A long way to go

Cases of unexplained killings have gone down in the past two years, but there’s still a long way to go before the government can boast of respect for human rights. As various human rights groups have pointed out, most of the previous cases remain unsolved. Where cases have been filed, the conviction rate is low and prosecution proceeds at the usual snail’s pace of Philippine justice. In Davao City, a surge in the executions of crime suspects has been compounded by the discovery of mass graves.

The drop in the number of attacks targeting mostly left-wing militants and journalists has also been overshadowed by celebrated human rights cases. The daughter of New People’s Army commander Leoncio Pitao was kidnapped and tortured before she was brutally executed. Soldiers and government militia members were tagged in the grisly crime. In Tarlac last May, 15 armed men seized Melissa Roxas, a 31-year-old Filipino-American member of Bayan-USA. Roxas told the Commission on Human Rights the other day that she was detained and tortured for six days in what she believed was a military camp by men who wanted her to admit her association with the NPA and the Communist Party of the Philippines.

The CPP and NPA were at their strongest during the martial law years, when repression and social injustice became the biggest recruitment tools for the insurgency. The martial law years should have given military officers enough lessons on the consequences of human rights violations on a counterinsurgency campaign. Every activist who is executed or disappears, never to be seen again, leaves behind loved ones with such resentment of the state they become vulnerable to rebel recruitment.

Police personnel who use extrajudicial methods of maintaining peace and order create the same risk of driving people into the arms of underground groups. The country has enough laws to deal with all types of troublemakers. Those laws must be applied efficiently and with zeal. Torture, kidnapping, forced disappearances and murder have no place in a democracy. –Philippine Star