Carol P. Araullo

Chief justice on trial

2011-12-15T23:20:00.000+08:00

In our previous column entitled "Battle for Justice", we said that a big battle is looming to bring the Arroyos to justice. Few outside the innermost circles of President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino would have foreseen that the initial major skirmish would take the form of an impeachment move against the Supreme Court Chief Justice, and that it would come this soon.

The showdown between Malacañang, in its stepped-up efforts to have former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo prosecuted, and the Corona Supreme Court, in its obvious moves to help Mrs. Arroyo evade criminal accountability, had been shifted to the House of Representatives where Mr. Aquino clearly had the numbers for a swift impeachment.

The progressive party-list legislators in the Lower House supported the impeachment move despite the fact that they were not afforded the opportunity to give inputs into the complaint and were given very short notice of the plan by the House leadership and Mr. Aquino’s Liberal Party.

According to Makabayan, the coalition of national democratic legislators and their political parties that includes Bayan Muna, the ouster of Mr. Corona is part and parcel of the continuing effort to make the Arroyos accountable for their grievous crimes against the people.

“Corona since he became associate justice has major responsibility for upholding illegal, anti-people and repressive acts of the Arroyo regime. Since he became chief justice, Corona has had chief responsibility for the legal maneuvers and decisions of the High Court favoring, protecting and allowing the Arroyos to escape prosecution.”

Moreover, the progressive movement has always been critical of anti-people Supreme Court rulings such as the reversal of the SC decision adjudging the 1995 Mining Act as unconstitutional, and had unequivocally protested the midnight appointment of Mr. Corona whose close ties to the Arroyos are indisputable while his voting record in the SC has been disreputable.

Certainly, the avowed objective of Mr. Aquino to remove a major stumbling block to the prosecution of the Arroyos through the impeachment of the Chief Justice is a step in the right direction.

But in truth, Mr. Aquino and Mr. Corona agree on a lot of major national issues and policies, as shown by the Corona defenders' citing instances where Mr. Corona voted in favor of Mr. Aquino’s economic programs whose legality was being disputed in the High Court. While we are no fan of Mr. Corona, we also have no illusions as to Mr. Aquino's concept of justice and what is good for the country.

When Mr. Aquino raises questions on the propriety of Mr. Corona's being chief magistrate, we are sure that outside of the prosecution of the Arroyos, his idea of what justice is and what is good for the country is fundamentally different from ours.

Most likely, Mr. Aquino and Mr. Corona basically agree on what justice is, from the point of view of an elite democracy and an iniquitous society that they are both sworn to uphold and protect. They only disagree now on who should be dispensing justice at the highest level and to which of the warring factions of the elite he should swear allegiance to.

We recall that in recent statements, each time Mr. Aquino utters the word "justice" or "just", strange things happen. People lose their homes and properties when, in the name of "all-out justice", bombs are dropped on civilian communities allegedly harboring lawless elements. Farmer beneficiaries lose hope of ever owning the land they had tilled for generations, when Mr. Aquino insists that they must pay the landowners (to whose family he incidentally belongs) "just compensation". And peace talks are once again stalled despite Mr. Aquino's continuing pronouncements to pursue a "just and lasting peace".

The progressive movement has also consistently criticized Mr. Aquino for his indecisive, inadequate and until most recently, ineffectual, moves against the Arroyos.

Mrs. Arroyo is now under “hospital arrest” for her role in the 2007 senatorial elections fraud. Still, she has not been charged for far bigger crimes such as the "Hello Garci" 2004 presidential elections fraud (where Mrs. Arroyo stands accused of having stolen the presidency from her opponent, Mr. Fernando Poe Jr.); the notoriously anomalous multi-billion peso NBN-ZTE deal; and the extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture, mass displacement of civilian communities and other gross human rights violations perpetrated with impunity under her rule. (The latter are still continuing, also with impunity, under the supposedly upright Aquino dispensation.)

The progressive movement can be expected to raise and pursue these issues against the Arroyos in the courts, in Congress and on the streets and whatever old and new avenues may be availed of as a result of the heightened debate over the Corona impeachment trial.

As to Mr. Corona, we expect he will employ legal arguments and loopholes as well as attempt to conflate the attack on him as an attack on the SC as an institution then utilize the people’s general acceptance of the SC’s inscrutability and supposed impartiality in his defense at the Senate impeachment trial. But he will be hard put to shake off the popular perception that he is a flunky of Mrs. Arroyo who prostituted himself and his office to protect her and her interests.

No doubt the partisan political lines will be drawn: pro-GMA/Corona versus anti-GMA/Corona; pro-Aquino versus anti-Aquino. The usual quid pro quo mechanisms will operate and Malacañang will pull out all stops to entice as well as draw dire scenarios for the Senator-jurists who will waver in rendering a guilty verdict. The trial will be fully covered by the mass media and the biases and proclivities of the owners and opinion makers will certainly come into play.

The wild card in all this is how the vast majority of the people who have no stakes in either the GMA/Corona or Aquino camps will weigh in on the ensuing political drama of the impeachment trial.

We are willing to bet that the vast majority want to see the Arroyos prosecuted, convicted and punished for a slew of crimes against the people and individuals whose rights they had trampled. Thus Mr. Corona will face an uphill climb in his defense.

But while it is true that a Corona conviction would remove a major obstacle to the prosecution of the Arroyos, rendering true justice to the Arroyo regime's crimes is still a long way to go.

Mr. Aquino has an even longer way to go in showing to the people that his "daang matuwid" will lead to fundamental policy changes and substantial reforms that will truly be for the good of the people and not just the ruling elite and foreign big power and big business interests. #

Published in Business World

16-17 December 2011

Battle for justice

2011-11-24T18:00:00.003+08:00

Forces in the Philippine political landscape are gearing up for a major legal and political battle. Former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her husband’s attempts to leave the country and escape the proverbial long arm of the law, ironically by utilizing a favorable Supreme Court order, were foiled by Justice Secretary de Lima and Comelec Commissioner Brilliantes by means of an arrest warrant for Mrs. Arroyo speedily issued by a Pasay court on the charge of election sabotage.

This has led to the current situation with Mrs. Arroyo under “hospital arrest” while a clutch of related legal issues are pending in the Supreme Court and more criminal and civil cases are being filed by various citizen’s groups against the Arroyos.

Indeed, a big battle is looming to bring the Arroyos to justice. Or, as many, including one of the Arroyos’ lawyers would put it, the battle has begun and Secretary De Lima has won the first round.

At first glance, the two major protagonists are the Arroyos on one hand and Malacañang on the other. In truth, the real protagonists are the people wanting to bring the Arroyos to justice for their crimes, and the Arroyos who wish to escape prosecution and punishment.

Thus, the arena of contention is not just the courts of justice, but more so the bar of public opinion.

Public opinion is vehemently and overwhelmingly against the attempted flight of the Arroyos by virtue of the Supreme Court TRO, while strongly in favor of Secretary De Lima’s thwarting such attempt by firmly and courageously refusing to implement the TRO outright at the risk of being charged and cited for contempt.

Nobody is buying the Arroyos’ storyline: that the former president only intends to get special medical treatment abroad, since they claim this is locally unavailable, and will return to face the charges against her and her husband.

Various groups and personages who have filed cases against the Arroyos with the Justice Department and Ombudsman are pushing for prompt action on these. Malacañang has announced additional charges will be filed against the Arroyos and others involved in anomalies in the Arroyo administration.

It must be pointed out that the Aquino administration’s credibility and following rests to a large extent on its repeated pledges to hold the Arroyos accountable and eradicate corruption in government. Thus it is compelled to show concrete results beyond promises and rhetoric.

In terms of mandate, power and resources, it is in the best position to bring the Arroyos to justice. But its performance thus far has been found wanting and reveals an inability to act effectively on its own.

The people need to be vigilant and push the Executive to promptly take the proper and necessary measures to ensure that the Arroyos are prosecuted and eventually convicted of their high crimes against the people.

They must be vigilant against all sorts of mutual accommodations or compromises that may take place between Malacañang and the Arroyos.

As had happened too often in the past ruling regimes have done little to investigate and prosecute the alleged anomalies of their predecessors in accordance with the unwritten rule among the ruling classes that these may used for purposes of election mudslinging or even to oust a sitting government but not for serious criminal prosecution.

The Supreme Court has once again put its integrity and independence under a cloud of doubt with majority of the magistrates voting in favor of the Arroyos on the TRO last Nov 15.

While many still blindly accept the Supreme Court’s impartiality and hold its mandate and decisions unassailable, the vote is reminiscent of previous highly questionable decisions, such as when it flip-flops on its issuances or goes against its own jurisprudence.

The Court’s 2010 decision upholding the constitutionality of the midnight appointment of the current Chief Justice is one of the most notorious and glaring examples.

In his searing critique of this decision, Fr. Joaquin Bernas wrote, “It will not take much imagination to guess whom the President will not appoint…(and) whom she will appoint…What the fallout will be from all this remains to be seen. One thing is sure today: popular confidence in the integrity and independence of the Court has been severely sapped.”

The way the SC voted last Nov 15, the majority of the honorable magistrates seemed totally mindless of how the credibility of the Supreme Court would be affected or how the people would regard the institution’s independence and integrity. Perhaps they had thought the people too naive or ignorant or both to see through their highly controversial if not dubious decisions and actuations.

On the other hand, the subsequent SC vote not to issue a TRO on the question of the legality of the Joint DOJ-COMELEC Committee that recommended charges of electoral sabotage was cause for a collective sigh of relief. A contrary vote would have again given the Arroyos the freedom to fly away from prosecution.

If anything, it was a sign that the people have made their voices heard and that it would have been foolhardy, even for the Supreme Court, to blatantly disregard them.

The Arroyos will certainly take full advantage of the numerical superiority of Mrs. Arroyo’s Supreme Court appointees to sabotage and defeat efforts to prosecute them in any court of justice.

But this advantage has its own limits. The people’s vigilance and active intervention on issues within and outside the courts can counter the Arroyos’ maneuvers and counter-maneuvers.

Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether justice will prevail. The odds are clearly stacked against it, with Malacañang having still to prove its mettle and its resolve to prosecute the Arroyos fully.

Indeed, the people's fight for justice rests on their shoulders more than anything. They must continue to be vigilant, unshakeable and make their voices heard unequivocally and strong so that in the end, their will would be undeniable and in fact become truly sovereign. #

Published in Business World

25-26 Novemeber 2011

Flight from justice

2011-11-18T11:21:00.000+08:00

The overriding and unstated premise in the controversy over the “constitutional crisis” provoked by the Supreme Court order allowing former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and former First Gentleman Miguel Arroyo to travel abroad and the Justice Secretary’s insistence on barring them from leaving on the basis of a departmental “watch list order” (WLO) is that the issue being decided on is the ordinary citizen's constitutional right to travel.

However the events that led up to the highly dramatic attempt of the Arroyos to leave the country some hours after the SC decision came down indicate that the issue was more than that. Or even that it was not that at all.

In the first place, GMA and FG are not your ordinary citizens. If they were, it is unthinkable that the SC would have given the petition the same priority they accorded the Arroyos. But lady justice being blind, we can grant that our highest magistrates would treat everyone equally, and also not give consideration to the fact that the Arroyos have hundreds of millions if not billions of reasons to leave the country and contemplate not returning, since these have nothing to do with the issue of constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court voted along clearly partisan lines: eight justices, all GMA appointees, voted to allow the Arroyos to travel; five who contravened are either Aquino appointees or have had a political falling out with GMA.

The speed with which the decision was made (oral arguments were still to be heard the following week) was highly unusual. It seemed the better part of prudence for the High Court to have exercised greater care and circumspection in this highly controversial and politically-charged case but evidently this was set aside.

The circumstances under which the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) was issued and received were, to say the least, suspect. The GMA camp appeared to know in advance what the SC decision would be, when it would be issued, and what the prerequisites for the order to become immediately executory were.

Thus the lawyers were able to comply with amazing dispatch. The tickets to Singapore for the GMA travel party were already booked on all possible flights and carriers for the same day of the SC decision. Before the day was over the Arroyos were attempting to fly out.

Most important of all, the “temporary relief” granted to the Arroyos citing their constitutional right to travel and even the right to life (accepting uncritically the Arroyos’ claim that GMA needed life-saving medical treatment abroad) would render the main case (whether the WLO that kept them from traveling is valid or not) moot and academic. The SC had practically given the Arroyos judicial “license to flee” as pointed out by the National Union of People’s Lawyers.

The real issue confronting us is not about an individual’s constitutionally-guaranteed right to travel. GMA’s lawyers cleverly couched the issue for the SC in such a manner to provide the majority pro-Arroyo justices the legal ground to issue a TRO and likely declare the Justice Department’s WLO unconstitutional. But take note that the current champions of this right never questioned it during GMA’s incumbency when it was issued by her Justice Secretary. Is it because they were never on the receiving end of the curtailment of such a fundamental right?

This is also not about seeking urgent and unavailable medical treatment abroad although the invocation of such grounds provides the pro-GMA SC justices the opening to cite the basic right to life and humanitarian grounds for deciding that GMA be allowed to travel.

The top-notch doctors and facilities that the Arroyos relied on to save FG when his life was threatened and to which GMA initially availed of to address her neck problems are all available still. The Philippine Medical Association and individual orthopedic surgeons as well as the Health Secretary have all attested to the fact that while Mrs. Arroyo is recuperating from her previous operations any other procedures such as a bone biopsy and work-up on possible metabolic deficiencies may all be done inside the country with no question as to accuracy and reliability.

Contrary to the vociferous claims of the GMA camp, this is also not about political persecution by the Arroyos’ political enemies. Apart from President Benigno Aquino III’s propensity for attributing everything that is wrong or problematic in his administration to the sins, foibles and follies of his predecessor, his administration has yet to file a single legal case against GMA whether for corruption or electoral fraud much less for gross violations of human rights. All the cases filed against GMA and her cohorts have been by progressive party list congress persons and social activists, human rights victims and various good government advocates.

