Archive for February, 2008
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 29, 2008
MANILA: In one of the largest demonstrations against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo since she took office in 2001, thousands of Filipinos took to the streets Friday, demanding her resignation over a corruption scandal.
Two former presidents - Corazón Aquino, who led the first “people power” revolt in 1986, and Joseph Estrada, who was ousted in the second one in 2001 - joined priests, nuns, farmers, leftist activists and students in a march through the capital’s financial district, as confetti made of shredded phone books rained down on them.
Chants of “Gloria resign!” reverberated on the four avenues that led to the statue of Aquino’s husband, Benigno Aquino Jr., whose assassination in 1983 sparked the protests that ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and installed Corazón Aquino in the presidency 22 years ago this week.
Tied to the statue was a placard that read “Gloria is evil,” a reference to testimony in the Senate in which Arroyo was described as an “evil person” after allegations that her husband tried to influence the approval of a $330 million government contract with the Chinese company ZTE to build an Internet broadband network connecting government offices.
Allegations of impropriety, among them that a principal Arroyo ally was going to receive a $30 million kickback out of the project, have led to a series of protests against Arroyo, who has repeatedly denied the allegations.
She later canceled the telecommunications contract.
The police estimated the crowd at 15,000, but organizers said more than 75,000 people took part.
Opposition to Arroyo has created unlikely coalitions. Estrada, who was seated beside Aquino at the rally, was ousted in 2001 in the protests that brought Arroyo to power. Aquino herself led protests against Estrada, who was accused of pocketing money from illegal gambling and government taxes. Estrada was convicted of the charges last year but pardoned soon after.
“Gloria, it’s enough! Resign!” Aquino said in her brief speech. When it was Estrada’s turn to speak, sections of the crowd shouted his name.
“What should we do if someone is overstaying?” Estrada asked demonstrators, who shouted back, “Resign!”
While Arroyo’s critics and the political opposition had been trying to elicit broad public support for their call to remove Arroyo since 2004, when she was accused of cheating in the election that year, their cause was given a huge boost in early February when Rodolfo Lozada Jr., an official who had been tapped to review the broadband contract, gave testimony in the Senate that corroborated the overpricing and kickback allegations.
In recent days Lozada had been trying to rally university students to join the protests and register their outrage against corruption in government. On Friday, the students - many of them still wearing their uniforms - seemed to have heeded Lozada’s call.
“We don’t want evil! We’ve had enough!” shouted Jake Mecias, a student from Ateneo de Manila University, holding a sign that read “It’s time to go!”
Leftist activists and farmers held up effigies of Arroyo depicting her as a serpent.
“I don’t care what will happen to Arroyo after this or what she will feel about this,” said Randy David, a sociology professor at the University of the Philippines who joined the march Friday. “The important thing is that Filipinos are outraged, as they should be.”
This week, Arroyo said in a radio interview that she learned about the alleged improprieties surrounding the contract the night before it was signed in China in April 2007, but felt it too late to cancel it. She said she immediately sought the contract’s cancellation. It was finally canceled in October, but only after a rival bidder on the project, Jose de Venecia III, testified in the Senate on the alleged overpricing.
Posted on February 29, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 24, 2008
MANILA: President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said Sunday that any officials involved in wrongdoing in connection with a scuttled $330 million broadband contract with a Chinese company would be held accountable - a day after acknowledging that she had been warned of possible irregularities before the contract was signed.
“No one will be above the law,” Arroyo said after hearing Mass at the presidential palace. “We will hold officials accountable if they are found to be corrupt.” At the same time, she struck out at her critics, saying there was no evidence linking her to the scandal surrounding the contract with the Chinese company, ZTE, a state-owned manufacturer of telecommunications equipment.
On Saturday, Arroyo said in an interview with DZRH radio that on April 21, the night before she witnessed the signing of the contract in China, she had been told about possible irregularities. She did not say who had told her about them or what the person had said.
“I received the complaint the night before the signing of the supply contract, which was one of many signings,” Arroyo said. “But how can you cancel the night before when you are dealing with another country?” She added that China, the Philippines’s largest trading partner, is an important ally.
Arroyo said she told President Hu Jintao of China afterward that the contract would have to be canceled. Arroyo eventually did so, but not until several months later, after allegations that it had been grossly overpriced and that an ally, Benjamin Abalos, stood to receive millions in kickbacks.
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In October, Romulo Neri, Arroyo’s former socioeconomic planning secretary, told Philippine senators that Abalos, then the elections commissioner, had offered him $4.4 million to approve the project. The president, Neri testified, told him to ignore the offer. Abalos has since resigned.
