Abuse Charges Persist in Philippines’ Fight Against Communists

By CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
Published: August 12, 2009

MANILA — Melissa Roxas, a 31-year-old artist and writer from Los Angeles, traveled to the Philippines in 2007 to learn more about the country of her birth.

Ms. Roxas moved to the United States when she was 9 years old, and finding out more about the Philippines had been an obsession for her. “I came to the Philippines to learn more about my roots and heritage,” she told the human rights committee of the Philippine Congress last month.

Soon after arriving, she embarked on an “immersion program” with a left-leaning nongovernmental organization, the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance), which sent her to impoverished communities in the provinces north of Manila to work on health and sanitation programs. One afternoon in late May, while watching television in a farmer’s home in a village in Tarlac Province, Ms. Roxas and two of her companions were abducted by armed and hooded men who dragged them into a van without a license plate.

For six days, Ms. Roxas says, she was interrogated, drugged, tortured and smothered to near death, with her interrogators trying to force her to admit she was a communist guerrilla. When the interrogators learned that she was an American citizen, she told the committee, the torture lessened. Although she continued to be tortured, her citizenship may have saved Ms. Roxas from death. Her captors later dropped her off at a relative’s house in the capital.

Ms. Roxas’s case was unusual in that she was among the few people who have been freed after being abducted and tortured. It also became highly publicized after it emerged that Ms. Roxas was a U.S. citizen and her lawyers said she would file a suit against the Philippine government in a U.S. court for unlawful kidnapping and assault.

But her case also highlighted something that international and local human rights groups say is all too common in the Philippines: violations of human rights by the military in the name of battling a communist insurgency.

Allegations of human rights violations have hounded the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ever since she came to power in 2001.

According to Karapatan, the largest human rights group in the Philippines, more than 1,000 activists, peasants and civilians have died and thousands more have been tortured or abducted since 2001. Those allegations have been echoed by groups like Human Rights Watch, based in New York, which has accused the government of being engaged in a “dirty war” against leftists.

The United Nations Human Rights Council, among other institutions, investigated several of the cases and found the Philippine military primarily responsible for the actions, attributing them to a counterinsurgency policy called Oplan Bantay Laya, or Operation Freedom Watch, that does not distinguish armed communist combatants from activists who are out in the open.

The United Nations says there has been an improvement in recent years — with a 70 percent decline in the number of killings since February 2007 — partly the result of human rights groups publicizing the problem. But in the first half of this year, 36 activists were killed, according to the Philippine Human Rights Reporting Project, a program of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

The military has disputed Ms. Roxas’s account, saying that she fabricated the story of her abduction, despite initial findings by the Commission on Human Rights, an independent constitutional body, that her account was credible. Later, the military went on a counteroffensive, accusing Ms. Roxas of being a member of the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines that has been waging a 40-year Maoist insurgency, the longest in Asia. Ms. Roxas has denied being a member of the group.

Leila de Lima, the chairwoman of the Commission on Human Rights, said at a hearing on the case that “freedom from torture is a nonderogable right” — that even if Ms. Roxas were a communist guerrilla, she should not have been tortured. “Even prisoners of war should not be tortured,” Ms. de Lima said.

Apart from the torture and killing linked to the communist insurgency, the Philippines has also come under fire for other human rights violations.

In May, the United Nations Committee Against Torture said that it was “deeply concerned about the numerous, ongoing, credible and consistent allegations, corroborated by a number of Filipino and international sources, of routine and widespread use of torture and ill-treatment of suspects in police custody.” The Philippine government told the U.N. committee that “torture or ill-treatment on suspects or detainees is not tolerated or condoned by the Philippine National Police.”

At the same time, the military and its backers have intensified a campaign against groups that the military says are sympathetic to the communists.

Jovito Palparan, a former general who is now a congressman, accused the Commission on Human Rights — whose chairman is appointed by the president and which has been accused by human rights groups in the past of not having been active enough in investigating violations — of backing the leftists.

In remote villages and in the slums of Manila, the military has embarked on a campaign to discredit leftist groups, often gathering residents in communities for viewings of videos where the groups are depicted as communists. The military has also gone into schools to warn students about radical groups out to recruit for the Communist Party.

Lt. Col. Danilo Lucero, the chief of the army’s Civil Military Operations, said in an interview that the military was concentrating on groups that it believed supported the armed New People’s Army.

“They have perfected the art of deception,” Colonel Lucero said. “They have their own political group that basically connects with their armed group.”