Justice Secretary Leila de Lima’s frantic attempts to forestall the execution of the TRO are last-ditch attempts to delay the inevitable in the hope that the people will blame the SC and not the Executive for government’s abject inability to exact justice for the Arroyos’ high crimes against the people.

The Aquino administration’s failure to investigate, do assiduous case build-up, file proper charges in court and competently prosecute these cases have all paved the way for what is being touted by the media as “De Lima’s dilemma” but which boils down to Mr. Aquino’s glaring lack of political will.

The apparent "constitutional crisis" that is manifesting itself in a showdown between the executive and judiciary has little to do with upholding constitutional rights although it has taken that issue as its arena of contention. The crisis stems from the Philippine state having to maintain a facade of being democratic and operating under the rule of law, purportedly to preserve peace and order, under conditions of worsening economic difficulties, increasing public restiveness and the festering contradictions among the factions of the ruling elite, in this case between the ruling Aquino regime and the out-of-power Arroyo clique.
Long before this, and especially under the Marcos dictatorship, the entire Philippine state has been in disarray, with the executive and legislative branches caught in all kinds of scandals, anomalies, fraudulent and criminal activities including gross human rights violations.

The GMA regime's contribution was to brazenly get away with all these with impunity through a masterful contravention and even use of laws and legal processes. Its misuse and abuse of the courts to harass the opposition and progressive leaders and cover up extrajudicial killings and other grave human rights violations severely undermined the integrity of the judicial system including the Supreme Court hitherto regarded by many as the last remaining credible institution in government.
The Puno and Corona Supreme Courts put their own credibility under question with decisions that could only kindly be described as questionable or controversial. The SC has reversed and even flip-flopped on its own issuances apparently due to powerful intervening interests.

This being the case, this current "crisis" will not find its resolution even with the Arroyos' constitutional right ostensibly upheld by their imminent flight from justice. #

Published in Business World
18-19 November 2011

Looming confrontations

2011-11-11T07:06:00.000+08:00

There is a world of difference between the “occupation” of Wall Street and many other cities not only in the US but all over the world by unarmed protestors, and the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya by the US and NATO armed forces. But there is also a definite and clear, though not obvious connection between them.

Occupy movements and people’s protests the world over spring from deep resentment and despair over the state of their economies, the dire effects on the people’s lives and livelihood, the grim future ahead, and how governments and the economic, especially the financial elite, are passing on the crisis to the 99% while bailing out the 1% who caused the unprecedented crisis in the first place.

More significant and ominous, the Occupy movements are a clear signal that ordinary people who mostly prefer to stay away from protest actions have decided that enough is enough, they will not stand idly by while the 1% steal from them their lives and the future of their children. They will add their voice and their warm bodies to the burgeoning protest against The System.

Adding fuel to the fire, governments in the advanced capitalist countries are attacking working people’s fundamental rights to collective bargaining, unions and strikes as well as gutting established entitlements in social welfare achieved through decades of struggle for socio-economic reform. And now, police are brutally attacking and dispersing Occupy demonstrations in many parts of the US, the way they earlier did in the most troubled EU country, Greece.

It is becoming exceedingly clear for many of the world’s peoples that what is in crisis today is the system of global capitalism. With workers' wages being pressed down while hi-tech production grows by leaps and bounds, capital finds less and less profitable productive ventures. Neoliberal policies designed to remove "fetters" to profit making paved the way to the abuse by big banks of unregulated financial derivatives such as the credit default swap scheme, inflating bubbles that burst one after the other in the past decade and peaking in the financial meltdown of 2008.

This crisis of capitalism, in its mature stage of monopoly capitalism or imperialism, has impelled US and NATO to launch wars of aggression and occupation against sovereign countries in resource-rich and geopolitically strategic regions of the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. Lenin’s oft-quoted statement, “Imperialism means war” acquires heightened relevance.

The US and the biggest NATO countries have resorted to military Keynesianism or the pouring of billions of dollars into the yawning jaws of their military-industrial complexes in order to stimulate their depressed economies. Revving up their respective war machines, they have infused jingoism and paranoia into their foreign policy frames and called it a “war against terror”.

All sorts of false accusations and fabricated charges -- the possession of “weapons of mass destruction”, the harboring of Osama bin Laden and the “massacre” of civilians and unarmed protesters -- were used by US and NATO to bomb the daylights out of the Iraqi, Afghan and Libyan peoples.

After “victory” they sent in occupation forces and installed puppet regimes to replace what had hitherto been sovereign governments and thus sparked fierce armed resistance from the aggressed peoples. Thus came to pass the recolonization of these benighted countries, the take-over of their oil and other natural resources as well as the installation of pseudo-democratic regimes ever ready to do the bidding of their imperialist masters.

A key imposition is the permanent stationing of US-NATO military bases and troops on their soil as staging ground for armed intervention in neighboring “hot spots” such as Syria, Iran and Pakistan.

Finally, after four years of shopping around in vain for a strategic base for its Africa Command (even its closest allies in the region had refused to be so demeaned in the eyes of fellow Africans), the US finally seized the most strategic and lucrative site -- Libya.

Doubtless, the US and NATO have sent out the clear and unmistakable message that no sovereign country anywhere can challenge their military might and it is best that every one does their bidding.

The US can rally its allies to gang up on any leader who dare think otherwise, with a United Nations mandate to boot. It can invoke humanitarian objectives such as protecting civilians even as it indiscriminately bombards cities, kills and maims tens of thousands of civilians, destroys infrastructure and properties, and assassinates perceived enemies with absolute impunity.

The US and fellow imperialists Britain, France and Italy condemn attacks on protestors by sovereign leaders they have branded and stigmatized as despots, even as they send their own police and national guards to attack and arrest Occupy protestors and disperse peaceful demonstrations.

The initiators of the “Occupy Wall Street” battle cry had looked to the so-called Arab Spring for inspiration, believing that the time had come for the American people to occupy their own Tahrir Square, the epicenter of protests by the anti-Mubarak, pro-reform movement.

The parallels between the poor, backward and miserable conditions of the Egyptian people weighed by the yolk of US-backed authoritarianism and that of the American people -- suddenly dispossessed of the security and comforts of middle class existence and the promise of the “American dream” while living under the oppressive rule of the US ruling elite -- are all too real.

The peoples in North America and the European Union are waking up from the cultivated illusion that they are living in a “democracy” and have control over their lives; that their political leaders are answerable to them; and that the fruits of their labor are theirs to enjoy into their retirement years.

They are now taking to the streets, occupying the plazas, blockading banks, marching on parliaments and other symbols of ruling class power and leading hugely successful general strikes. They are having teach-ins and general assemblies where political activists, trade unionists, progressive intellectuals and artists and ordinary folk especially young people are discussing and learning the truth about their situation, what are the real causes of their misery, and who are the 1% against the 99%.

As the world watches both the Occupy movements and the occupation of invaded and vanquished countries, seemingly disparate happenings in a troubled world, the bigger picture emerges each time the smoke from the teargas and bombs momentarily clear.

The expanding arenas move inexorably closer to each other. The specter of bigger and wider confrontations looms in the future. #

Published in Business World

11-12 November 2011

No truth, no justice

2011-11-03T21:38:00.003+08:00

President Benigno Aquino’s “all-out justice” slogan, coined by his tourism secretary (an advertising man before joining government), seems to be catching on. As a tagline, it aims to capture the administration’s purported commitment to peaceful means, i.e. peace negotiations, to resolve the armed conflict with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), without sacrificing its mandate to “maintain law and order” anywhere in Mindanao, regardless of or unrestrained by any ceasefire agreement with the latter.

It has elicited the approbation of foreign governments, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, an assortment of peace advocates among “civil society organizations” and more so, the MILF leadership.

The “all-out justice” call appears to be in stark contrast to the “all-out war” approach espoused by the rabidly anti-Moro warmongers like former President Joseph Estrada, former Marcos martial law henchman and now Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, military officers like the dismissed AFP spokesperson and a slew of mindless, revenge- seeking and/or military ass-licking and profit-seeking bandwagon commentators in mainstream mass media.

In the aftermath of the aerial bombardment of supposed MILF-cum-bandit lairs in Zamboanga Sibugay, what has the Aquino government to show for its “All-out Justice” campaign against those who overpowered and killed at least 19 members of the AFP’s special forces in Basilan?

One doesn't have to be a soldier or policeman to understand that if the mission is to serve a warrant or apprehend a criminal that mission cannot be said to have been accomplished until the target or object has indeed been captured.

In this case, several bombs were rained upon a cluster of houses, supposedly the camp of the band of "lawless elements" that was the object of the military-police operation. This is standard tactic for softening up a target preparatory to a ground assault, never mind that from the air, it is impossible to distinguish between civilian abodes and huts occupied by “lawless elements”.

In practice, aircraft could always be heard before they reach the target so that anyone who has experienced such bombings can easily escape and hide in the adjoining forested area. It is the elderly, feeble and sick, the women and children who cannot run away fast enough, who end up being “collateral damage”. The livestock, immovable houses, and crops left behind are invariably destroyed by the bombings.

In terms of the government's vaunted and enlightened new policy, how was justice served in dropping bombs on a hapless community -- even assuming without granting that there were "lawless elements" in that community?

All-out justice should first of all ferret out the truth. The MILF leadership's call for an impartial investigation by the International Monitoring Team (IMT) on what really happened is the logical and only sane first step in this direction.

To more critical observers, a grand cover-up appears to be taking place. Mr. Aquino is allowing the AFP to save face with its farcical, open-ended military campaign in Moro areas. Meanwhile tens of thousands of civilians are continuously being displaced in the ensuing military operations. Where is the justice there?

With grave implications to the quest for peace, the cover-up serves to obscure one of the major obstacles to the peace negotiations between the GPH and MILF as well as that between the GPH and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).

On the one hand, the GPH has been trying, through peace negotiations, to entice if not coerce the MILF and NDFP to accept a political settlement of the armed conflict. Thus there is the presumption that the MILF and NDFP are political organizations, not criminal syndicates, and that they (MILF and NDFP) exercise leadership and control over their respective armed forces.

On the other hand, the GPH has long been carrying out a policy and practice of criminalizing the political offenses allegedly committed by suspected MILF-BIAF and CPP-NPA-NDFP leaders, members and sympathizers, justifying these as legal actions in accordance with GPH law.

This is supposedly the basis for sending out two special forces platoons to "arrest" an MILF commander allegedly for multiple murders, even if the killings were committed in an earlier battle with government troops. It is also invoked as the basis for sending warplanes to bomb a touted lair of MILF forces that the government has arbitrarily called "lawless elements" and for more ground assaults in Sulu and Basilan.

All these actions are in wanton disregard of the ceasefire mechanisms and processes mutually agreed upon and set up by the GPH and MILF with the participation of international and NGO monitors to deal with such situations.

It is exactly the same case with the GPH-NDFP talks that are now stalled due to the GPH refusal to release at least five NDFP consultants, arguing that it is not obligated to do so.

What the GPH is concealing is that while these detainees were clearly arrested for their alleged links with the CPP-NPA-NDFP, they are all being kept behind bars on the basis of non-bailable charges of common crimes (murder, homicide, illegal possession of firearms, arson, robbery) and rarely for the political crime of rebellion contrary to the Hernandez Doctrine which is part of GPH jurisprudence.

Looking back, it is clear that the GPH deliberately suspended the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees in August 2005 and set up the Inter Agency Legal Action Group to pave the way for filing trumped-up charges, arresting, detaining, and even torturing and killing, suspected CPP-NPA-NDFP elements and sympathizers including those unarmed and openly involved in the peace negotiations.

The current GPH regime of Mr. Aquino acknowledges this as a mistake of the previous administration, yet refuses to rectify or remedy the situation by releasing the political prisoners it keeps in its jails.

The GPH for too long has been using "sole sovereignty" and its obligation to uphold the Philippine Constitution and legal processes as excuses to circumvent if not undermine its own agreements with the MILF and NDFP.

It has never given up on its basic US-inspired counterinsurgency frame where peace negotiations are merely tools for psychological warfare, together with dole-out social welfare programs and civic action by the AFP, alongside continuing or intermittent military-police offensives against so-called insurgents.

The GPH pays lip service to attaining a just and lasting peace but lives are being needlessly lost and innocents are languishing in jail, all because the Aquino government would rather use "justice" as a catchy slogan rather than uphold it as a noble goal to pave the way for genuine peace, social equity and economic progress. #

Published in Business World

4-5 November 2011

All-out deception

2011-10-27T21:05:00.002+08:00

The shrill call to wage “all-out war”, in reaction to the overwhelming defeat of a platoon of special action forces on a mission to “arrest” a rebel Moro commander in Basilan, is nothing but pure hogwash.

For one it is obvious, except to the military top brass and to those who for various reasons wish to suck up to the armed forces, that it was a botched operation that the military now wishes to blame on the targeted enemy, in this case, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Indeed, the armed forces hierarchy has a lot to answer for in the unnecessary deaths of these young soldiers and junior officers that only a thoroughgoing and honest assessment can fully determine.

For another, had the numbers of killed or wounded-in-action been the other way around, with MILF fighters being dealt a rout, hardly anyone would have asked whether the military’s combat operation against a known MILF commander, albeit branded as a “criminal”, was a violation of the terms of the ongoing peace negotiations and ceasefire agreement between the Philippine government (GPH) and the MILF.

As it is, government officials and media commentators are having a field day accusing the MILF of “treachery” in the Basilan encounter; of coddling criminals if not engaging in criminality themselves because of their refusal to submit to the authority of the government (they are after all, rebels); and of taking advantage of a presumably flawed ceasefire agreement to get away with their lawlessness (in fact the ceasefire had been holding up fairly well to the satisfaction of both parties until this latest firefight).

But let’s get back to basics. There is an ongoing war between the Philippine government and the MILF over the historic demands of the Bangsamoro for the right to self-determination and to their ancestral domain. These inalienable rights of the Moro people have been denied them by the Spanish and American colonialists then by what they call the Manila government post-independence, thus bringing about their marginalization and oppression as a people for centuries up to the present.

