By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: June 28, 2007
MANILA: The Philippine military has been waging a “dirty war” against leftists that has resulted in the murder and disappearance of hundreds of Filipino activists, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
In a report, the group said that the government had failed to prosecute members of the armed forces implicated in the killings and that witnesses were afraid to testify, thus contributing to “official impunity.”
Human Rights Watch, based in New York, also said that measures by the government to deal with the killings had been largely unsuccessful and that the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had consistently failed in its obligations to uphold international human rights law.
The report came a few days after a Philippine newspaper quoted unidentified generals as saying that they had been present at meetings in which an alleged military policy that involved the assassination of leftists was discussed.
The armed forces took offense at report by Human Rights Watch, calling it unfair and one-sided.
“We categorically deny the allegations that there is a dirty war being waged by the armed forces of the Philippines, particularly against the leftist groups,” Lieutenant Colonel Bartolome Bacarro, a military spokesman, said Thursday.
While he conceded that some military elements might have been involved in the killings, Bacarro said, “It is not a policy to commit extrajudicial activities.”
The report has prompted calls from the political opposition, as well as leftist groups, for a Senate investigation into the killings.
“There is strong evidence of a ‘dirty war’ by the armed forces against left-leaning activists and journalists,” Sophie Richardson, deputy director for Asia of Human Rights Watch, said in the report. “The failure to prosecute soldiers or police suspected in these killings shifts the spotlight of responsibility to the highest levels of the government.”
The report said the killings “appeared to shift into a higher gear” in February 2006, after several leftist groups were accused of participating in a coup plot by renegade members of the military. Arroyo also ordered around the same time an “all-out war” against the Communists, the report said.
An investigation in February by a United Nations human rights envoy, Philip Alston, blamed the military for the killings. A commission created by Arroyo this year reached the same conclusion.
Apart from the commission and several task forces, the government also created “special courts” to try such cases but, according to the Human Rights Watch report, these are hampered by the unwillingness of witnesses to speak out, out of fear for their safety.
Karapatan, a Philippine human rights group, some of whose members have been slain, has documented nearly 900 victims of these extrajudicial killings. There has also been a recent spate of abductions of leftists, some of whom later turned up dead.
Karapatan and leftist groups allege that the killings are part of a military operation called “Oplan Bantay Laya” (Oplan Defend Freedom) that, according to them, seeks to undermine the three-decades-old Communist insurgency.
Human Rights Watch urged Arroyo to issue an executive order to the police and military explicitly prohibiting extrajudicial killing. It also called on the United States to suspend military assistance to the Philippines until members of the armed forces implicated in the murders were prosecuted.
“Actions speak louder than words, and the only real proof of the government’s commitment to end these killings will be when the perpetrators are finally held to account in a court of law,” the group said.
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