But Marie Hilao-Enriquez, secretary general of Karapatan, said the counterinsurgency strategy was “disastrous for human rights.”

“What the military does — labeling every dissenter as a communist — is dangerous,” Ms. Enriquez said. “They are in effect justifying the harassment, torture, abduction and even murder of Filipinos whose only crime was to speak out against the problems of society.”

Filipinos Mourn the Death of a Leader Who Helped Bring Democracy

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune/New York Times
Published: Aug. 2, 2009

Filipinos across the country mourned former President Corazon Aquino on Sunday, with thousands lining up outside a Catholic school in the capital for a last glimpse of the woman they credited with ushering in Philippine democracy nearly a quarter of a century ago, ending two decades of dictatorial rule.

The same reverence for Mrs. Aquino — who served as president for six years after leading the movement to oust Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 — had been evident across the archipelago since Saturday morning, when it was announced that she had died of colon cancer at 76. Yellow ribbons, Mrs. Aquino’s symbol of defiance against Mr. Marcos’s rule 23 years ago, were everywhere Sunday — on arms, trees, lampposts, car antennas and Web sites. Prayers and Masses for the former president were scheduled across the country.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo announced that she would cut short her visit to the United States to attend Mrs. Aquino’s funeral on Wednesday. Mrs. Arroyo had earlier decreed that Wednesday would be a nonworking holiday and declared a 10-day national period of mourning.

In a statement Saturday, the president paid tribute to Mrs. Aquino — who, in recent years, had taken an active role in street demonstrations against Mrs. Arroyo — calling her a ‘‘national treasure’’ who had ‘‘helped lead our nation to a brighter day.’’

At La Salle Greenhills, a Catholic school in Manila where Mrs. Aquino’s body had been brought for public viewing, a line of mourners had stretched for at least a kilometer since Saturday evening, despite heavy rains. On Sunday, the line grew even longer, with mourners wearing yellow shirts, yellow caps, yellow buttons and yellow ribbons.

A soft-spoken homemaker who became a global icon of democracy, Mrs. Aquino was regarded in the Philippines with an affection that bordered on the spiritual. Her preference for the company of nuns and priests, and the constant presence of a rosary in her hand — even in her casket Sunday — only deepened her appeal in this deeply Roman Catholic country.

Indeed, many of the mourners Sunday had decided to pay their respects to Mrs. Aquino rather than go to church.

‘‘She was an inspiration to all of us, and I want my children to know who she was and what she did for my country,’’ said Elpidio Albaracin, a 40-year-old who had lined up outside La Salle Green Hills early Sunday morning with his 3-year-old son Andrew. Egged on by his father, Andrew softly muttered the ‘‘Cory! Cory! Cory!’’ chant that reverberated across the country in 1986, as the bloodless ‘‘people power’’ revolt swept Mr. Marcos out of office.

James Bicaldo, a quality analyst at Transcom Asia, a call-center company, took a day off from work Sunday to be at Mrs. Aquino’s wake. He said he mourned her death deeply because he considered himself a ‘‘people power baby.’’

‘‘I was only three years old when my parents brought me to anti-Marcos rallies. They would teach me the Cory chant,’’ said Mr. Bicaldo, 25. ‘‘She inspires me and many Filipinos to fight for freedom.’’

An offer to hold a state funeral for Mrs. Aquino was declined by her children. Although the family did not make its reasons public, many assumed it was because of her political opposition to Mrs. Arroyo.

Her son, Senator Benigno S. Aquino III, said Saturday that although the Aquino family would be civil toward Mrs. Arroyo, he was ‘‘not looking forward’’ to seeing the president at his mother’s wake or funeral.

World leaders offered their condolences. President Barack Obama was ‘‘deeply saddened’’ by Mrs. Aquino’s death, according to a White House statement that extolled her for ‘‘courage, determination, and moral leadership’’ that served as ‘‘an inspiration to us all and exemplify the best in the Filipino nation.’’ President Hu Jintao of China sent condolences to Mrs. Arroyo, said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jiang Yu, who said the ‘‘Chinese government and the Chinese people deeply lament’’ Mrs. Aquino’s death, according to The Associated Press.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer said in an editorial Sunday that the former president’s death had brought together ‘‘rich and poor, old and young, partisan and the apathetic, men and women, soldiers and civilians.’’

‘‘Unity is a rare thing in our country; we have it now, and adding to the feelings of grief is the wistful realization that it took the passing of Cory to reunite a divided nation,’’ the editorial said.