At least two witnesses testified in the Senate that the project, which was supposed to link government offices nationwide through a broadband network, was overpriced by more than 100 percent. A Philippine businessman testified that Arroyo’s husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, had angrily told him to “back off” from entering a bid.
Last week, ZTE released a statement denying any wrongdoing and warned that the controversy could harm relations between Beijing and Manila.
Opponents of Arroyo seized on her admission Sunday.
It raised more questions than answers, said Renato Reyes, secretary-general of Bayan, a leftist group that has been leading anti-Arroyo demonstrations. “If she knew about it, she could have stopped it. Why didn’t she stop it?” Reyes said.
Posted on February 25, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 20, 2008
MANILA: The Philippine government has decided to stop borrowing money from abroad for new infrastructure and development projects, opting instead to finance them locally.
As a result of the decision, which was first announced by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Tuesday, financing for at least 11 pending government projects costing more than $2.5 billion in total will not come from so-called official development assistance, as had been planned. Such aid comes in the form of loans from other governments or from multilateral donor agencies with relatively easy payment terms.
The policy change will affect only projects whose official development assistance financing agreements had not been completed, Ignacio Bunye, Arroyo’s press secretary, said Wednesday. “All foreign borrowings are going to stop,” he said in an interview.
Bunye said that the Philippines could afford to raise funds locally and that the government’s fiscal position has improved over the years. Manila has carried out reforms that have won praise from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and intends to balance its budget by next year. The government announced this week that it had paid $2.75 billion in foreign debt ahead of schedule.
“The rationale for the new policy was the president’s social payback scheme,” Bunye said. “We have to use the fruits of these fiscal reforms for infrastructure. There’s no reason to borrow foreign funds when we have the money now.”
A half-billion-dollar project to give more classrooms Internet access will be affected by the change in policy, as will a planned extension of Manila’s light-rail transit system. Bunye said new financing arrangements for each of the projects affected would be made case by case.
The Philippines has relied heavily on official development assistance for the development of its infrastructure and services, with Japan, the United States and, lately, China having provided most of the financing. The Asian Development Bank has lent the country more than $8 billion since 1966.
Last week, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, which conducted a six-month review of 71 official development assistance-financed projects, found that “the sharp surge in assistance in recent years has not only sparked scandals and allegations of corruption, but threatens to drag Filipino taxpayers deeper in debt.” It said 7 out of 10 such projects “have failed to deliver their touted benefits and results.”
As of October last year, Manila’s foreign debt was 1.589 trillion pesos, or $39 billion, according to the Bureau of the Treasury. More than 30 percent of the national budget for this year is allocated to interest payments.
Posted on February 21, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 17, 2008
MANILA: When Rodolfo Lozada Jr. decided to become a whistleblower in the corruption scandal that is bedeviling the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, he said he was only trying to save his own skin. After all, he said, he had been kidnapped by the police, allegedly on orders from the president’s men.
The scandal has been a political nightmare for the administration for months. And now, it is business groups that are being dragged into the fray because of Lozada’s testimony in the Senate last week and his statements on television.
Lozada was a little-known government bureaucrat who had been given the job of reviewing a $330 million contract between the government and the Chinese firm ZTE to build a broadband Internet network connecting Philippine government offices. The deal, Lozada said at the Senate hearing, was overpriced by more than 100 percent. The scandal forced the president to cancel the contract in September.
According to Lozada, police officers abducted him on his return from Hong Kong on Feb. 5, in what Lozada said was an attempt to prevent him from testifying at the Senate hearing. The government did admit that it sent the officers, but only to protect him from unspecified death threats. Lozada said he was held for nearly 24 hours before he was let go. He said he never asked the government for protection.
On Saturday, in a television face-off with those he accused of having had a hand in the corruption scandal, Lozada alleged that Donald Dee, president of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, had earlier advised Romulo Neri, Arroyo’s former economic planning secretary who had approved the ZTE contract, to avoid the Senate hearings in September by going with the president to New York.
Lozada also alleged that Dee had told Neri that Neri could always get more than the 200 million pesos, or $5 million, allegedly offered him by Benjamin Abalos, the former election commissioner, for approving the contract. Abalos, an Arroyo ally, is said to have brokered the deal with ZTE.
Abalos has repeatedly denied the charges, including the one that he demanded $130 million in kickbacks.
Dee said during the television broadcast: “I really resent that Lozada has included me. I will not let this pass.”
