Utang na LoobFormer President Ferdinand E. Marcos declaring martial law, September 21, 1972 (interaksyon com). It’s his duty to country, he said, that made him decide to inter the corpse. According to him, we should forgive and forget so that the nation could move on. It’s as if moving on means forgetting what happened. It’s as if moving on means revising or tearing the bad chapter of history so the ill feeling, the pain and the bitter experiences and memories of those who were arrested and detained or involuntarily disappeared, three or four decades ago, would be washed away from our hearts and minds. The infamous decision also prescribes lying. As if the nation can be likened to couples or families who move on by forgetting grievous acts of infidelity and waste of family resources or savings by the partner or a family member who has also caused great shame and damage to the family. One has to remember only the few good things done. When the person dies, a beautiful eulogy is delivered at the necrological service for him/her and a wonderful dedication is etched on his/her tombstone. In order to move on, one has to be in permanent “state of denial”. Marcos was president and soldier, he asserts. Duterte dabbles on legal technicality saying that the law that created the Libingan ng mga Bayani (LNMB) does not specify whether one had to be a good president. According to Duterte, no law bars Marcos from being buried in the LNMB. The spirit and objective of the law (RA 289), however, are clear. “To perpetuate the memory of all the Presidents of the Philippines, national heroes and patriots for the inspiration and emulation of this generation and of generations still unborn…” (Section 1, RA 289) Meanwhile another law (RA 10766) orders that victims of human rights violation under Martial rule be compensated from Marcos’ ill-gotten wealth. Even before President Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr. declared martial law on September 21, 1972, serious graft and corruption had characterized his administration. Nonetheless, he plotted to stay in power beyond his term and ordered charter change in 1971. But the bribes and threats to some delegates to the constitutional convention (Con Con) were exposed and the scheme to draft a charter suited to Marcos’ plan was foiled. Marcos then declared martial law, closed Congress and ruled as a dictator. He had a viva voce referendum to ratify the greatly altered draft charter called later the Marcos constitution. State tyranny reigned. Are we going to forget what Marcos did or do we create a different image of him and let his cadaver be buried at LNMB? We should not forget the raids soldiers conducted in urban poor communities, at the dead of the night, to conduct body searches of residents, inspect houses and drag men with tattoos or with long hair to interrogation rooms inside military barracks. We should not forget that soldiers forcibly undressed several hundred women activists during interrogation, molested and/or raped them. We should not forget that they burned several barrios (now barangays) like in some parts of Samar. In Mindanao, whole Moro and Lumad communities were forcibly evicted and in certain cases massacred. We should not forget that the Philippine military bombed and burned Jolo, Sulu in February 1974. We should always remember that some barrios, like Sta. Filomena in Lanao became a “no man’s land” when the military declared it a “free fire zone.” Not a few farmers spit blood, could hardly urinate or had broken ribs after experiencing torture in their hands. Remember that martial law banned workers’ unions, workers’ strikes and put behind bars and tortured many leaders and ordinary workers. And in Bicol, soldiers forcibly took away seven babies of suspected rebels from the families attending to them and were never seen again. Marcos was a ruthless dictator that’s why, because of fear, many people went underground or to the mountains and when they realized that they would be dying without putting up a fight, they joined the armed struggle against the Marcos dictatorship. His fascist rule did not result in discipline but fear and certainly, not in development. Stealing from the state coffers was reserved among Marcos’ family and his cronies and they were stealing big. The number of criminals increased including a big number of soldiers and officers who got involved in different kinds of criminal syndicates. And, the paramilitary Civilian Home Defense Forces or CHDF that he formed became small gangs of plunderers in the rural areas. As they lived like king and queen, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos raided the national treasury. The Philippines sunk deeper in debt while they stashed away billions of dollars of the country’s wealth in banks outside the Philippines. Had they not plundered the country, the Philippines could have built more than one cultural center, international convention center, film center, kidney and heart hospitals, more than one line of the light railway transit (LRT) and other infrastructures. Burying the late dictator in the LNMB means trampling on the sovereign will of the people that ended the dictatorship. We should not forget that the people overthrew the Marcos Dictatorship in the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution. We should not forget also that the bigger number of soldiers and officers of the Armed Forces joined in dismantling the dictatorship. The former dictator should never be made a hero for the youth to emulate. It is troubling that Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. is the idol of the president. Is it his duty to the people that made him decide to have Marcos buried in the LNMB? Or, as payback (bayad sa utang-na-loob) to the family that supported his candidacy? Utang na loob, sobra na! (for God’s sake, stop this madness) Stop the moves that defile the history of genuine heroism of the Filipino people. We don’t have to forget the past in order to understand the present and shape the future. Military reign or dictatorship should not be allowed again, never.K