This revolutionary war, precisely because it is being waged on just grounds, has been intractable. The most brutal military campaigns and the series of peace talks under several Philippine governments have all failed to quell the Moro separatist armed movement.

This is the objective context in which peace negotiations between the Philippine government and the MILF are being held today. And until an agreement is concluded that addresses the just demands of the Bangsamoro and a final cessation of hostilities and disposition of forces is achieved, fighting can and does flare up even with a ceasefire agreement in place.

A ceasefire can be broken by either side, for various reasons and with varying degrees of seriousness. Ceasefire violations, especially if agreed-upon processes have not been activated to address these, can not be a reason to go on “all-out war”.

President Aquino has rejected the call for his government to go on an “all-out war” against the MILF, something he knows would be unsustainable given the government’s tight fiscal situation and politically untenable as well, what with the US and other foreign governments involved in the GPH-MILF peace talks.

Instead he has coined the phrase “all-out justice” to describe how he chooses to deal with the Basilan military fiasco and satisfy the calls to bring the perpetrators to justice.

He has authorized the AFP to bomb MILF camps in Zamboanga Sibugay and to undertake intensified ground operations in Basilan and Lanao del Norte in order the flush out the supposed perpetrators of the Basilan and subsequent other attacks attributed to alleged bandits/Abu Sayaff/”rogue” MILF commanders.

In this way, he is giving the AFP a face-saving way out of the trouncing they got from the MILF. Yet how can “all-out justice” be attained by means of massive military operations against suspected "criminals" while entire populations are displaced and their rights violated?

In truth, the “all-out justice” call of Mr. Aquino falls squarely under his government’s counterinsurgency program dubbed Oplan Bayanihan. It employs the twin tracks of military operations and socio-economic reform programs under the cover of peace talks supposedly to address the roots of armed conflict between GPH and MILF but only geared towards pacification and cooptation of the MILF.

It allows the military to “punish” the MILF and its civilian mass base for alleged criminal acts while maintaining the illusion of suing for peace.

Meanwhile, peace talks with the MILF, as with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), are actually at a standstill.

In response to the MILF’s toned-down demand for a “substate” or genuine autonomy in lieu of a separate state, the GPH countered with socio-economic projects and an offer to include the MILF in the leadership of the Autonomous Region of Muslin Mindanao whose temporary leaders are to be appointed by Mr. Aquino. This has been rejected by the MILF as completely unacceptable and in fact a negation of all past agreements reached through years of negotiations.

Observers of GPH-MILF peace negotiations, including former GPH panel members, point to GPH difficulty in formulating and presenting a clear and coherent position on major substantive issues in contention.

A main stumbling block is GPH insistence that the agreements be interpreted and implemented in accordance with the GPH constitution and legal processes and the assertion that the GPH is the sole political authority or sovereign power. That is supposedly what is behind the rejection of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) and even the “substate”, also the same rationale behind sending the military and police in force to serve arrest warrants, and now the bombing of MILF camps.

These are concrete examples of the GPH’s Janus-faced position: On one hand, entering into peace negotiations supposedly to seek a just and lasting solution to the armed conflict, "with neither blame nor surrender", tacitly recognizing that the MILF (and NDFP) have legitimate grievances and demands and that their actions in pursuit of their political aims -- including armed opposition -- are not criminal acts; while on the other hand asserting the GPH as lone political authority and its security forces as the lone legal armed forces, etc. thus leading to non-compliance with and violations of bilateral agreements such as the ceasefire agreement in the case of the MILF and the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) in the case of the NDFP.

Mr. Aquino’s cleverly-worded “all-out justice” policy may not be as hare-brained and as obviously doomed-to-fail as the “all-out war” policy to which it is contrasted but it can only lead to more armed conflict in Muslim Mindanao because the peace it espouses is deceptive and hollow. #

Published in Business World

28-29 October 2011

Killing the peace process

2011-10-20T20:03:00.001+08:00

The cold-blooded murder of 59-year-old Italian missionary priest, Fr. Fausto “Pops” Tentorio, who was a champion of indigenous people’s rights, an anti-mining campaigner and a human rights defender, jolts us all to the reality that President Benigno Aquino III's promise of change is nothing but empty rhetoric aimed at deluding the people into complacency and perpetuating the current iniquitous status quo.

Despite the posturing and loud pronouncements for peace and human rights, the Aquino government has done nothing to fundamentally address the real and age-old problems that drive significant numbers of our people to protest and even take up arms against the government. Worse, unarmed advocates and social activists are assassinated with impunity, continuing the pattern and practice of violent suppression of legitimate protest.

In response to resistance by rural communities, especially of peasants and national minorities, to the land grabbing by big mining companies, loggers, landlords and real estate property developers in cahoots with military and civilian government officials, the Philippine government (GPH) utilizes the same-old carrot-and-stick approach, i.e. dole-out and counterinsurgency programs like the Conditional Cash Transfer Program and Payapa at Masaganang Pamayanan or PAMANA (Peaceful and Resilient Communities) and Oplan Bayanihan.

Oplan Bayanihan, which Malacañang claims to be a peace-oriented and people-centered internal security program, in reality gives priority to military campaigns aimed at weakening the New People’s Army and reducing it to “irrelevance”, so that the revolutionary umbrella organization, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) will be forced to lay down its arms and join the mainstream.

The GPH-NDFP peace talks are just so much hot air as far as the Aquino government is concerned.

Government's two-track approach to peace negotiations is based on deception and military force, as underscored by the recent Basilan battle where nineteen government soldiers and six MILF combatants were killed.

Government says it was not violating the existing ceasefire agreement because its troops were merely going to serve an arrest warrant on an MILF commander involved in a 2009 Basilan battle where many soldiers were also killed.

Did the GPH/AFP really expect the MILF forces to sit idly by while the "arrest" was being made and not consider the incursion into their claimed territory to effect that "arrest" an outright attack?

On the one hand the GPH has a ceasefire agreement with the MILF; on the other, it invokes and asserts its authority to arrest any MILF element, even an MILF commander, for what it calls a criminal offense when it fact the act in question is part and parcel of the GPH-MILF armed conflict.

The intent by the military to "arrest" was clearly based on the criminalization of a political act, not unlike the trumped-up charges of criminal offenses (murder, illegal possession of firearms and explosives, arson, etc) versus suspected CPP-NPA-NDF members and sympathizers, including or especially NDFP peace panel consultants.

In the case of the GPH-NDFP peace negotiations, there is the JASIG that explicitly provides for immunity and safety guarantees for those involved in the negotiations. Without the JASIG there could be no peace negotiations because the NDFP cannot risk exposing those people it consults and seeks assistance from to military and police surveillance, harassment, arrest, torture, assassination, etc.

The GPH agreed to the provisions of JASIG. In much the same way, the GPH and MILF have a ceasefire agreement that covers similar situations including alleged violations, and provides for measures to address these.

The GPH has been trying to go around the JASIG and even its own laws and jurisprudence to detain and arrest suspected CPP-NPA-NDFP elements by criminalizing political offenses. For too long a time, the GPH has been getting away with it, what with a political leadership beholden to and relying on the state security forces for support, if not its survival.

The recent Basilan incident is what happens when the GPH carries this tack too far, thinking it could take into custody an MILF officer (as confirmed by the MILF leadership) with a special forces platoon.

More importantly, this throws back into light the question of how the GPH or the Aquino government really intends to bring peace to Mindanao and for that matter the entire country.

As in the GPH-NDFP talks, the GPH has been mouthing ad nauseam the call for a "just and lasting peace" by "addressing the roots of the armed conflict".

But MILF Information Committee deputy chairman Khaled Musa says that OPAPP's PAMANA project which is being pushed in Maguindanao is "nothing but plain and simple counter-insurgency scheme aimed at the hearts and minds of the people".

Furthermore, “(t)he Aquino dispensation through the OPAPP wants to solve the Moro Question and the armed conflict in Mindanao through the PAMANA program while it continues to dilly-dally in the negotiation...The government is not serious in the negotiation."

For its part, the NDFP Peace Panel Spokesperson Fidel Agcaoili says: “The GPH only wants to talk about peace negotiations but not to really negotiate seriously and to forge agreements on basic social, economic and political reforms. It merely wants pacification and capitulation of the revolutionary movement…”

Like the Arroyo regime before it, the Aquino regime set off by raising our people's hopes in the peace process, admitting and vowing to rectify the mistakes of its predecessor.

Close observers of the peace negotiations with the MILF and NDFP will attest to the fact that both have bent backward considerably to "meet the government halfway" so to speak.

From its starting position of independence, the MILF has proposed the Bangsamoro "sub-state" as a compromise political settlement. The NDFP, for its part, proposed as early as 2005 an alliance and truce based on a "concise agreement for an immediate just peace" with provisions that are more bourgeois democratic than socialist.

The Aquino government has rejected both proposals. Instead, it appears poised to scuttle the talks completely and put the blame on the MILF and NDFP even as its spokespersons pay lip service to continuing with the talks.

The conclusion that emerges is that the GPH is not inclined to truly address the roots of the armed conflict through a negotiated settlement. What it is really doing is to implement token development and social services programs to draw away the mass or support base of the MILF and NDFP and intensify military operations to downgrade their military capability until they are compelled to accept a negotiated solution dictated by the GPH.

It is an old, worn-out scheme that is bound to fail again. #

Published in Business World

21-22 October 2011

Ka Roger (1947-2011)

2011-10-13T20:54:00.001+08:00

Gregorio ‘Ka Roger” Rosal, widely known as the spokesperson of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army, is dead at the age of 64 years, from a heart attack; he died somewhere in a “guerilla zone”, according to the press release issued by the CPP’s Information Bureau. His passing deserves more than a footnote in this nation’s history of a people striving to achieve an independent, just, egalitarian, and prosperous society amidst entrenched poverty and backwardness, exploitation and oppression.

Ka Roger’s homely yet perennially smiling face with his trademark Mao cap; his plain-talking, hard-hitting and infectiously humorous broadcasts explaining the different facets of the armed revolutionary movement or demolishing the Philippine military’s disinformation campaigns; and the many stories about his model life as a committed communist cadre, a red fighter, a Filipino patriot and a man of the masses are all being recounted in the underground, mainstream and electronic media.

Who was Ka Roger that his death would sadden ordinary folk, even those who did not know him personally or the details of his colorful life as a revolutionary?

Why did the Philippine military -- that had launched numerous campaigns to hunt him down, put a five-million-peso bounty on his head, slapped countless trumped-up charges against him and even engineered the abduction of his daughter to force him to surrender – feel compelled to issue an official statement of “sympathy” to his family?

Gregorio Rosal was born to a poor peasant family: his parents were farm workers in a small sugarcane plantation in Batangas. Because of poverty, he left school at an early age working as a house help and later as an itinerant peddler to help support his family. He was only able to step into college at the age of 24 in 1971, in Batangas City, during a time of great unrest and activism for Filipino youth and students.

Eventually, Rosal became caught up in the awakening of his generation: he became a member of the Kabataang Makabayan, a militant national democratic youth organization founded by Prof. Jose Ma. Sison in 1964. By the time martial law was declared in 1972, he had already left school to organize sugar mill workers in his province, was arrested and eventually joined a daring escape from a prison in a military camp.

Once free, Rosal literally went to the hills to join the New People’s Army and he never came down since. His direct contributions to the growth of the revolutionary movement in the entire Southern Tagalog region were so significant that he was eventually promoted to responsible positions of party leadership at various levels in that region.

Ka Roger was also witness to dark chapter in the history of the revolutionary movement in Southern Tagalog, what is referred to as Operation Missing Link, an anti-deep penetration agent campaign that led to violations of democratic rights. According to the movement’s accounts, “(a)lthough he had no direct role…Ka Roger was among those criticized and meted disciplinary action because of his accountability as one of the region's leading cadres and his failure to take a stand against the hysteria. He criticized himself for this with all humility.”

Ka Roger’s highly commendable stint as the spokesperson of the Southern Tagalog Melito Glor Command of the NPA earned him the heavy responsibility of being appointed in 1993 as head of the CPP Information Bureau and the party national spokesperson.

The CPP Central Committee hailed Ka Roger as “indefatigable in bringing news of the Philippine revolution. He would hike for days, cross rivers and seas and go on long road trips to get to wherever he was needed. He granted almost all requests for interviews, any day and at any hour” thus gaining for himself many friends in the mass media.

Further, the Central Committee said, “The ability and patience, the sharpness and intelligence, the patriotism and love of country demonstrated by Ka Roger further raised the prestige of the Party and the revolutionary movement.”

Prof. Jose Ma Sison, founding chairperson of the CPP, had this to say of Ka Roger: “Ka Roger was the frequent voice of the Philippine revolution and the Filipino people…(H)e had a clear and direct style that expressed in simple terms for the benefit of the masses the most complex situations and analysis.”

Ka Roger stood out as a very unassuming leader who, for all the fame he had attained among the revolutionary forces and the general public, remained consistently modest and un-self conscious till the very end.

According to a comrade and friend, Ka Roger was not only humble as a person, he exuded a sense of knowing his rightful place in the people’s movement, in the larger-than-life story of the people’s struggle for national and social liberation. Thus he would assume no airs in this regard.

Those outside the movement who had the privilege of meeting Ka Roger are one in calling attention to his many endearing qualities: his liveliness and sense of humor; his sincerity and honesty in delivering his message; his simplicity and embrace of the hard life of a guerilla.

His sharp mind and clear explanations are the hallmarks of a natural intellectual, someone who had gained wisdom not just from books but from a lifetime of service to the people especially, the downtrodden masses.

His musical talent and inclinations he also put to good use to demonstrate the humanity and creativity of hard-boiled revolutionaries.

Ka Roger’s unwavering commitment to revolutionary ideals and aspirations as expressed in the hardships he endured, the sacrifices cheerfully undertaken, his refusal to bow to or give in to both military pressures and enticements for him to surrender even when he was already very sick gained the respect, if not admiration, of many, even those who may not have agreed with him.