Dee’s group is generally viewed as an administration ally. Dee himself has echoed the administration’s line on the issue, saying in the past that it was not doing the country any good.
Another business group that is now in the middle of all this is the Makati Business Club, an influential forum of the country’s biggest corporations. Last week, the club stopped short of asking for Arroyo’s resignation, asking instead for the resignation of Neri, among other officials.
“We must see to it that those who are revealed to have broken the law, no matter how high up, must be made to account for their transgression,” the club said in a statement last week. “We cannot stand on a very shaky political foundation,” it added.
This prompted a sharp rebuke from the administration, with one cabinet official allegedly calling one of the club’s officers, threatening to unleash the might of the country’s tax-collection agency, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, on the club’s members. Although the administration denied ever threatening the club, the club responded last week by challenging the government to “bring it on.”
This is not the first time that business groups in the Philippines have been involved in political scandals. Indeed, in most of the country’s political upheavals, the business sector was always in the mix.
The difference this time around is that, as can be seen in the case of the Philippine chamber and the Makati Business Club, they are at opposing sides of the fence.
“This scandal has a polarizing effect on the business community,” said Jose Enrique Africa, an economist at the Ibon Foundation, a Manila economic research group. “In the case of the Makati Business Club, it shows how intolerable government corruption has become.”
As the scandal unravels, Africa added, it reinforces the view that the Philippines is a volatile place for business and that more needs to be done in fighting graft.
Ramon Casiple, executive director of the Institute of Political and Economic Reforms, said that in the short term, some investors might hold back a bit - as what happened late last week, when the markets went down slightly because of the anti-Arroyo protests - but in the long term, business should not be badly affected by the scandal, “assuming it won’t get out of hand politically.”
ZTE on Friday denied any wrongdoing.
“ZTE has neither done anything wrong, nor has it bribed anyone to get this project,” the company said.
Posted on February 18, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
The New York Times
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 14, 2008
MANILA: The Philippine authorities went on high alert Thursday after the discovery of a plot to assassinate President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, officials said.
The supposed plot was made public by the chief of the president’s security staff Thursday, one day before planned demonstrations here by groups accusing her of corruption and demanding her resignation.
According to Brigadier General Romeo Prestoza, head of the Presidential Security Group, the plot was hatched by the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group and by Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian extremist Islamic network that the authorities say has been operating in the southern Philippines.
“If they want to launch it, they can do it anytime,” Prestoza said Thursday, adding that the plot had forced Arroyo to cancel a trip to a northern city set for Friday.
General Hermogenes Esperon, the chief of the armed forces, confirmed the assassination plot, saying it was the reason why the Philippine military had been put on full alert. He also said the two terrorist groups were planning to attack “high-value targets” in the capital.
But critics of the president said the disclosure of the plot was intended to sabotage the demonstrations on Friday.
“This is a desperate scare tactic to discourage people from joining the protests,” said Renato Reyes Jr., secretary general of Bayan, one of the groups that organized the protests.
On Wednesday night, the military declared a “red alert” in the Manila metropolitan area following intelligence reports that the communist New People’s Army was planning to infiltrate the demonstrations Friday and possibly make violent attacks during the mass actions.
The declaration came a few hours after the New People’s Army issued a statement urging its cadres “to further intensify tactical offensives in the next few weeks and months to help further weaken the Arroyo regime and contribute significantly to its ouster.”
The Communists, with armed members numbering between 6,000 and 10,000, have been waging an insurgency for three decades in the largely impoverished Philippine countryside.
Adding to anxiety here was an advisory issued Thursday by the U.S. Embassy warning Americans to “exercise extreme caution” when in the Philippines. It discouraged travel to southern areas because of a high threat of terrorism.
But according to Reyes, the secretary general of Bayan, the police and the military “always do this sort of thing every time public protests against the government are scheduled.”
The political opposition, as well as leftist and civil society groups, planned the protests Friday in response to new testimony in the Senate that corroborated earlier allegations that the president’s husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, and a former elections commissioner, Benjamin Abalos, a critical Arroyo ally, were going to receive $130 million in kickbacks from a $329 million broadband project between the government and the Chinese company ZTE. The government later revoked the contract.
Posted on February 15, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 10, 2008
MANILA: President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines has ordered an investigation into the killings last week of seven civilians and an off-duty soldier by Philippine military personnel in the southern province of Sulu.