Filipinos mourn “people power” icon

Corazon Aquino, ex-president of the Philippines, is dead at 76.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost
Published: August 1, 2009 13:42 ET

MANILA — She was the closest the Philippines ever had to a living saint. And when she died on Saturday, from colon cancer at the age of 76, Filipinos grieved as though they had just lost one.

Inside a Catholic school in Manila where the remains of Corazon Aquino lay for public viewing, Filipinos from all walks of life lined up to get a glimpse of “Tita (Auntie) Cory,” undaunted by the heavy downpour that had drenched the capital all day. Nuns and priests with solemn faces walked past the shivering masses and the rows and rows of white, green and yellow flowers that covered the campus. On the railings going up to the school’s gym, yellow ribbons flapped forlornly in the rain.

“This is such a sad day for me and my family,” said Digna Labalan, a 50-year-old businesswoman who lined up on Saturday evening to view Aquino’s casket a few hundred meters away. In 1986, like hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, Labalan had gone to Edsa — the main highway in the capital where the “people power” that toppled Ferdinand Marcos took place — and participated in what has been called a “bloodless revolution” later emulated in many countries in the world.

But Labalan said she was “relieved and happy that Aquino had gone to heaven, no longer in pain.” Aquino suffered greatly from the cancer — she was on morphine when she died. Across the country, trees and fences had been festooned with yellow ribbons, the symbol of the housewife who challenged the dictator Marcos and went on to become the country’s first woman president.

An image of a yellow ribbon had replaced profile pictures on Twitter and Facebook. Churches all over were holding daily masses for the stricken former president.

A daughter of one of the country’s wealthiest families, Aquino was thrust into the political limelight after the assassination in 1983 of her husband, Benigno Aquino Jr., the arch enemy of the dictator. When Marcos rigged the election in 1986, Filipinos revolted, drove Marcos away to Guam (he later died in exile in Hawaii) and installed the housewife as their new president.

Although her six years in office were tumultuous — she survived at least six coup attempts — Aquino restored the democratic institutions that the dictatorship had systematically destroyed during two decades in power.

But many say Aquino could only do so much. For instance, her centerpiece program — agrarian reform — did little to alleviate poverty in the countryside or end the festering communist insurgency. Indeed, her family’s vast landholdings managed to escape this program, prompting cries from the left that Aquino never transcended her class interests. Worse, some of the most notorious atrocities against peasants and farmers occurred during her term, such as when her troops massacred more than a dozen farmers demonstrating near the presidential palace.

Under pressure from some in the military to which she owed a great deal for protecting her from the coup attempts, Aquino launched a “total war policy” against the left and the communist insurgency — unleashing, for example, armed paramilitary elements, many of them members of fanatical religious cults, against communists and suspected communist sympathizers. This resulted in massive human-rights violations that continue to this day.

Many Filipinos also expected her to repudiate billions of dollars in debts that the dictatorship had incurred. But, under tremendous pressure from international creditors, she did not, and Filipinos are still paying for these debts.

When she spoke before a joint session of the U.S. Congress in 1987, she practically begged America to throw the Philippines a lifeline. “You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it,” Aquino told her American audience. “And here you have a people who won it by themselves and need only the help to preserve it.” That same day, legislators approved a $200 million emergency loan to Manila.

But despite all that, Aquino managed to keep her nose clean, keeping her promise that she would be the opposite of Marcos. During her term, not one corruption allegation was leveled against her.

“She was the epitome of integrity and graciousness,” said Christian Monsod, who was appointed by Aquino as chairman of the elections commission. “She never interfered, she never called me while I was at the commission,” he added with an apparent dig at current President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whose regime has been hounded with the allegation that she cheated in the 2004 election by calling up an election official as part of the plot to steal the vote. Arroyo has always denied the charge.

Aquino, who was Catholic-educated, was also deeply pious. She liked the company of nuns and would often talk about suffering as a gift from God, as a way of testing her faith. She developed a close relationship with the late Cardinal Jaime Sin, who was often described as her most important ally in the fight against Marcos.

According to members of her family, Aquino died in the early morning Saturday while praying and clutching her rosary, her children surrounding her at the hospital where she had been confined the past several weeks as her cancer worsened.

“She was a mentor to me,” said Rodolfo Lozada Jr., a whistle-blower in one of the corruption scandals confronting Arroyo and whom Aquino publicly supported when he came out against the current president. “She told me to never lose faith,” Lozada said, gesturing at the casket that bore the woman who had provided hope to Filipinos during their darkest hour, wearing her signature yellow dress, a rosary in her hand.