By his storied life be brought fresh meaning to what it means to be a revolutionary.

The Philippine revolutionary movement and the Filipino people mourn Ka Roger’s untimely death. Yet like all human beings whose lives have made an indelible mark, his passing will only serve to immortalize his legacy.

Younger generations of revolutionaries and activists continue to gain inspiration and real life lessons from Ka Roger’s compelling narrative. #

Published in Business World

14-15 October 2011

Protests are good

2011-09-29T19:30:00.001+08:00

The protracted global economic depression is sending the economies of even advanced capitalist countries such as the United States and members of the European Union on a tailspin. Despite fits of financial convulsions due to the bursting of economic bubbles and now EU countries threatening to default on their sovereign debts if not bailed out, most official quarters still minimize the extent and depth of the crisis of global capitalism.

But the average person on the street in the perennially underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East as well as the most advanced capitalist countries in the West knows from experience that this global economic depression is for real.

It is making life harder and harder even for the touted “middle class”. Worse it is unclear how or when the crisis will end and how or if the people’s situation will improve.

All over the world, what is becoming exceedingly clear for a growing number of working people and their families – wage workers, salaried employees and the bourgeoning underclass of unemployed, under-employed and self-employed individuals trying to scrape together a living – is that they are being made to unfairly bear the burden of this crisis.

And they are fighting back. They are demanding changes that mean something to them and are not mere empty promises.

In this country, students, teachers and school officials are marching in the streets to decry budget cuts for state colleges and universities. Health care workers are up in arms over slashed budgets of public hospitals and public health programs.

They denounce the Aquino government’s budget priorities: debt servicing, conditional cash transfers aka dole-outs and military outlays that go down the drain of corruption and failed counter-insurgency programs.

They reject the privatization and commercialization of basic social services such as education, health care and housing and public utilities such as water, electricity and public transport.

Militant transport workers, in particular jeepney drivers and operators, along with the riding public have staged protests and strikes to dramatize their opposition to run away oil prices. They attribute this to the foreign and domestic oil cartel and speculators in the oil futures market manipulating the oil price and raking in super profits, together with the oil deregulation law and the national government’s “hands-off” policy even as it collects windfall value-added-tax on higher oil prices.

The protesters are demanding the scrapping of deregulation policies, centralized government procurement of crude oil to take advantage of the cheapest prices, the scrapping of VAT on oil and for the government to take the commanding heights of developing a sustainable and people-oriented energy policy that is free from foreign domination and control.

Workers are on a warpath against the policy of contractualization that is ravaging their jobs, security of tenure, wages and benefits leading to labor being at the complete mercy of capital. They are calling for the implementation of the twin policies of land reform and national industrialization to optimize the utilization of the country’s natural and human resources and to create jobs and livelihoods for the army of unemployed and underemployed, especially the youth.

Homeless people living in shanty colonies in urban centers are resisting spontaneously against violent demolitions of their make-do residences only to be literally thrown into the streets. They reject so-called government cum private development projects which exclude them but instead cater to commercial and financial big business interests.

In the US, there have been work stoppages and mass protests over lay-offs, budget cuts, withdrawal of entitlements and subsidies both in the public and private sectors. Migrant workers and other immigrants have denounced job discrimination, police racial profiling and severe restrictions as well as harassment from immigration authorities.

Fed-up ordinary Americans are staging an ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” campaign wherein hundreds if not thousands of people have been conducting a daily sit-in protest at the heart of the financial district in New York City, pointing their fingers at the behemoths of finance capital for their economic dislocation and immiseration.

Greece, Spain, France and Italy have witnessed hordes of their people pouring out into the streets to reject government austerity measures after the public coffers have been emptied in bail-outs for the banks and other financial institutions and other failed neo-liberal policies as well as profligacy of their ruling elites. They are also demanding jobs and social justice against the corporate elite and their political backers who continue to control the highest levers of power.

In North Africa and the Middle East, the political upheavals that have removed or are trying to depose entrenched authoritarian regimes continue. The workers and youth in Egypt, for example, will not settle for the mere removal of their previous ruler, Mubarak, but are calling for his trial and those of his cohorts to account for their crimes against the people.

They reject the military’s hold on power and demand greater political representation of ordinary people in decision-making. They call for an end to failed policies that have only managed to deepen their people’s impoverishment and misery and the backwardness and stagnation of their economy. They vigorously call the US to account for backing the Mubarak regime and its policy of rapprochement with the Zionists in Israel.

Sooner than expected, the real objectives of US-NATO in invading Libya are revealed. For one, Libya is being turned into their newest field of investment (read: dumping ground of surplus capital), with the IMF-World Bank "asked" to "rehabilitate" the Libyan economy using the billions of dollars the Libyan government has invested in foreign banks, and to repair its infrastructure damaged by the US-NATO bombings.

All these developments are rooted in the inability of the global capitalist system to fully recover from the global economic crisis triggered by the financial meltdown in 2007-08. The continuing and intensifying paroxysms in the very centers of capital belie all claims that the world economy has recovered or is on the way to recovery.

This is not at all surprising since none of the neoliberal policies that have brought about the crisis has been reversed. Measures have not been put in place for regulating transactions in financial derivative long identified as one of the major culprits that brought about the meltdown. Worse, the US and European governments, invariably beholden to and directed by finance capital, continue to conspire to this day in diverting public funds meant for housing, education and other basic social services to rescue the latter.

Corporate media and bourgeois propaganda may have succeeded for some time in conjuring the illusion of recovery and brighter times ahead, the reality of continuing joblessness, rising prices and loss of social security inevitably catches up and bursts whatever bubble of false hope remains.

Thus while it can be argued that the people’s protests are long overdue and still need to gain strength and momentum, these have so far been the only forces that have mitigated the greed and avarice of the big capitalists and their agents in the bureaucracies.

In the medium and long run, they are bound to grow and gain more strength as the crisis worsens and the hardships become more intolerable worldwide. #

Published in Business World

30 Sept - 1 October 2011

“Kano ang boss ko!”

2011-09-22T16:37:00.001+08:00

It is supreme irony that while Filipinos were commemorating the declaration of martial law 39 years ago by the US backed-dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos and calling for the release of hundreds of political prisoners, the son of the most prominent victim of martial law, Philippine President Benigno “Noynoy”Aquino, was being given a pat on the back by US President Barack Obama, the current chief representative of the imperialist superpower that benefitted the most from the fascist dictatorship.

Another irony, the presidential spokesperson had the effrontery to declare that there are no political prisoners under the Aquino regime, a grim reminder of how Marcos had denied the existence of tens of thousands of dissidents, opposition leaders and ordinary people who suffered unjust detention under his thirteen years of iron-fisted rule.

“Never again to martial law!” In order for this defiant pledge to be fully grasped and wielded as a battle cry by today’s younger generations the most important lessons of martial rule must be tirelessly recalled and taught over and over again.

One major aspect sorely lacking in write-ups on martial law, by even those who lived under its shadow or were directly victimized by it, are references to how foreign big business and big power interests, chiefly those of the US, colluded and collaborated with Marcos and his coterie of generals, cronies, technocrats and apologists, to impose martial rule and reap its benefits.

The billions of pesos Marcos and his ilk plundered by dipping into the public treasury as if it were his piggy bank; cornering overpriced development projects funded by foreign loans; grabbing lands from peasant and small land-owning communities and turning these into touted “development” projects; or by simply taking over the businesses of his political opponents have been amply written about.

What is sidelined is the fact that foreign multinational corporations which were business partners and financiers of the Marcos clique profited immensely from the behest loans, big-ticket government projects and other mind-boggling scams engineered by the dictatorship not to mention the economic policies favoring foreign monopoly capital that it implemented.

The over-the-top costs of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (including fat commissions to Marcos and Disini, super profits for Westinghouse, and juicy interest fees for the banks that syndicated the loan) easily comes to mind. The same goes true for billions worth of onerous foreign debts incurred by the dictatorship that generations of Filipinos have had to pay for.

Marcos curried favor with western, chiefly US, imperialist powers by protecting their economic and politico-military interests in the country.

For one, the Laurel-Langley and Parity Agreements granting parity rights to US citizens. (i.e. equal economic rights with Filipinos) were to expire in 1974. Two Supreme Court rulings, the Quasha and Lusteveco decisions that went sharply against US business interests were set aside by martial rule.

The treaty to normalize trade relations with Japan was stalled in the legislature by nationalists; an investigation into the operations of foreign oil companies was being spearheaded by the eminent nationalist Senator Jose Diokno; and the 1971 constitutional convention counted among its ranks outspoken nationalists as well. Martial law swept aside all these threats to foreign big business interests.

There was no word of caution much less criticism from the US or other so-called Western democracies when martial law was declared. Foreign chambers of commerce immediately lauded and gave their unqualified support for it accepting Marcos’ justifications, i.e. quelling security threats from the communists, Moro secessionists and “rightists” and “reforming society”.

US military bases in the country operated unhampered during martial rule. Philippine foreign policy hewed closely to that of the US such as support for the US wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and aggression in other countries such as in Chile with the US-engineered overthrow of the democratically-elected Allende government and its replacement with the Pinochet military dictatorship.

The US justified backing for Marcos authoritarian rule as a means to ensure stability in the face of a growing communist-led “insurgency” and heightened nationalism. Military bases and a US-friendly government were definitely more important than the preservation of “imperfect” democratic institutions such as a free press, Congress and a social order that upholds human rights and civil liberties.

It was only when the Marcos fascist dictatorship became extremely isolated after the assassination of Marcos’ arch-enemy Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino - to the point that a broad anti-dictatorship front that included people’s organizations, the bourgeois opposition, the Catholic hierarchy, the revolutionary forces under the umbrella of the CPP-NPA-NDFP and rebellious young officers and soldiers of the armed forces was ranged against it - did the US drop their long-nurtured puppet like a hot potato.

The US quickly repositioned itself to support the anti-Marcos, pro-US opposition rallying behind Ninoy’s widow Cory Aquino and began whitewashing its totally self-serving, unprincipled and bloodied backing for the fallen Marcos. Thus the US basked in the glow of the people power uprising of 1986 and was back in business supporting a new but no less subservient client regime.

All this is consistent with the US record of backing up dictators, tyrants, despots while they serve its geopolitical and economic interests, and deposing, overthrowing and even assassinating sovereign heads of state not to its liking.

More so now under the guise of the so-called war on terror, the US, mainly through the CIA and Special Operations Forces as spearhead of its mighty high-tech war machine, has been committing flagrant violations of international law and human rights all over the world with absolute impunity.

In this light, the Obama-Aquino meeting on the day of the anniversary of the imposition of a US-directed dictatorship in the Philippines is nothing more than a reaffirmation of the continuing collaboration of the local ruling classes and US imperialism in further exploiting and oppressing the Filipino people, disguised as a lasting partnership for peace, security and development in the country.

If anything, what has endured is the odious legacy of poverty and backwardness, oppression and state forces committing crimes and human rights violations with impunity. The incessant hikes in oil prices, deepening poverty and the continuing detention of hundreds of political prisoners are daily reminders of this enduring collaboration.

Whatever their differences, and there are quite a few, Macoy and Pnoy have one, and the most important thing, in common -- "Kano ang boss ko!” #

Published in Business World

23-24 September 2011

Lessons from September 16

2011-09-15T16:45:00.002+08:00

When I am asked here or abroad what are the two outstanding achievements of the Philippine mass movement in the 20th century, without thinking twice I declare it is the ouster of the dictator Marcos through a people’s uprising in 1986 and the booting out of US military bases through the Philippine Senate rejection of a new treaty in 1991.

Today marks the 20th year of the RP-US Bases Treaty rejection and it is worthwhile to celebrate and be proud of this shining accomplishment.

We Filipinos did it through consistent struggle, through the mass movement that spanned more than half a century (counting the anti-colonial struggles of the 30’s) and the forging of the broadest anti-bases formations that delivered the coup de grace to this glaring vestige of US colonialism in Asia. Against the unrelenting efforts by the US and President Cory Aquino to simultaneously cajole and pressure the Senate, 12 senators stood up for national sovereignty and the larger national interest.

BAYAN convened a few days ago, September 14, a gathering of Filipino nationalists -- young and not-so-young, street parliamentarians and activist legislators as well as veteran and budding progressive artists -- for a forum to rededicate themselves to the cause of freedom from foreign, specifically, US military presence.

According to Prof. Roland Simbulan, “(T)he non-concurrence by the Philippine Senate of the proposed treaty that was to extend the U.S. bases for another 10 years after the expiration of the 1947 RP-U.S. Military Bases Agreement…was a historic feat because it marked the shutting down and dismantling of the largest U.S. overseas military naval and air force bases that were located on Philippine soil since 1901.”

Nathanael Santiago, BAYAN Deputy Secretary-General during this tumultuous period attributed the resounding victory to four major factors: 1) the persistent and painstaking efforts to awaken nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiments among the people; 2) the struggle to overthrow the US-backed Marcos dictatorship; 3) the unification and mobilization of the broadest array of anti-bases, anti-nukes and anti-treaty forces; and 4) the sustained political campaign that saw huge and militant demonstrations attesting to growing public opinion against the bases.

Senator Wigberto Tañada, staunchest of the 12 senators who voted down the bases treaty, recounted how they were derided by pro-bases quarters as the “Dirty Dozen”. After the vote, they were toasted by the media and the general public as the “Magnificent 12” who took that fateful stand and struck the chord for national independence and sovereignty.

Mr. Tañada told the gathering of his proudest moment when his then ailing father, the venerable nationalist, Senator Lorenzo Tañada, sat in a wheelchair in the Senate gallery during the suspenseful vote to witness and take part in the victory of the lofty cause he had fought so hard to attain since the 1950s.

But he categorically concluded that the fight did not end twenty years ago. The Cold War vintage Mutual Defense Treaty and The RP-US Military Assistance Pact together with the post-bases treaty Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and Mutual Logistics and Support Arrangement (MLSA) remain and must be abrogated.