“The instruction of the president is to have a credible investigation,” Gilberto Teodoro, the defense secretary, told reporters Saturday. He also disclosed that at least 50 of the soldiers had been restricted to barracks pending the completion of the investigation.
The Philippine military said last week that its soldiers had encountered a group of militants from the Islamist group Abu Sayyaf in the village of Ipil, in Sulu, early Feb. 4. In the ensuing firefight, it said, three terrorists, two soldiers, seven civilians and one off-duty soldier were killed. Four of those killed were children and other minors, Sulu officials said.
Survivors and relatives of the dead, however, said the victims had been deliberately killed. One survivor, Rawina Wahid, widow of the off-duty soldier, told Teodoro in a meeting last week that soldiers had tied her husband’s hands behind his back and shot him while he was facedown on the ground.
She said the soldiers had allowed her to accompany the body of her husband, and those of the other people killed, on a boat to Jolo town, and claimed to have seen American as well as Philippine soldiers on the boat just before she was blindfolded. That allegation has led to outraged condemnations from Muslim and leftist groups that oppose the U.S. military presence in the southern Philippines.
Rebecca Thompson, spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy here, said American soldiers do not take part in combat operations in the Philippines. “They are here at the invitation of the Philippine government to share information and work with the Armed Forces of the Philippines on humanitarian and civic projects that benefit the people and benefit the local community,” The Associated Press quoted her as saying.
Two units took part in the Ipil raid: the army’s Light Reaction Company and the navy’s Special Warfare Group. Both units have received training and logistical and intelligence assistance from the U.S. military.
U.S. military personnel have been stationed in the southern Philippines, where Islamist extremist groups such as Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah operate, since 2002.
Abdusakur Tan, the governor of Sulu, said last week that his office was preparing to file charges against the Philippine military.
The Commission on Human Rights, which sent a team to the island last week, said its initial investigation had found that most of the civilian victims had been killed while sleeping and that there were no signs of an exchange of gunfire.
Posted on February 10, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 5, 2008
MANILA: The political turmoil of the Philippines deepened Tuesday after congressional allies of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo voted to remove the longtime speaker of the House of Representatives.
The speaker, Jose de Venecia, sharply criticized Arroyo and her party in an hourlong televised speech Monday night. The chamber then voted to strip de Venecia of his duties as speaker of the House, a position he had held for 12 years.
“It’s simple arrogance,” de Venecia told lawmakers. “Just plain arrogance that Malacañang and the people of the Palace are above the law,” he said, referring to the presidential palace.
Prospero Nograles, a close ally of Arroyo, will succeed de Venecia as leader of the House of Representatives.
De Venecia blamed his ouster on Arroyo’s allies in Congress, particularly Juan Miguel Arroyo and Diosdado Arroyo, sons of the president.
He said the vote to oust him was motivated by revenge, as his own son had charged Arroyo’s husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, with having tried to help a $329 million contract between the government and a Chinese company in exchange for a bribe.
The son, Jose de Venecia III, testified in a Senate hearing last year on the matter. Arroyo’s husband has denied the charges.
De Venecia added Tuesday that he had evidence of fraud in the 2004 presidential elections, which Arroyo won. He also accused the military of having attempted to kill him and his son.
In his speech Monday night, the former House speaker all but claimed credit for the political fortunes of Gloria Arroyo. In 1998, he said, Arroyo had asked him to be her vice presidential candidate. Since then, he said, he had stood by Arroyo in the face of numerous political scandals.
“In every challenge in the life of President Arroyo, I was there, standing beside her,” de Venecia said. He also said that he had allowed his son to testify against the president’s husband out of a moral obligation, repeatedly referring to the “moral revolution” that he said he had introduced in Congress.
Arroyo, speaking at an energy conference Tuesday, said she would not comment on the leadership change. “We are focused, like a laser, pointed on the infrastructure boom, and the expansion of public services, and not on politics.”
According to Ignacio Bunye, Arroyo’s spokesman, de Venecia had been offered a “graceful exit” - to step down and be spared the vote - during a meeting with the president and party leaders on Monday. “But he insisted” on the vote, Bunye told reporters Tuesday.
On Tuesday, de Venecia vowed to cooperate with the political opposition in “fighting corruption” and hinted that he would disclose more information that was potentially damaging to the administration.
The opposition responded by calling de Venecia a “treasure trove” for 2010, the year the country is next scheduled to hold presidential elections.
“This is not the end,” Alfredo Lim, executive director of an influential business group, told ABS-CBN television.
