By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: January 14, 2008
MANILA: The number of extrajudicial killings of activists and journalists in the Philippines dropped sharply in 2007 compared with the previous year – by as much as 83 percent, according to Philippine authorities.
A report released Sunday by the Interior Department said that the Philippine National Police listed only 7 such killings last year, compared with 41 in 2006. This, according to the department, “underlines the Arroyo government’s strong commitment to human rights and its firm resolve to put an end to these unexplained killings.”
According to the Philippine human rights group Karapatan, more than 800 people, mainly activists, have been killed since 2001 as part of an alleged plot by the Arroyo administration and the military to silence critics and leftists.
Human Rights Watch, a group based in New York, welcomed the decline in killings but challenged the Arroyo government to prosecute the killers.
Sophie Richardson, the group’s Asia advocacy director, said the Philippine police and government “are much more interested in discussing numbers, but we really have not seen one of the most important developments we’re waiting for, and that’s the prosecution of senior members of the military” who are alleged to be carrying out what the group earlier described as a “dirty war” against leftists and journalists.
Trumpeting the decline in the killings, Richardson said by telephone from Washington, “obscures the more important questions that needed to be asked: Who’s doing the killings, and why they are not being prosecuted?”
The “culture of impunity” in the Philippines that has been blamed for the spate of killings has not changed at all, Richardson continued. “These guys have got to get prosecuted.”
According to the police, only two have been convicted so far in these killings. The police also disputed the number of victims and have been insisting that only a little more than 100 have been killed since 2001.
The Asian Human Rights Commission, a nonprofit organization based in Hong Kong, said last week that the Philippine government had been rejecting and dismissing figures related to the deaths.
“Sadly they have clearly missed the point; be it 100 or over 800, no one has been held to account,” it said in a statement.
Although the Interior Department said that charges had been filed against suspects in 22 of these cases, most of them were members of the Communist New People’s Army, while only one soldier was charged. The government has been saying Communists were behind the murders – a claim that the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Philip Alston, had earlier found unconvincing.
The administration initially rejected the findings by the UN, as well as those by groups like Human Rights Watch, but later formed a police task force to investigate the killings.
The police report came as journalists’ groups protest Philippine government plans to make criminal charges against reporters and news organizations if they disobey government orders while covering emergencies.