These provide the legal and political infrastructure to justify and pave the way for the permanent presence of hundreds of US troops; the prepositioning of US armaments, war vessels and aircraft and related equipment; year-round cooperation between US and Philippine Armed Forces ostensibly for training and joint exercises and civil military operations under the cover of humanitarian assistance and peace and development projects.

Current BAYAN Secretary General, Renato Reyes, titled his presentation “It’s like they never left”. He expounded on how the US and all the post-bases regimes – Cory Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada, Gloria Arroyo and now Benigno Aquino – conspired to ensure the virtual return of US military bases in a form more pernicious and more of an affront to Philippine sovereignty than ever before.

He cited the VFA and MLSA as legal instruments that allow the stationing of US troops and war materiel in Philippine territory with very little regulation and oversight. He decried the fact that the VFA has an unspecified duration; does not specify or limit the number of troops allowed entry into the Philippines; does not specify or limit the areas in the Philippines that the “visiting” troops can access; and does not specify or limit the activities of the “visiting” troops.

The MLSA on the other hand allows the US Armed Force to access and utilize a wide-array of services for its civil-military operations from the Philippines as host country without having to set up the requisite physical and personnel infrastructure.

In short, “US troops are back and are digging in.”

The US has in fact established the US Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTF-P) that is headquartered in the Western Mindanao Command’s Camp Navarro in Zamboanga City. The activities of the JSOTF-P are kept from the public eye and access to its headquarters is highly restricted even for Philippine military and civilian officials. Moreover, the JSOTF-P is a ubiquitous presence especially in Western Mindanao where it partners with the USAID to spearhead civil-military operations under the auspices of the so-called Growth with Equity in Mindanao (GEM) programs.

Recently Wikileaks released a US embassy cable dated April 2007 explicitly describing the Philippines as "currently the focal point of our counterterrorism fight in the region". It proposes five projects in Southwestern Mindanao for "dual-use" facilities, i.e. useful both for military and civilian purposes. This revelation provides concrete examples and proof of continuing and permanent US military presence and activity in the Philippines twenty years after the Filipino people expelled the US bases from Philippine territory.

So far, the Aquino regime has not taken a single step, not even uttered a single word in the direction of reclaiming the victory marked by September 16, 1991. In this regard President Benigno Aquino is following closely his mother’s subservient example.

Clearly, while the September 16 Senate vote was historic because it capped the victory of the decades-long struggle for sovereignty and against US bases, it was by no means the end of the struggle.

For so long as the country is ruled by a political elite beholden to the US, who cannot shake off the US economic shackles and who can only find security under the protection of a foreign military power that it calls an "ally", the lessons of the anti-bases struggle retain their relevance and power to inspire a new generation of Filipino nationalists and anti-imperialists. #

Published in Business World

16-17 September 2011

Who's afraid of immediate peace?

2011-09-01T09:20:00.003+08:00

In marked contrast to the positive and hopeful outcome of the GPH-NDFP peace talks that resumed in February of this year, an impasse has now indefinitely delayed the holding of the second round of formal talks originally scheduled for June.

What has led to this impasse and how can it be overcome?

The GPH fired the opening salvoes with its chief negotiator Atty. Alexander Padilla accusing the NDFP of setting “preconditions” for the second round of talks, specifically, the release of all or most of 17 NDFP consultants protected by the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) before the formal talks resume. He and presidential spokesperson Lacierda claimed that the GPH was under no obligation to release said consultants since these constituted mere “confidence-building measures” that the GPH could unilaterally choose not to undertake.

The NDFP countered that these releases are part of what was agreed upon in the initial round of talks; it is clearly stated in the February 21, 2011 Joint Statement that the GPH would work for the expeditious release "before the second round of formal talks, subject to verification as provided in the JASIG Supplemental Agreement dated June 26, 1996, or on the basis of humanitarian and other practical reasons (underscoring ours)".

The NDFP underscored that it was only for the second time in the history of the GPH-NDFP peace negotiations that it had asked for a postponement of the formal talks to allow the GPH time “to fulfill its obligations and comply with solemn agreements”.

More ominously, Mr. Padilla recently announced that the JASIG is “inoperative” and that “they (rebels) cannot cite it now.” The NDFP had allegedly violated JASIG by depositing encrypted electronic copies of the photographs of the NDFP consultants along with their assumed names instead of actual photographs in a designated bank safety deposit box in The Netherlands.

The NDFP, in the presence of GPH representatives and Norwegian Facilitator, had been unable to open the encrypted files. The NDFP attributed this to the likelihood that the decryption keys may have been corrupted since these were seized by the Dutch government when the NDFP office and residences of NDFP leaders and staffers were simultaneously raided on August 28, 2007. Furthermore, only 4 out 5 diskettes containing the keys were returned to the NDFP.

As a consequence, additional verification utilizing the said photos can not be resorted to at this time until the NDFP is able to reconstruct its list of holders of “documents of identification”.

The NDFP asserts that there is no provision in JASIG that absolutely requires the deposit of hard copies of the photos. As a security measure, the NDFP had to transport these highly sensitive and otherwise incriminating files as encrypted soft copies so as to avoid their being accessed by unauthorized persons and possibly used to cause the arrest or worse, the extra judicial killing, of said DI holders.

NDFP legal counsels further point to well established legal jurisprudence that electronic and encrypted documents are deemed identical to and of the same value as the documents themselves.

Thus the GPH accusation that the NDFP had violated JASIG has no leg to stand on.

The Philippine Peace Center recalls that “in practice, since 1995, the GRP (now GPH) and the NDFP have been able to determine or agree on the accreditation of persons arrested and detained by the GPH and effect their release without having to open the safety deposit box containing the photographs.” The five NDFP consultants released since January are the latest concrete examples of these. Ergo the resort to such verification is also not an absolute necessity and itself is subject to the mutual decision of both parties.

In truth it is the GPH that grossly violates JASIG by Mr. Padilla’s one-sided and arbitrary pronouncement that JASIG is “inoperative”. JASIG provides that only the principals of either side may terminate the agreement by issuing a notice 30 days in advance before such termination takes effect. This stands to reason to allow all those involved in the peace negotiations time to secure themselves before JASIG loses its effectiveness.

The picture that emerges is that the GPH is utilizing all sorts of excuses and ruses in order to renege on its obligation to release all or most of the previously identified NDFP consultants before talks resume. We can only surmise that the hardliners have gained the upper hand on the GPH side and wish to use these political prisoners as leverage for bargaining in the talks.

Since it is unimaginable that the GPH peace panel could be ignorant of JASIG provisions, it also appears now that the seemingly “foolish” statements of Mr. Padilla may actually be calculated to cause a collapse of the peace talks while sticking the blame on the NDFP.

From numerous public statements on both sides, we are aware that the NDFP has forwarded to President Benigno Aquino III a bold proposal that could cut short the time for arriving at a comprehensive political settlement with the NDFP.

In a nutshell, the NDFP is offering a “truce and alliance” with the GPH. The proposal was first issued in August 2005 in the form of a "Concise Agreement for an Immediate and Just Peace" as a counterproposal to persistent GPH demands for an indefinite ceasefire for the entire duration of the talks. While it sounds like a watered down version of the NDFP Programme, a close study shows it is at the same time basically consistent with and echoes principles enshrined in the Philippine Constitution.

In a statement issued in August 27, 2009, the NDFP describes the proposed agreement as "statements of principles and policies in the national and democratic interest of the Filipino people". The statement declared, "The civil war ends and a just peace begins as soon as the GRP co-signs this 10-point concise but comprehensive peace agreement with the NDFP. Alliance and truce become the modus vivendi of the GRP and the NDFP."

This offer was reiterated last January in a discreet letter to Mr. Aquino, with further elaboration on concrete immediately doable measures including new political instruments such as a Council of Peace and Development, cooperation in undertaking industrial projects, offering to buy big landholdings so that landlords may invest into these industrial projects, the New People’s Army being assigned to "guard the environment and industrial projects", etc.

Could it be that this out-of-the-box proposal from the NDFP is pulling the rug from under the GPH in the sense that it has the real potential to excite and draw support from a wide array of classes and sectors including sections of the ruling elite who are interested in putting an end to the armed conflict, the sooner the better?

Does the GPH find itself perplexed and unable to respond to this challenge from the NDFP knowing full well that not doing so could make it the spoiler or the villain in the peace process. This would be so both in the eyes of the Filipino people as well as the international community supporting the fruitful end result of the peace negotiations.

If such is the case, peace advocates need to intervene and help avert the collapse of the GPH-NDFP peace negotiations. They must demand and help see to it that the bilateral agreements are respected and complied with. They must work double time in exposing not only the hard-line yet untenable positions of the GPH in the peace negotiations but also its short-sighted, cowardly and doomed-to-fail approach amply demonstrated and ably executed by the GPH peace panel through its voluble chair, Mr. Padilla. #

Published in Business World

2-3 September 2011

Not yet over

2011-08-26T20:58:00.001+08:00

One thing stands out in the six-month military campaign of the US and NATO to overthrow the Libyan government, assassinate or capture Strongman Moammar Kadhafi, install a puppet regime, take control of substantial oil and gas deposits, and carve out a strategic sphere of influence directly under imperialist control in Africa. It is how three global institutions - the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the international media - have been transformed into instruments and willing accomplices to justify war crimes against a sovereign state and people.

Soon after the outbreak of armed clashes between government and anti-government forces, UN Security Council Resolution 1970 (2011) imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on Kadhafi, his family members and high government officials; this included the freezing of the assets of the Libyan state itself and an arms embargo on Libya. This was followed by Resolution 1973 (2011, authorizing all UN member states to undertake "all necessary measures" for the protection of civilians and for the enforcement of a "no fly zone" in Libya’s airspace.

What we are seeing is how the US and NATO have cynically used and even blatantly violated these same resolutions to justify the bombardment of non-military targets like television stations and communications towers, highly populated residential areas, even schools and hospitals, causing untold civilian casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure.

NATO’s arming and training of anti-government groups, its use of drones, helicopter gunfire and special commando forces on the ground in the final assault on Tripoli, together with continuous bombings in order to batter and eventual overwhelm the defenses of the Kadhafi bastion can by no stretch of the imagination be called “protecting civilians”.

In fact, the hospitals in Tripoli are bursting at the seams with maimed and dying civilians and the damage to water and electricity systems have further compromised the capacity of these medical facilities to cope with the humanitarian crisis.

The National Transition Council - a hodge-podge of monarchists, defectors from the Kadhafi regime (who should be held responsible as much as Kadhafi for the sins of the past dispensation), Islamist groups with proven links to Al Qaeda, ex-Libyan soldiers caught in Kadhafi’s war against Chad and organized by the CIA and MI-6 to undertake assassination missions against Kadhafi, and Libyan exiles in Britain and elsewhere - was held up by Britain, France, the US and other NATO countries as the legitimate opposition in Libya not long after the bombardments began.

The NTC provided the thin façade of a politically valid and viable Libyan opposition to which the US and NATO could relate to and shortly recognize officially as the successor government to the Kadhafi regime even when the anti-government forces had yet to succeed in toppling it.

The International Criminal Court’s issuance of warrants of arrest for Kadhafi, his sons and other government officials who had not broken with Kadhafi for alleged “crimes against humanity” despite meager basis helped give a legal patina to the incessant campaign by Britain, France, the US and eventually other NATO countries to demonize Kadhafi and delegitimize the Libyan government. At the same time, it merely added Gadhafi to its growing list of alleged "rogues" charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide and ordered arrested - the common denominator being persons whom the US and its allies dislike.

The ICC in no small way contributed to politically and diplomatically isolating the Kadhafi regime. At the height of the NATO assault on Tripoli, the ICC even allowed itself to be utilized in spreading anti-government disinformation calculated to break the morale of pro-government forces and Tripoli residents. It announced that Seif al-Islam, Kadhafi’s son, had already been arrested by the insurgent groups and would be turned over to the ICC but this was later proven to be false. A rebel leader had admitted that this false report had contributed considerably to the collapse of government defenses.

The US ruling elites have learned valuable lessons from the Vietnam War about how to keep the painful truth about war from the American people. US public opinion turned against the war after the Tet offensive, which the US won militarily, but proved to be a propaganda debacle with countless body bags containing dead US servicemen being shown on US television.

Mass media coverage of the My Lai massacre and other gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law by the US military also fueled anti-war sentiment, protests and the “conscientious objectors” movement of Americans who evaded having to serve in Vietnam.

Thus international media coverage of the Iraq War in 2003 was strictly confined to “embedded journalists” who reported on the war from the vantage point and under the supervision of the invading US army.

In the case of the foreign-backed insurgency in Libya and the US-NATO war of aggression, international media were allowed by the Libyan government to cover what was happening. The reporters were free to cover both sides of the conflict and the so-called US-NATO “humanitarian intervention”.

Instead, those from the big media outlets such as CNN, BBC, Reuters and even the Qatari-based Al Jazeera chose, as one analyst put it, “to obfuscate the casualties and human suffering of the Libyan people and uphold the humanitarian fiction of NATO’s R2P (responsibility to protect) mandate.”

According to an eyewitness form the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), after a particularly devastating bombing that killed many people and leveled houses, the only members of the international press that reported the damage of the bombings in detail were Russia Today (RT), TeleSUR, Chinese Central Television (CCTV), and independent journalists.

When the mainstream press reported on NATO’s military operations in Libya as well as mounting casualties there is scant mention about who are to blame for the civilians killed. NATO claims that their military strikes are pinpoint and their targets highly select are accepted with hardly any question despite evidence to the contrary.

There is wide coverage of so-called rebel forces who are positively described as “freedom fighters” (the way the US government used to call the counter-revolutionary forces in Nicaragua that they had set up to fight the Sandinista government that had toppled the dictator Somoza) obscuring the fact that many of them were organized, funded, armed, trained and even commanded in the field by NATO.