“The change of speaker does not mean that things will go smoothly from now on. In fact, it introduces an element of political instability, which gets in the way of legislation.”
Posted on February 5, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 5, 2008
MANILA: In response to attacks on mining companies by insurgent groups in the Philippines, the military has agreed to recruit and train residents in communities near the mines as a defense force for the companies.
The policy, officials said, is just one of several that the government is pursuing in its efforts to promote the Philippines as a major player in the mining industry in Asia.
Under the plan, the military, with the help of local governments and the mining companies themselves, would recruit residents in communities where mining investments are present. It would then train and arm the recruits to help guard the companies from armed groups, mainly the New People’s Army, which is Communist and is responsible for most attacks against the mostly foreign-based mining companies.
The latest attack occurred on Jan. 1, when Communist rebels swooped down on the base camp of a copper-mining project in the southern Philippines owned by Xstrata, a miner based in Switzerland. The company said the rebels destroyed office buildings and other structures, causing an estimated $280,000 in damages.
Officials said security is the main problem that mining companies in the Philippines face. Because the companies operate in remote regions of the country, they are easy targets of Maoist rebels, who have been waging what they call a “protracted people’s war” in the countryside in the last three decades. It has the stated purpose of driving out foreign capitalists, among other revolutionary objectives.
The guerrillas usually demand “revolutionary taxes” from these firms, and those that fail to pay are usually targeted for attacks, army officials said. The military said the New People’s Army currently has about 5,700 regular fighters, down from the estimated 12,000 in 2002. The administration of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has vowed to crush the insurgency by 2010.
Foreigners are allowed to operate mining projects in the Philippines and the government has been trying to lure more of them. According to official estimates, the country has an estimated $1 trillion worth of mineral wealth. In the case of the Xstrata project, in Mindanao, the company said it was “one of the largest undeveloped copper-gold deposits in the Southeast Asia-Western Pacific Region.”
Despite these riches, the industry only generates about $1 billion a year in revenues. The lack of safety and security has been cited by the government as a major factor for the lack of investments.
An army spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Torres Jr, said the civilian defense units would be considered reservists and “cannot be employed as bodyguards or operate independently from the military in the area.” A regular army officer would be assigned to every defense unit.
Torres said the setup was ideal because it would not require the deployment of more regular troops and that such matters as feeding the militias would be taken care of by the mining companies.
Last week, the military deployed civilian defense units to a mining project owned by DMCI Mining in the northern Philippines that has been threatened by the Communists.
While not categorically endorsing the plan, Xstrata said the scope of the attack on its project necessitated more government intervention.
“The safety and security of our staff, contractors and visitors is a paramount consideration,” Emily Russell, a spokesman for Xstrata, said Tuesday. “We will continue to seriously assess the risks in light of the continuing threats against mining companies, and work with the host communities, our security service provider, and the local authorities to ensure a safe and secure environment for our employees.”
Tom Green, executive director of Pacific Strategies and Assessments, a risk-analysis company that counts among its clients foreign mining companies in the Philippines, cautioned that the government from relying too much on the civilian defense units.
“From years of dealing with security issues like this, this is probably bad news for mining companies,” Green said in an interview.
Given the history of the Philippine military with militias, Green said that these armed local volunteers “would have minimal, if any, training - no discipline. You’re not going to find stellar citizens to volunteer. But you’ll find guys without jobs, local thugs probably. You end up with guys that are not really much of a deterrent for the New People’s Army.”
Green said he viewed the plan as a “cheap way out for the Philippine armed forces.”
Environment groups have likewise opposed the plan. The use of these militias, said Clemente Bautista, of the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, “will only result in more human rights violations against communities, civilians, and organizations opposed to mining operations.”
Posted on February 5, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 4, 2008
MANILA: Jose Bernas considers himself extremely lucky. In May last year, two gunmen posing as journalists tried to kill him inside his office here. Bernas survived only because he had managed to block the path to his office; as he and the assailants struggled for control of the door, one of them fired his gun through it but missed Bernas.
The men fled, leaving behind the shaken but otherwise unscathed lawyer.
Gil Gojol was not as fortunate. A lawyer known for representing several victims of human-rights abuses, Gojol and his driver were shot and killed in Bicol, a region south of Manila, on Dec. 12. His colleagues believed the murders had something to do with a human-rights case Gojol was handling at the time.
The shootings of Bernas and Gojol were just two of the high-profile attacks on lawyers and judges in the Philippines in recent years. Last month, Roberto Navidad, a judge in a trial court in Calbayog City, in the central Philippines, was shot and killed.
