reinforced.”
Our obscurantist courts attribute the slow pace of legal proceedings to the lack of witnesses and lost evidence. But every day that passes without justice is another opportunity for ”lost” evidence; another opportunity to add to the growing backlog in our nation’s courts going back to the desaparecidos of the ’70s. With the proof we already have at our disposal (even discounting the now ”missing” witnesses), one wonders what’s taking them so long.
Meanwhile, the country still ranks third in the world in the CPJ’s 2012 Impunity index, above Colombia, Afghanistan, Russia and Pakistan; and is one of the ‘’four worst countries in combating journalist murders’’ – a dubious distinction a country-not-at-war shares with Iraq, Somalia and Sri Lanka, which have also made little progress in prosecuting extrajudicial killings.
For of the 305 known cases of extrajudicial killings recorded over the past decade, only 161 have been filed in court as of 2011. Successful convictions? Four.
Human rights organisation KARAPATAN places that tally at over a thousand over the same period, with 64 cases (and 24 frustrated attempts) last year alone, alongside other breaches of civil and political rights: 9 enforced disappearances, 51 victims of torture, 343 cases of illegal arrest with or without detention, at least 6,108 left homeless by violent demolitions, and 4,376 affected by forced evacuations of low-income communities from lands marked for mining, commercial development or real estate. A total of 356 political prisoners remain unaccounted for, with 78 arrested under the current administration.
While Human Rights Watch and other observers hold the Philippine army and national police responsible for many of the abuses, para-military groups, death squads and private armies still roam what should be civilian territory, from rural backwaters to the streets of Davao, despite official promises to abolish them.
Militarisation is rife, with mines, large landholdings, small villages, even schools seeing occupations of armed men in peace time, their presence justified in the interest of the “protection of investments’’ and the government’s counter-insurgency program Oplan Bayanihan. This is especially true in Luzon’s Bondoc Peninsula and in northern Mindanao, where armed conflict has repeatedly displaced indigenous communities since the early 2000s, according to reports by the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines and then-UN Special Rapporteur on indigenous peoples, Rodolfo Stavenhagen.
Human rights defenders, trade unionists and activists of all stripes have also been assaulted on the legal front. Journalists who refuse to toe the accepted line are sued for libel, while members of legitimate civil society organisations are criminalized and their leaders arrested on fraudulent charges, likely for their leading roles in lobbying for their rights. Prominent Cagayan anti-mining activist Esperlita Garcia was arrested recently on charges of libel, for a Facebook post she wrote last year – after the Supreme Court’s Temporary Restraining Order on the Cybercrime law.
The International Peace Observers Network and the Department of Justice record an increasing number of criminal charges, from petty theft to trespassing, filed by landowners against farmers pressing for their share of land in accordance with the government’s own agrarian reform programme (CARPER). CARPER has since moved at a Jurassic pace and is due for another extension by 2014, having met less than half of its land distribution targets last year, and with over a million hectares still to go.
All of this and more Pnoy denies, backed by a chorus of his allies in the commercial media who have met such reports with damning silence. They urge us instead to look favourably upon a bullish market, rising credit ratings, the acclaims of Wall Street bankers, and an era of unprecedented but mostly jobless growth as signs of national progress. More sober eyes can only weep for governments and well-meaning ”experts” that, rather than on meeting the concrete needs of their people, ground their legitimacy on popularity surveys and the opinions of those responsible for the global financial crisis.
Any mention of national development is incomplete without acknowledging the full spectrum of civil, political, social and economic rights that should be guaranteed to all citizens regardless of class, status, religion, ethnicity or political inclination. Yet Human Rights in the government’s development plans are noted only in passing, and while the administration pays lip service to ‘’inclusive growth’’, the facts on the ground speak of a different reality.
The ranks of the unemployed have risen from 10.9 million in 2010 to 11.7 million. Of those jobs generated, only about 60 per cent amount to regular employment with decent wages and reasonable tenure. The manufacturing and agriculture sectors are on the decline, while the country has continued to open itself up to extractive industries and export-dependent growth. Deregulation and liberalisation have further squeezed out attempts to enact measures to ensure better environmental and social protections.
With key drivers of economic growth and productivity still absent, the stability of the economy remains tied to overseas workers’ remittances. Appeals by labour groups to raise minimum wage rates across-the-board or to ensure security of tenure have gone unheeded. Cuts to social spending, including an almost 800-million peso cut on the welfare budget for OFWs, have led to the increasing privatisation of health care and other public services, including education, leading to recent hikes on state university tuition fees.
All of this has been driven in part by the global economic crisis, but also by the administration’s own unwavering commitment to a neoliberal agenda and the development policies of the past.
The results? Self-rated poverty has increased from 9.1 million in 2011 households to 11.1 million this year, while the combined wealth of the 40 richest Filipino individuals has more than doubled, from $ 24.6 billion to $ 47.7 billion – or 21 per cent of national GDP.
Maternal mortality rates have also spiked while progress on reproductive health measures has slowed. Progressive legislation including the Freedom of Information bill – among other bills promised since the beginning of Aquino’s term – have since stalled, in stark contrast to the urgency with which the Cybercrime bill was passed.
Patchwork policies enacted against a backdrop of a growing population, rising inequality and limited systematic reform, have done little to curb hunger and malnutrition, with rates of self-rated hunger – among households who have lived through days with nothing to eat in the past three months – rising from 18.4% in May to 21%, or 4.3 million families. The sharpest increase was in Metro Manila, where the hunger rate rose to 26%, or 738,000 families.
The Global Hunger Index now ranks us among the worst performers in terms of boosting food security in Asia, alongside Pakistan, Nepal and North Korea. At this rate, the Philippines looks unlikely to meet its Millennium Development Goal target of halving hunger by 2015.
Of course, considering how all of this propaganda, none of it matters right?
We cannot expect real change from a government of a nominally democratic state that fails to secure for its own citizens something so fundamental as the right to life: both the right to live a life of freedom, dignity and opportunity… and the right not to be gunned down for fighting to ensure that such rights are not denied to the majority.
Between the status quo’s denial of reality, the sycophantic press, and the war-mongering tactics of the isolated Left, there is little room for rational debate over these issues. But to dismiss all allegations of human rights abuses as little more than a smear campaign by political opponents or the radical Left flies in the face of the facts. That the Truth comes from more radical circles makes it no less credible, and to deny it is naïve at best and at worst, evasive.
Perhaps the words of this column should best be rephrased: when Leftist Propaganda turns out to be true.