Pro-government forces and ordinary Libyans supportive of Kadhafi and opposed to the NATO invasion are depicted as few and dwindling, paid mercenaries, or simply brainwashed by government propaganda.

This kind of selective, biased and even in some cases, outright fabrication of news, that the mainstream media has dished out on the Libyan situation is no doubt largely responsible for the relatively weak anti-invasion protest movement in the US, Europe and elsewhere.

In due time it will be shown that Kadhafi, just as Saddam and the Taliban, was not the evil tyrant ripe for “regime change” that the US and its fellow imperialist powers in Europe together with the international media painted him to be.

The US-NATO invasion and likely occupation of Libya (to be justified as a means to stabilize the post-Kadhafi situation and allow the oil rigs to start pumping again) will invariably be met by prolonged armed opposition as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another quagmire for the aggressors.

With institutions like the UN, ICC and media losing their credibility and ability to serve as deterrents to foreign aggression and the wanton commission of war crimes, it appears armed resistance emerges as the only weapon and defense for the victims of imperialist aggression and armed intervention. #

Published in Business World

26-27 2011

Poisoning the air

2011-08-18T09:20:00.001+08:00

Of late the Aquino government’s peace panel negotiating with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) has aggressively stepped up its propaganda offensive against the NDFP and the latter’s main component organizations, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army (CPP/NPA).

This is a departure from the enlightened practice of previous panels (both GPH and NDFP) to refrain from acerbic or heated public exchanges, especially in the mass media, at crucial junctures such as before and after formal talks. It also stands in contrast to the conduct of the GPH panel negotiating with the MILF, which has prudently refrained from ventilating in public whatever problems it may have with the MILF and its armed groups.

The GPH has been shrill in demanding that the NDFP prove its “sincerity” and “seriousness” in the peace negotiations. No less than President Benigno Aquino and GPH Panel Chair Atty. Alex Padilla have echoed what only the AFP-PNP spokespersons and other hawks in government have been wont to raise ad nauseam whenever prospects for formal talks improve.

The current word war between the GPH and the NDFP stems from the former’s lack of compliance with the agreement to release the remaining NDFP consultants and personnel involved in the peace negotiations from detention. This has in fact resulted in the postponement of the second round of formal talks which were originally scheduled for June 2011.

The heated exchange has spilled over to the New People’s Army’s detention of four BJMP guards captured in what the NDFP considers a legitimate military operation and a mayor and his two bodyguards arrested by the NPA to face charges in a People's Court. The former have been granted the status of “prisoners-of-war” in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, to which the NDFP has declared its adherence, while the latter are reportedly undergoing investigation by a People’s Court for their “culpability with respect to charges of involvement in armed operations of the AFP, PNP and other armed units of the GPH against the NPA and the local population".

In attempting to draw attention away from its obligation to release most if not all JASIG-protected persons before the next round of formal talks and instead put the NDFP in a bad light, the GPH muddles the issues, poisons the air and in effect hampers the process of getting the negotiations back on track.

Mr. Padilla asserts, “The government is under no obligation to release all detainees as requested by NDF. What was stated in the Oslo Joint Statement is that the government will work for their release, meaning, subject to verification and after undergoing due process.”

According to the 18 January 2011 Joint Communiqué signed by the Parties in Oslo: “The GPH Panel agreed to work for the expeditious release (underscoring ours) of detained NDFP consultants and other JASIG protected persons in compliance with the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) and in the spirit of goodwill.”

Mr. Padilla's statement obscures the fact that (1) at least eight of these detainees have been acknowledged by the previous GPH panel as JASIG-protected persons, (2) many of the consultants were arrested after the Arroyo regime had unilaterally suspended the JASIG in violation of the provisions of JASIG. (3) these consultants, like most political prisoners, are falsely charged with criminal offenses based on fabricated evidences, and (3) at least one, Tirso Alcantara, is publicly known to be involved in the peace negotiations and was arrested and detained after the GPH had declared its restoration of JASIG.

Now Mr. Padilla has the effrontery to question the NDFP’s “sincerity” when the latter seeks postponement of talks in order to give the GPH time to act in accordance with its word.

The GPH Panel goes on to declare that the NDFP cannot act like a state or a belligerent force because no one has accorded it that status. But no amount of declaration or denial by the GPH can reverse the fact that the NDFP wields political authority over a sizable territory with a significant population and responsibly commands an armed force that adheres to international law.

The CPP-NPA has, in the course of its armed revolutionary struggle against the GPH, gained sufficient political and military strength and popular mass support in order to seize captives in battle, be they military, paramilitary or police personnel, who are eventually accorded by the CPP-NPA-NDFP the status of prisoners of war.

They also undertake peacekeeping operations in areas that they have under their control to the extent that they can put under detention government officials who are alleged to have committed crimes against the people and try them in their revolutionary courts.

This is something the GPH can neither deny, discount nor denounce away. It is par for the course in a situation of unabated armed conflict where the revolutionary forces under the umbrella of the NDFP are able to operate to a significant extent as a “shadow government”.

And this is precisely part of the reason why the GPH is impelled to enter into peace negotiations with the NDFP in the first place: their forces and the constituency they represent are sizeable, irrepressible and, most importantly, are fighting for a rationale and viable political program that is a serious challenge to the existing order that the GPH upholds and protects.

The NDFP has assured the GPH that the NPA has a proven track record of treating its POWs “in accordance with the 1969 Basic Rules of the New People's Army, international humanitarian law, the CARHRIHL and within its capabilities and circumstances” and cites former POWs themselves and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as witness to this.

The CPP explains: “By according POW status to the four (BJMP) personnel, the NPA custodial unit is required by international protocols to ensure their health and welfare, respect their democratic rights, ensure communication with their families and work for their eventual release with the help of third party interceders.”

It would seem that the release of the four is only a matter of time and ensuring proper security arrangements. To this end, the facilitating role of the ICRC, trustworthy personages from the churches, national and local government and peace advocacy groups must be encouraged.

As to Lingig town Mayor Henry Dano and his two bodyguards, the CPP said that they are “presumed innocent until proven guilty…have the right to counsel and enjoy other basic legal rights as provided for in the Rules on Establishing the People’s Democratic Government.” The NDFP and NPA's declarations could be taken as an assurance that they will keep to their word or risk public censure.

Mr. Padilla may appear to be a skillful and effective propagandist for the GPH but his repeatedly calling to question the “sincerity” of the NDFP and ventilating in public issues that are properly addressed across the negotiating table only serves to obstruct, rather than pave the way, towards the presumed mutual objective of advancing the peace negotiations.

Each party must be held to its own word, either by its public pronouncements or its signature on bilateral agreements, about wanting to negotiate, implement agreements, and push the negotiations forward to as far as it can go.

In the current snag in the GPH-NDFP peace talks, the GPH by its puerile double talk is clearly the party responsible for holding up if not threatening the scuttling of the peace talks. #

Published in Business World

19-20 August 2011

Clearing the air

2011-08-12T22:24:00.002+08:00

Anyone who has been into peace negotiations, or has at least been earnestly following developments in the GPH-MILF and GPH-NDFP peace talks, would know that conventional thinking is not the best way to solve impasses, achieve breakthroughs and open new paths in the quest for genuine peace.

Peace advocates striving to nurture positive, forward-looking steps in these peace negotiations should welcome the recent protocol-breaking meeting between President Benigno Aquino III and the MILF’s Chairman Murad Ebrahim in Japan.

As late as July, the MILF and its supporters had harsh words for the Aquino government for failing to come up with the GPH counterproposal to the MILF proposed Comprehensive Compact Agreement submitted in February 2011. The MILF also criticized the absolute lack of mention of the peace negotiations in Mr. Aquino’s SONA. They lamented that one year had elapsed since Mr. Aquino’s first SONA with no significant progress to speak of.

The Aquino-Murad one-on-one meeting was held at the instance of the GPH and agreed to by the MILF so long as it is held in another country that is part of the International Contact Group (a grouping of countries helping to facilitate the peace negotiations in varying capacities). It has served as a confidence-booster to the peace talks in light of government delays in responding to the revolutionary group’s proposal for a negotiated settlement.

It purports to send the message that both sides are in earnest in so far as trying to “fast-track” an agreement that would end the armed conflict between them.

For the GPH, Mr. Aquino’s gambit has apparently earned himself almost general approbation even from former and sitting local government officials who had vehemently opposed the MOA-AD and certainly has enhanced his posture as peace-maker.

The only discordant voices within government came from an unnamed DFA official who said that the meeting was an “act of treason”; Cong. Edcel Lagman from the opposition who complained that there was a lack of transparency; and Aquino ally Senator Chiz Escudero who opined that Mr. Aquino was “ill-advised” to meet someone who is “not even his counterpart” and may have opened Mr. Aquino to unspecified vulnerabilities in “this early (sic) stage of negotiations”.

For the MILF, “this historic and unprecedented meeting between the two leaders in a third-party country host is a significant political milestone in the MILF’s quest for Bangsamoro right to self-determination”. We take this to mean that the meeting gives a gigantic push to the MILF’s bid to project the legitimacy and strength of the Bangsamoro struggle both domestically and internationally.

To reassure its forces and supporters, the MILF declared that Chairman Murad reciprocated Mr. Aquino’s “grand gesture” without compromising fundamental principles in its pursuit of the Bangsamoro right to self-determination.

Chairman Murad’s stock within the MILF and among Moro people has definitely been boosted in the wake of the high-profile meeting. This is significant especially in the wake of the split of a sizeable part of the MILF’s armed forces under Commander Umbra Kato and armed hostilities already breaking out between the two.

The outcome of the next round of negotiations set on August 22, especially the content of the GPH counterproposal to the revised Compact Agreement submitted by the MILF will provide the proof of the pudding, so to speak, whether the GPH will accept a modified Memorandum of Agreement-Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) as the key to unlock the impasse in the 14-year-old talks.

So far the MILF has given up its call for independence or secession and has pushed instead for a “substate” within the existing unitary Philippine state, seeing this as a more acceptable and viable political arrangement than insisting on a federal system that could accommodate the “Bangsamoro juridical entity” or BJE.

The MILF appears to be doing its homework and have studied and are ready with proposals on how GPH can hurdle legal and even constitutional obstacles to the recognition of such a substate. We recall that the MILF conducted these studies and consultations with its various constituents with the help of the US Institute of Peace, with the results incorporated or referred to in the controversial MoA-AD.

Those who think that the MILF's proposal for a substate within the GPH's unitary state amounts to capitulation should recall that in the MoA-AD, the BJE or the substate that it could lead to would eventually be subject to review and possible change after a fixed period of time, including the scope of its territory and its degee of autonomy.

It would also be useful to recall further that the MILF had broken away from the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) in the late 70s after Hashim Salamat, who was then MNLF Vice-Chairman and its chief negotiator with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP), rejected the 1976 Tripoli Agreement. Salamat had objected to a last-minute addition by the GRP that the Agreement shall be interpreted and implemented in accordance with the GRP Constitution and legal processes. The Tripoli Agreement, Salamat observed, would solve the problems of the Manila government but not of the Bangsa Moro people.

So far there is nothing in the declarations of the MILF after the Aquino-Murad meetings that would indicate that the MILF is reneging on its demand for the right to self-determination. For the MILF this means the right to a separate national identity as Bangsamoro; to a “national homeland”, which is their ancestral domain; to ownership over all the natural resources and wealth found in their ancestral domain; to govern and rule their national homeland; and finally, the right to determine their future political status (vis a vis the Philippine state).

Clearly, both sides have gained valuable points from their own respective points of view, and certainly from the perception of the general public, both local and international, while not conceding anything new nor substantial if one is to judge from official public statements from the GPH and MILF.

To a large and significant extent, then, the air appears to be somewhat cleared for further no-nonsense negotiations. All the difficult issues remain to be grappled with and fashioned into something that would be mutually beneficial and acceptable and hopefully lead to a just and lasting peace. #

Published in Business World

12- 13 August 2011

Lack of conviction

2011-08-05T10:58:00.001+08:00

In conventional Philippine politics, grave accusations about graft and corruption, electoral fraud and other anomalies, including heinous crimes like extrajudicial killings, massacres and other atrocities, are abundant and even common knowledge. These are the stuff of the opposition’s tirades against those in power, rising in crescendo and reaching fever pitch as election time nears, or the potential for an extra-constitutional ouster of the incumbent gains credence.

One would expect that the moment the opposition ascends to power, riding on the crest of popular demand for rectitude, good governance and justice, it would have all the motivation and the means, most especially the people’s mandate and backing, to go after the offenders and throw the guilty behind bars.

But not so, going by well-established tradition since post independence. Even the most scandalous of scams and disgusting of depravities are eventually swept under the rug; shelved and archived until forgotten by all except the most zealous of chroniclers; or even pardoned and whitewashed.

The argument has always been that all such accusations are just part of the unfortunate but necessary mudslinging of electoral or ouster campaigns. Once in power, the new political leadership is supposed to “move on” and go about the more important business of governing (and, of course, taking their turn at the till), magnanimously calling for unity and conciliation rather than division and strife.

Perhaps it can be taken as a measure of the extent and severity of the crisis of Philippine society and politics that business cannot go on as usual.

For one, the crimes that former government officials must answer for have quantitatively jumped to the plunder of hundreds of millions if not billions of the people’s money. These have also qualitatively mutated to include systematic, wholesale and complex schemes to defraud the electorate to gain power and similarly well-planned, convoluted and brazenly executed maneuvers to cling to power by both government-orchestrated deception, high bribery and state-sponsored violence and coercion.

For another, in the aftermath of two people’s uprisings that toppled the hated dictator Marcos and the erstwhile popular but venal “Erap”, as well as an “almost” uprising that was itching to oust the much-despised usurper Gloria Arroyo, the people’s demand for a day of reckoning can not so easily be appeased or brushed aside.

Much more so from President “Noynoy” Aquino who campaigned and continues to work the crowd on an anti-corruption cum good governance platform while invoking the hallowed names of his departed parents.