Navidad was the 14th judge to have been slain since 2001, according to the records of the Supreme Court. According to the National Union of People’s Lawyers, 26 lawyers have been assassinated since 2001, with 7 of those deaths taking place last year.
The killings have become so daring that the judge hearing the case that Bernas had been working on was killed in 2005. The next year, the government lawyer prosecuting the same case was assassinated along with his son. No wonder Bernas, a well-off young corporate attorney, decided to leave the Philippines immediately after the attempt on his life. In an interview late last year, he called the incident “a most harrowing experience” that took its toll on him, his family and his practice.
Human-rights and lawyers’ groups use 2001 as a reference point for these killings, because it was the year President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo took power and, according to them, more killings have occurred during her administration than in any other since the era of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Nearly 900 activists, journalists, lawyers and judges have been killed since that year, according to Karapatan, a Malina-based human rights group, which says the attacks began to worsen in 2004.
The Arroyo administration has denied the allegation that it was behind the killings or that it was condoning them.
Nevertheless, the government has created a police task force to investigate the killings and, along with the Supreme Court, held a summit late last year to try to find solutions to the murders. “We are as concerned about these killings as everybody else and we are doing everything we can to bring the perpetrators to justice,” said Jefferson Soriano, commander of the task force.
The Supreme Court has taken steps to ensure that lawyers and judges are provided ample security. It has ordered more security personnel to be posted in the courts and has set up a system in which judges who receive death threats can immediately apply for protective security. It also abolished so-called heinous-crimes courts because a judge in such a court is easily identifiable and therefore vulnerable.
But on Jan. 29, a gunman slipped inside the court inside the Manila City Hall compound and killed a former town mayor. The assassin escaped, leaving behind what Dante Jimenez, founding chairman of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, called an “unmistakable message - no one is safe, not even those who seek refuge in the courts.”
And just as the killings of activists undermine democracy in the Philippines, lawyers, judges and anti-crime groups also believe that the killings of judges and lawyers seriously undermine the criminal justice system here.
Also, because many of the victims were known to represent victims of human rights violations that are almost always blamed on state security forces, the killings are seen as a setback to the cause of human rights in the Philippines.
“These killings intimidate and threaten lawyers and judges. I can’t even begin to imagine what these can do to those who are tasked to dispense justice,” said Dante Jimenez, founding chairman of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption. “The fear these killings spread is no different from what the Mafia spread,” he said.
Jimenez said his group had studied the phenomenon and concluded that the prevalence of guns for hire in the Philippines, who kill for as little as $100 a contract, has worsened the situation.
“In at least two regions, we know that a criminal syndicate handles the killings of lawyers and judges,” Jimenez said.
And because of what Jimenez called a climate of fear, Filipinos “can expect a perversion of the justice system much worse than bribing a judge.”
In the Philippines, he said, “the gun trumps justice anytime.”
Neri Colmenares, executive director of the National Union of People’s Lawyers, agreed. “If the judge sees that you have the capacity to kill,” he said, “he would consider ruling in your favor whether he likes it or not.”
As a result of what Human Rights Watch called a “climate of impunity” in the Philippines, the judiciary has suffered serious credibility setbacks. In its report last year on the extrajudicial killings in the country, in which the killings of lawyers and judges were also studied, this impunity has deepened public distrust in the justice system.
“Witnesses and victims’ families interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they expect no real results from government investigations, and they predict impunity for those involved in the killings,” the report said.
An international fact-finding mission attended by Filipino and European lawyers last year found that “no killers of lawyers and judges have been convicted” and that the threat against lawyers and judges “makes their work completely impossible.”
Colmenares knows this only too well. Last year, he discovered that his name was on a list of alleged communists said to have carried out murders in a central Philippine province years ago. The list was prepared by a military witness in a case in which Colmenares was representing leftist activists accused of being armed insurgents.
“I did not attend hearings for fear of my life,” Colmenares said, “and for fear that if the supposed witness saw me, it would be easier for him to make up lies about me.”
Human Rights Watch, in its monitoring, has discovered cases of lawyers representing activists who were sent threatening letters by courier.
Colmenares said that these threats directed against human-rights lawyers tend to discourage them from representing clients perceived by the governments as leftists. “This is a tragedy because we have seen an improvement in public-interest lawyering since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship,” he said. “With all these killings and threats, we fear that those who cannot afford lawyers or those who become victims of abuses will become even more marginalized and victimized.”
Posted on February 5, 2008, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