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In a little less than a month since his inauguration, President Rodrigo Duterte has delivered on his campaign promise to go after suspected drug pushers and users with little or no regard for human rights and due process. Units of the Philippine National Police, under the command of his close associate General Ronald (“Bato”) de la Rosa, have turned many low-income neighborhoods in the country into free fire zones. The bloody encounters taking place daily have polarized the country between those who support the president’s quick and dirty methods of dealing with drugs and crime and those who regard them as illegal, immoral, and self-defeating. To date, more than 500 people had been killed in intensified anti-drug operations since the May 9 elections in which Duterte emerged as the victor. The pattern is worrisome: The police announce that drug pushers or users have been killed in an operation. Slain people are shown on television, invariably with firearms near their hands. The now routine police explanation: “The victims resisted arrest and fired on us, so we had to shoot them in self defense.” In some instances, the police story borders on the incredible. In a Pasay City precinct, for instance, two manacled suspects are shown on television being led into jail. Shortly thereafter, a policeman emerges to tell the press the father and son were shot dead inside the jail since they tried to reach for the police's pistols and had to be killed "in self-defense." The suspicious circumstances surrounding incidents like this and many others have convinced many that the killings are rub-outs by the police profiting from the illegal drug trade who are out to eliminate people who can connect them to drugs. Others wonder if this anti-drug push might not be a case of killing the small fry but protecting the big fish since there have hardly been any big-time drug lords apprehended. Whatever the causes of the wave of extra-judicial killings by police and unidentified people, the president must take responsibility for having encouraged them. Throughout his campaign for the presidency, he claimed that criminals had no rights and that they were better off dead than alive. During his victory speech in Davao on June 6, he asked people to take the law in their own hands and kill drug pushers, offering a higher bounty to people who killed suspected drug dealers than to those who brought them alive to the authorities. He has repeatedly said that rehabilitation does not work and at the solidarity dinner at the Del Pan Sports Complex on the very night of his inauguration, he told people that "If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourselves as getting their parents to do it would be too painful." To the police who follow his orders, he has said more than once, “If in the process you kill one thousand persons because you were doing your duty, I will protect you.” Fighting Drugs and Crime the Right Way Those who uphold human rights and due process have been accused of not sharing the population's concern with curbing crime. This is a lie. We do not question the goal of fighting drugs and crime. Indeed, we support it. But it cannot be achieved by trampling on human rights. No one has the right to take life except in the very special circumstance and in a very clear case of self-defense—not a police setup masquerading as “self defense.” Everyone is entitled to the right to life and its protection by the state. Moreover, denying some classes of people these rights, as Duterte does, puts all of us on the slippery slope that could end up extending this denial to other groups, like one’s political enemies or people that “disrupt” public order, like anti-government demonstrators or people striking for better pay. In this connection, we cannot forget that candidate Duterte threatened to kill workers who stood in the way of his economic development plans and made the blanket judgment that all journalists who had been assassinated were corrupt and deserved to be eliminated. That was no slip of the tongue. A Dangerous Path President Duterte's explicit, indeed boisterous denial of human rights and due process to suspected wrongdoers makes him unique among those who have served as chief executive, most of whom explicitly promised to uphold due process even if some of them deliberately violated it in practice in pursuit of their political enemies. Duterte would not, however, be as confident in his attack on the universality of human rights and the state's duty to ensure due process to suspects were he not supported in his extreme views by many if not most of those who voted for him. Duterte feels he has a blank cheque to disregard the law, and he is encouraged in this behavior by the rabid support he gets from many supporters who copy his aggressive style in expressing their views in the media. This dangerous synergy between the Leader and his followers is normalizing the denial and ridiculing of human rights and due process. And this can only lead to the erosion of the foundational belief of the 1987 Constitution: that each citizen of the Republic is endowed with fundamental, political, civil, social, economic, and cultural rights and is entitled to the protection of the law. Further the Constitution’s Bill of Rights states that: “No person shall be held to answer for a criminal offense without due process of law.” And that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall be presumed innocent until the contrary is proved, and shall enjoy the right to be heard by himself and counsel, to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation against him.” We demand that President Duterte order a halt to the extra-judicial killings and restore the rule of law and due process. We urge him to desist from inflammatory rhetoric that can only turn this country into one vast killing field where a rogue police force and vigilantes roam with impunity. But above all we ask our fellow citizens to come out and speak up for the inviolability and universality of human rights, the rule of law, and due process. These gains that our people made in their long struggle for their fundamental rights and democratic rule are under threat. Impunity should neither be made the foundation nor should it be made to serve as a "counter-balance" or "exchange" for future economic and social development. Acquiescence and silence in the face of the impunity that now reigns is the surest way to the loss of the rights of all. CCHR is a broad coalition of non-government organizations (NGOs), people’s organizations (POs), human rights lawyers, religious sector and members of the academe that came together to defend and assert human rights for all. |
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