Recently, human rights victims have taken the decisive step of filing criminal and civil cases against military officials up to and including Mrs. Arroyo as commander-in-chief. New whistleblowers have come forward regarding fraud during the 2004 and 2007 elections. New revelations have surfaced regarding graft and corruption -- nay outright plunder --perpetrated under the Arroyo regime not just by subordinates but by Mrs. Arroyo and the “First Gentleman” (“FG”) themselves.

These more than validate what critics, opponents and victims of the Arroyo regime have been saying all along about its crimes against the people. It also goes to show that with the Arroyos out of Malacanang, the cover-up of their culpability cannot be sustained and honest-to-goodness investigation can and must proceed.

Mr. Aquino does not need a so-called Truth Commission to do what was needed to run after Mrs. Arroyo and her ilk. He just needs political will including rolling up his sleeves to make sure that the serious, hard work of coming up with the evidence and successfully prosecuting cases will take place.

What we have seen so far leaves much to be desired, and raises doubts on what the regime's real intentions on the exposes are.

It must be pointed out that the Aquino administration has not filed a single case against Mrs. Arroyo, “FG” or any of her most notorious cohorts. Efforts in this direction have either failed (e.g. Truth Commission) or are characterized by press releases and innuendoes rather than hard-nosed investigation and case build-up.

Admittedly, Mr. Aquino is able to sustain public perception that he is serious about going after corruption by dint of Malacanang’s media campaign and the exposés in several government agencies like the PCSO and Pagcor and some government-owned-and-controlled corporations.

Thus there is serious if not cynical questioning whether some or most of these revelations are being orchestrated for Malacanang’s benefit, i.e. to remove attention and onus from Mr. Aquino himself for not having much to show for all his speechifying, for tolerating the questionable or outright wrongdoing by his favored government officials; for missteps or lack of rectitude in his own decisions (e.g. buying a luxury car albeit second-hand while poverty is widespread and entrenched).

More importantly, many of the economic and political interests/personalities lined up behind the Aquino administration today were originally with Mrs. Arroyo; switched sides during the campaign and elections; or flipped sides when Mr. Aquino took over. This eloquently signifies that their conflicts are not about fundamental differences in political platform but a question of shifting alignments based on factional interests.

It stands to reason that ordinary people, most especially those who were in the forefront of the fight against the Arroyo regime but who have not joined government, must continue to act as a generic Citizens’ Watchdog on the Aquino administration.

They can take advantage of the abovementioned favorable developments to push harder for the prosecution and punishment of GMA and her cohorts including jail time, removal of all powers and perks as former president and now legislator, recovery of ill-gotten wealth in favor of the people and the regime’s victims.

They must ensure their independence and initiative from the Aquino administration’s maneuvers and machinations by developing a broad flank for pursuing the campaign for justice versus the Arroyos et al.

They must maintain a critical stance vis a vis the Aquino administration on the issues of good governance, graft and corruption and even fraud (in anticipation of mid-term elections in 2013).

Most important, the gains from the campaign for justice versus the Arroyos et al are valuable in raising the people’s awareness of the roots of the problems of electoral fraud, corruption and bad governance in the bureaucrat capitalist system of governance and politics. #

Published in Business World

5-6 August 2011

Broken peace

2011-07-28T16:36:00.002+08:00

I have only been to Norway twice -- the first time in 2001 when peace negotiations between the GRP (now GPH) and the NDFP were resumed after they were terminated in 1999. The second time was last February, again when formal peace talks were resumed after the Arroyo regime had suspended these for six long years.

In both instances, the Royal Norwegian Government hosted the talks, indicating that they have been patiently accompanying the GPH-NDFP peace negotiations for the past ten years, officially serving for the most part as Third Party Facilitator.

Anyone who has been to Norway in the last decade or two, appreciated the peace and tranquility of the surroundings, met the pleasant, quietly hospitable people, and marveled at the prosperity of the country, could never imagine that such a generally pacific people would be the target of horrific terrorist attacks such as the one that took place last Friday.

The mass murder of scores of Norwegians at a youth camp of the Labor Party, preceded by a powerful bomb blast at the executive government quarter of Oslo that killed eight people and wounded several others, calls for a serious examination so that right-thinking and peace-loving peoples everywhere may come to terms with such a tragic event.

Norway may be described, in the community of nations, as "nouveau riche", having only recently risen, after the discovery of oil and natural gas in the North Sea in the late 60s, to having the largest capital reserve per capita in the world, being the second wealthiest nation in terms of monetary value, and having the highest Human Development Index from 2001-2006 and from 2009-2010.

Nonetheless one doesn't find a trace of the arrogance or pretentiousness usually associated with the nouveau riche in the Norwegians, not even government officials or their royalty. Perhaps it is this simple demeanor despite their wealthy status that has helped in no small way in gaining for them acceptability as a third party in peace negotiations, mostly in internal conflict in less developed countries.

In turn, their exposure to and experience in these internal and social conflicts has surely provided them with broader perspectives and deeper insights that could be quite useful in grasping the complexity of the issues behind the bombing and youth camp killings.

The extreme, right-wing views of the Norwegian bomber and mass murderer, stands in stark contrast to the political tradition and culture of Norway.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg describes Norway as an “open society” with high regard for democratic principles and practice, including openness to migrants, an acceptance of cultural diversity alongside integration, tolerance for different ideologies, politics and religions (even though Norway has a state religion). It also has the distinction of having a Norwegian Committee award the coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

The arrest of the main suspect, a 32-year-old blond, blue-eyed Norwegian, Anders Behring Brevik, and the discovery of his online 1,518-page manifesto 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence, posted under a pseudonym, has shed light on what motivated these attacks.

Breivik was a zealot for a Christianized Europe that would exclude – through expulsion or some form of extermination, if need be -- immigrants, particularly Muslims, because he believed they were on the road to dominating Europe -- and in the process destroying its civilization -- through their continued immigration and high birth rates.

But contrary to how police described him as a fundamentalist Christian, he is not religious as such but merely extolled Christianity as part and parcel of the supposedly unsullied European culture he imagined he was fighting for.

Without a doubt, Breivik is virulently anti-Muslim to the point of being xenophobic, but it is incorrect to say that he is the mirror image of Osama Bin Laden who was depicted by Western governments and mass media as the ultimate radical Islamist terrorist.

Breivik’s second major obsession was that the European elite had sold out to “cultural Marxists” who he believed controlled the universities, the mainstream media, and almost all the political parties and were thus instrumental in the destruction of western civilization, not least of which through the policy of multiculturalism. (In a photo released before the attacks, Breivik had on a compression suit with an insignia that said "Marxist Hunter - Norway - Multiculti traitor hunting permit".)

To this extreme rightist, the ruling Labor government of Norway that would more aptly be described as left-of-center is “Marxist” and, together with the upcoming generation of Labor Party leaders he slaughtered, are legitimate targets of a violent hate campaign that incorporates deadly terrorist attacks on civilians.

There is a need to expose the sources of such distorted views that combined lethally with Breivik’s militarism to bring about the Norway attacks. The whipping up of xenophobia, racism, false and narrow nationalism, anti-communism, Islamophobia, and anti-terrorism hysteria by right-wing movements and parties has certainly provided the climate that breeds such monsters as Breivik.

From the 1990s the rise of right-wing populist parties through their entry into the legislatures of such countries as Canada, Norway, France, Israel, Russia, Romania and Chile and their partnership with other mainstream parties in coalition governments in Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Italy have provided the ultra rightists with a veneer of legitimacy and a new platform for espousing their views.

In the US, the growth of the political influence and electoral clout of the right-wing Tea Party Movement over the Republican Party is part of the same phenomenon.

Mainstream political parties on the traditional right-“left” spectrum have tolerated, if not encouraged, such right-wing extremism because it has its use in pinning the blame for the current global crisis of capitalism on fall guys – Muslims, immigrant and other minority communities, trade unionists, social activists and reformers and other vulnerable groups.

Not surprisingly, the killings have elicited a chorus of calls for more stringent security and counter-terrorist measures such as greater police visibility, heightened and wider surveillance of suspected or potential terrorist organizations and individuals, interrogations, and more restrictions on if not outright suspension of civil and political rights as well as stricter immigration laws.

I am confident that with Norway's track record as third party in peace negotiations, the RNG and the Norwegian people in general will not settle for dismissing this tragedy as an isolated case and merely resorting to security and counterterrorist measures to prevent its repetition in the future. #

Published in Business World

29-30 July 2011

Continuity

2011-07-21T21:48:00.002+08:00

As the State-of-the-Nation Address of President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III aka “Pnoy” approaches, we are witness to frenzied attempts by his three-headed communications group to orchestrate the “messaging” emanating from Malacanang that will be capped by Monday’s SONA.

Nothing exemplifies the hollowness of the group’s claims that under the Aquino watch “justice is being served…where those responsible for the suffering we have all endured for almost a decade will be held accountable’’ than the impunity which continues to this day with regard to grievous human rights violations perpetrated by the Arroyo administration.

Indeed, after a year in power, the Aquino government has yet to prosecute a single human rights violator from the state security forces. It is an open secret in the AFP and PNP that each army infantry battalion (IB) has an “internal security operations team” or ISOT, usually headed by the battalion intelligence or operations officer and centrally directed by the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces (ISAFP), whose task is to carry out the “neutralization” operations against so-called “enemies of the state”.

The non-prosecution of the perpetrators of these dastardly crimes sends the clear signal that they can go on with impunity. Since Aquino came to power, the human rights organization Karapatan has listed 48 extrajudicial killings and 5 enforced disappearances, nearly all of them leaders and activists of progressive organizations and party lists. That adds up to a horrifying rate of nearly one a week, a terrible record for a regime that claims to be a champion of human rights

It also completely belies PNoy’s claims that under Oplan Bayanihan, the deodorized version of Oplan Bantay Laya, the AFP and PNP have become defenders, rather than violators, of human rights.

President Aquino’s handlers are working very hard to drown out reality. They want us to live in a fantasy world bathed in bright yellow where Pnoy is the knight in shining armor slaying the two-headed beast of corruption and poverty left behind by the evil queen Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. They want us to believe their simplistic version of what ails Philippine society and that Aquino is just the man -- with his supposedly untainted, if undistinguished, track record -- to lead us to the path of our salvation.

But what is the real score as far as a growing number of Filipinos are concerned?

Mr. Aquino is not the harbinger of change either in politics or in society at large. He merely presides over the same rotten, oppressive system that he took over from Mrs. Arroyo.

It is a system that tramples on the democratic rights and welfare of 99 per cent of the people in favor of the hacienderos, the big bankers and other domestic partners of multinational corporations (MNCs), the government officials who make public office their private business, the generals and, of course, the monopoly capitalist interests embodied by the foreign MNCs, the international multilateral agencies and the US government.

The Aquino administration wound up its first year in office without showing any sign of prioritizing land reform, creating quality jobs for the long term, upgrading social services and making them universally accessible, developing the rural economy and rehabilitating much less building up domestic industry.

Mr. Aquino – to the delight of US imperialism and the ruling elite – used his high popularity ratings as political capital to implement unpopular decisions such as hikes in rates of public goods and services; maintaining regressive taxation like VAT on oil; not budging on land reform; not budging on wage hikes and contractualization, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to urban poor pleas against demolitions and for decent resettlement; and budget cuts in education, health care and housing.

His underlings gave token statements about reviewing the Visiting Forces Agreement but Mr. Aquino accepts without question the permanent presence of US troops on Philippine soil. He broke protocol recently to welcome the crew of the USS George Washington, one of the mightiest US aircraft carriers and flagship of a US battle group roaming the Western Pacific coast.

He assured foreign investors of wide-open opportunities in public works such as airports, roads and railways as well as in the exploitation of natural resources through so-called Public-Private-Partnerships and even offered unprecedented guarantees.

He continued to make debt servicing a top budget priority even managing to pay eight billion pesos more than the Arroyo regime in his first ten months in office.

To buy the loyalty of the military and police top brass he hiked their budgets by billions of pesos and treaded lightly on corruption scandals and accusations of human rights abuse and violations of international humanitarian law in the conduct of so-called counterinsurgency operations.

Most telling, Aquino’s economic policies are the same old pro-“globalization” policies that have been proven to slow down growth, spur joblessness, shrink incomes and multiply poverty not just in the Philippines but all around the globe. Even his multi-billion peso dole-out programs, the Conditional Cash Tranfers, expanded several times over, are taken from the Arroyo era.

But Mr. Aquino is a “new” and “improved” version of Mrs. Arroyo in the sense that he is what the rotten ruling system so desperately needs to buttress what is already falling apart at the seams and is under constant threat by the unarmed protest movement and the armed struggles being waged by the CPP-NPA-NDF and the MILF.

Mr. Aquino as President is in effect the CEO of the reactionary ruling system. He serves to stabilize the Philippine state by his relatively better capacity (compared to Mrs. Arroyo’s zero credibility) to use deceptive slogans and PR campaigns to blunt criticism, defuse dissent, co-opt opposition and even whip up patriotic fervor (versus Chinese interlopers but never against US meddling) when needed.

It will still take some time for Mr. Aquino to become as odious and isolated as Mrs. Arroyo but at the rate he is going, this may be sooner than later. No amount of public relations gimmickry can appease hungry stomachs, homeless families and victims of injustice.

Of course, anti-Aquino factions of the ruling elite especially those who are pro-Arroyo, pro-Marcos or just plain opportunist will grab at this eventuality to prepare to take their turn at the till.

This is what the people’s movement must prevent and fight hard against, that the ruling system that is exploiting and oppressing the people to intolerable levels will be given another lease on life despite its deep-going crisis. #

Published in Business World

22-23 July 2011

Building a bright future

2011-07-14T14:45:00.001+08:00

Four hundred thirty participants from two hundred organizations and forty three countries, territories and autonomous regions from all continents packed the plenary hall of the 4th International Assembly of the International League of Peoples’ Struggles (ILPS) held in Manila last week.

