Another human rights body probes into city’s psyche

DAVAO CITY: This month, an international fact-finding mission came here to investigate human rights violations in the Davao district of Paquibato and towns in Davao del Sur and Compostela Valley.

Cases of torture, arbitrary detention, forcible evacuation and other civil rights violations were documented and will be submitted to the government and United Nations agencies.

According to a briefing paper from the International Solidarity Mission (ISM), Paquibato, Davao City’s largest district of over 40,000 people, has become a virtual garrison. People cannot move around without identification cards issued by the military, it says.

“In 2008 alone, around 5,000 families were reported victims of military operations such as harassment, forcible recruitment for civic-military operations, torture, bombing of communities and illegal arrest and seizure,” says Bishop Delfin Callao of the Philippine Independent Church in Davao City and one of the convenors of the ISM fact-finding mission.

Since January this year, the ISM says, intense military operations launched by the 10th Infantry Division deployed in Southern Mindanao have caused fear and human rights abuses in many peasant and indigenous peoples’ communities.        

“No one is spared, whether church-people, leaders or volunteers of peasant groups, agricultural workers, indigenous peoples, women and other people’s organizations, lawyers, media and local government officials. The threat is over the head of any dissenter.”

Farmers in Paquibato District of Davao City; Bagobos in Santa Cruz, Davao del Sur and lumads and farmers in Compostela Valley are constantly forced to evacuate. They are also forced to join the anti-insurgency Barangay Defense System, the ISM says, adding peasant children are the most affected by the atrocities in the conduct of military operations.

Last year, Karapatan, a human rights group, and KABIBA (Alliance for Children’s Concern), Children Rehabilitation Center and Solidarity Action Group for Indigenous Peoples, documented 36 cases of child victims in Southern Mindanao.

The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) held public hearings last March in Davao City on the role of vigilantes behind the extrajudicial killings of petty thieves, drug dealers, gang members and juvenile delinquents.

The victims had included 185 young adults and 45 minors, CHR Chairman Leila de Lima said.

The CHR also looked into the torture, rape and slaying of public school teacher Rebelyn Pitao, 21, daughter of a New People’s Army commander. Last March 5, her body was found in a shallow creek—a day after she was abducted in Carmen, Davao del Norte, on her way home to Barangay Aplaya, Davao City.

Quezon Rep. Lorenzo Tañada 3rd has started a similar inquiry in the House of Representatives.

The CHR is looking at the unsolved murder of over 800 civilians reportedly by the Davao Death Squad which the New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch said had police backing.

The police promptly dismissed the allegation, saying there is no evidence to back up the claim. In two days of hearings, the CHR failed to get evidence that the death squad indeed exists or who are behind it.

The public hearing is unprecedented, the first the government has probed the alleged death squad. With the death penalty abolished, there was no room for executions, de Lima said.

“This probe seeks to save the psyche of the Davaoeños, to remove this terrible stigma over their city, to lift the fear for their own rights and for their own lives,” de Lima said.

Source: International Solidarity Mission