They came from far and wide responding to the clarion call of the League: “Build a bright future! Mobilize the people to resist exploitation and oppression amidst the protracted global depression, state terrorism and wars of aggression!”

Remarkably, a diverse crowd gathered under one roof -- trade unionists and migrant workers; peasants and farm workers; indigenous peoples; youth and students; health workers and professionals, teachers, lawyers and other professionals; human rights defenders; researchers and development workers; scientists and technologists; artists and media practitioners; environmentalists; and advocates of the rights of women, gays, lesbians and bisexuals as well as children and the elderly. Most were seasoned activists in their fields or advocacies, in their own countries and internationally.

The ILPS 4th International Assembly was by far the biggest, broadest and most energetic international conference of social activists here in the Philippines in recent history, calling to mind the spectacular people's caravan from Manila to Subic that capped the People's Conference against Imperialist Globalization in 1996.

They were all motivated by the desire to gain a broader, deeper and common understanding of the causes of the protracted global economic crisis and the widespread political disorder involving wars and other armed conflicts together with peoples’ mass protests and uprisings. And they were bound by the conviction that such an understanding was imperative in order to effectively deal with these scourges and build a new world without war and plunder.

The participants committed themselves to working for immediate as well as fundamental changes in the world by raising people’s awareness, organizing and mobilizing them – especially the exploited and downtrodden – for national liberation, genuine democracy and social emancipation.

The failed promises, distortions and outright lies of neoliberal “globalization”, the touted “new world order” and the US-led “war on terror” were dissected and laid bare. The incalculable misery, hardships, death and devastation to peoples, social and physical infrastructure and the environment wrought under these imperialist-constructed signboards were exposed and denounced.

The General Declaration of the Assembly minced no words in identifying the worsening global crisis as that of the world capitalist system and in welcoming the rising resistance of the world’s peoples to the “harsh consequences of the crisis and government measures that make them shoulder the burden of the crisis”.

It underscored the fact that the financial meltdown that started in 2008 has become a full-blown global depression with still no end in sight despite optimistic pronouncements of the G8 countries.

The toiling peoples of the world, whether in the advanced capitalist countries or in the poor and underdeveloped Third World, “create society’s wealth (but) suffer the most from unemployment and underemployment, lower income and rising prices of basic commodities and services” made worse by the downturn.

The so-called solutions to the crisis have not resulted in any real economic recovery with production and employment continuing to stagnate and even further decline as governments persist in pursuing neoliberal policies such as privatization, deregulation and liberalization that undergird the crisis in the first place.

The unprecedented trillion-dollar bail-outs by Western governments of the “too-big-to-fail” banks and corporations have served merely to improve balance sheets, revive the stock markets and pay for the golden parachutes of their overpaid executives.

In the process, these governments are incurring huge budget deficits and public debt because of tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies for favored monopoly firms, overpriced contracts and bailouts for the big bourgeoisie on top of which are the bloated expenditures for military production and wars of aggression and intervention.

Once more, it is the people who must pay the price through harsh austerity measures pushed by governments and the ruling elites that include attacks on wages, job security, and conditions of work in the private sector and cutbacks on jobs, wages, pensions and health care in the public sector together with spiraling costs of living all around.

But as the Assembly Declaration pointed out it is still the poor peoples in the third world who suffer the most from the ravages of global capitalism in crisis. Untrammeled speculation in oil and food has caused prices to skyrocket pushing millions into destitution. Transnational corporations are taking over vast tracts of land, forests and marine resources, violently dispossessing peasants, farm workers, fisherfolk, and other rural communities from their means of livelihood throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

For the past ten years, the ILPS has steadily gained the capacity to launch globally coordinated campaigns and mass actions led by its member organizations in several countries on a wide range of people’s issues.

Among them are the wars of aggression and counterrevolution under the guise of counterterrorism, the neoliberal policies of globalization being pushed by the WTO and other international agencies, environmental plunder, the exploitation and oppression of the peoples, the extrajudicial killings and other gross human rights violations against progressives, the chauvinist, racial, gender, religious and other forms of discrimination and the anti-labor, anti-immigrant and anti-youth policies in imperialist countries and many others.

Unlike many conferences where the energy of the participants wanes from day to day of listening to speeches, the energy of the participants at the ILPS 4th IA was not only sustained but visibly rose to a high point towards the close. Everyone was happy with the process and outcome, each one was prepared and eager to carry out the tasks of the ILPS which had been clearly defined and united on.

Doubtless, the ILPS is in an even better position now to serve, as it had been conceived to, as a rallying center for anti-imperialist and democratic forces all over the world as they struggle to uphold people's rights, interests and welfare.

According to newly-elected ILPS Chairperson, Jose Maria Sison, “The people have a bright future because they wage revolutionary struggles and build their strength against those forces that oppress and exploit them…The broad masses of the people are moving in the direction of a fundamentally new and better world.” #

Published in Business World

15-16 July 2011

Independent foreign policy

2011-06-30T16:27:00.002+08:00

The territorial dispute over the resource-rich and strategically-located Spratlys islands, highlighted by alleged recent incursions and other aggressive actions of China into areas also claimed by the Philippines and Vietnam, underscores the importance of an independent and non-aligned foreign policy for small and weak nations like the Philippines.

This is in stark contrast to the current tack of the Aquino administration of invoking the RP-US Mutual Defense Treaty and so-called historic ties as well as undertaking high-profile diplomatic lobbying in the US to involve it in the conflict. US meddling, under the cover of the Philippines’ entreaties, would surely complicate and becloud matters, heighten tensions and likely fuel open hostilities.

Renewed public attention on the Spratlys issue is thereby an occasion to review and deepen our thinking on international relations.

At the outset, we must set aside narrow notions of nationalism that underlie the emotional appeal to engage in China bashing – including egging the Left to demonstrate at the Chinese embassy and twitting them for being unpatriotic when they don’t – just because the Philippines is staking its claims.

The Aquino administration’s actuations so far unnecessarily and mindlessly drag into the controversy the big-power rivalry between the US and China and declare the Philippines as squarely on the US side no matter what. This makes the Philippines appear ridiculous to the international community since neither China nor the US, at this point, have any intention or interest in a confrontation - even a diplomatic one - over the Spratlys.

In the first place, there is no imminent danger or immediate possibility of any armed confrontation between China and the Philippines, with or without US backing. China has no use for driving away the Filipino troops and inhabitants of the Kalayaan Islands nor blasting away the Philippine facilities there. Neither can the US afford provoking China at this point, what with its forces already engaged in three major theaters. The AFP on its own challenging the Chinese troops is absolutely out of the question.

Like a half-awake volcano, the dispute may continue to fester and even exacerbate, or it could fizzle out now but surely reemerge at a future, more volatile moment. That is because the underlying interest of China and the US, the two big powers in the region, is not only the oil and natural gas beneath the Spratlys, but the sea lanes through which half of their trade pass. The US and China are both racing on trajectories that are bound to bring them to a future collision, and the South China Sea and the Spratlys in particular could one day be that point of intersection.

Unfortunately what is consistent and highlighted through all this is the Aquino administration’s propensity to turn to Uncle Sam, reminding if not beseeching, the US of its “responsibility” to take up the cudgels for “little brown brother”. For in truth, the country’s capabilities for external defense, after decades under US tutelage and purported assistance, are pathetic if not laughable even in comparison to those of similarly small and weak co-claimants like Vietnam and Malaysia.

This mendicant and servile approach of the Aquino administration is antithetical to the principles of an independent foreign policy which is the bedrock of any truly sovereign and free country. For small and weak countries, non-alignment or neutrality is also an indispensable aspect of foreign relations. This was true in the era of the Cold War; it is true now with the US as lone Superpower and China fast emerging as an economic, if not yet military, powerhouse.

The principles undergirding an independent, non-aligned foreign policy are well articulated in the Afro–Asian Summit Conference - also known as the Bandung Conference – of 1955. It remains a shining historic precedent wherein small and weak nations uniting against colonialism and all its vestiges and post WWII reincarnations, hammered together a Declaration of Ten Principles to guide state-to-state relations and international relations in general.

This was preceded in a substantive way by the formulation of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in 1954 by China and India. The principles are mutual respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual nonaggression, noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.

One might say these are all principles that are up in the air and matter little in the real world when push comes to shove in actual disputes between countries especially between an elephant like China and a flea like the Philippines.

On the contrary, because these principles are grounded on the objective interests of the vast majority of countries and their peoples, most especially the poor and weak ones dominated by the forces of imperialism, big power chauvinism and racism, they provide the correct and only viable frame for the Philippines to assert its national interests.

Perhaps the more relevant question is whether the Aquino administration, given the Philippine state’s long-standing neocolonial relationship with the US and its own demonstrated eagerness to be considered the latest reliable vassal regime, would even consider hewing to such principles much less translating them into practice.

It would appear that Mr. Aquino is using the Spratlys issue to reinforce the mindset and policy frame that keeps the country dependent on the US for its external defense, including the so-called “modernization” of the AFP, and the pursuit of its “national interests” vis a vis other countries.

The US, for its part, loves the game because it has a platform to swear by its undying “friendship” for the Philippines, making much ado about the long-debunked RP-US “special relations”. It reiterates vague allusions to unfounded claims that the MDT provides for US backing in case of a shooting war over the Spratlys. The US is also able to project its vested interests in the South China Sea in order to justify any future interference in the area for tactical and strategic purposes.

The Philippine government has a long way to go to gain credibility in its pose of upholding and defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity, a critical missing ingredient in its loud assertions of Philippine claims in the Spratlys.

In the final analysis, only a truly democratic and patriotic government can stand for a self-respecting and genuinely independent foreign policy. In the meantime, it is up to a strong people's movement for genuine democracy and freedom to push and fight for one. #

Published in Business World

1 – 2 July 2011

Foreign intervention: bane or boon?

2011-06-23T16:50:00.001+08:00

One aspect of the debate over what the Philippines can do in its territorial dispute with China over the Spratlys is the wisdom of inviting, nay imploring, the US, by invoking the Mutual Defense Treaty and waxing sentimental over “historic ties”, to back up the Philippine claims militarily.

Even assuming that the US has such obligations under the MDT (something which US officials have hemmed and hawed about for the longest time and which nationalists like Recto, Taňada and Diokno have categorically exposed as non-existent in the letter and spirit of the MDT) there is the more basic question: Would US military intervention be a good thing at all?

Much has been said about US involvement in Vietnam: the real and manufactured stakes for the US; US underestimation of the resilience of the Vietcong backed by the inexhaustible support of the Vietnamese people; how the war of attrition drained US resources, troop morale and public sympathy; the inherent instability and weakness of the successive US-backed – and discarded - puppet regimes.

Here we have, once more, another serious political conflict, this time in far-away North Africa. It has much of the hallmark of past foreign military adventures of the US and other imperialist countries.

This time the justification for US-NATO meddling is couched in “humanitarian” terms: Libya’s Moamar Gaddafi having been successfully demonized as a crazed, brutal and overstaying Strongman allegedly poised to commit a blood bath on protesting Libyans inspired by similar unrest in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt.

Nonetheless, the conflict inside Libya is indisputably an internal one with no “communist-backed external threat” as the North Vietnamese were depicted by US war propaganda.

There is the Gaddafi regime and its supporters on the one hand and motley anti-Gaddafi forces on the other, the most prominent and best-armed of whom having been organized and backed by the CIA and British MI-6. Not surprisingly, the latter have been cobbled together into a touted National Transition Council recognized by key NATO countries as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people through whom substantial military and financial support for the armed insurgency is being coursed.

Recently, from a returning Filipino priest who spent years in Libya ministering to Filipino OFWs (his name is withheld for his own safety) we gathered a fuller view of the situation inside Libya. Much of the information he shared are eye-openers that belie most of what has been dished out by the western-dominated media.

The recent uprisings in Benghazi and Tripoli and spreading to other parts of Libya are partly fueled by the brewing discontent among the new generation. The young people are restive over the lack of changes in the political sphere after more than 40 years of Gaddafi rule and the entrenchment of a socio-economic elite despite the eradication of mass poverty and universal access to state-guaranteed social services.

People are not complaining about poverty and hunger as we know it in the Philippines. Libyans can get cheap basic goods and there is an abundant food supply. All Libyans enjoy free schooling and hospitalization. Families with a newborn baby are given an S$100 state subsidy per month while the youth are subsidized with free meals and clothing

But the youth are demanding more tangible changes such as more democratic participation in the way government is run together with greater respect for human rights. While others, especially those in the lower strata are boldly calling for equitable distribution of their country’s wealth.

Some groups are demanding a republican constitution and form of government; some, seek greater transparency as to who benefit most from the oil revenue and an end to the Gaddafi family's control over the wealth of the land.

The "opposition" or "rebels" include the Al Qaeda who are “numerous”; followers of ousted ruler King Idris (who are highly organized in the US and the UK); elements of the Muslim Brotherhood (one of the largest and oldest Islamist groups in many Arab states); the First Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (an Islamic fundamentalist group with links to Al Qaeda); relatives of victims under the Gaddafi rule; and defectors from the Gaddafi cabinet and military (with the TNC headed by the erstwhile justice minister.)

Among the tribal groups - more than 130 in the whole of Libya – the anti-Gaddafi ones are the Warfllah, considered the biggest, and the Zuwayyax, both of which benefit from the oil refineries. The majority, more than 80 tribes, are for Gaddafi such as the relatively smaller Quaddasa, where Gaddafi himself originated and the Barasa, the tribe of the Gaddafi’s second wife.

According to our informant, although there are frictions and even divisions among Gaddafi’s followers, the core of officers in the Libyan armed forces are still loyal to him. The Libyan army has had hundreds killed and hundreds more injured since the US-NATO bombardment but are still a formidable force.

Clearly from the abovementioned, there is a wealth of legitimate issues that the people are raising against the Libyan government even as the more well-organized and funded anti-Gaddafi groups come from a disparate political spectrum including Islamists, moderate and radical; remnants of the pro-royalist, pro-Western groups identified with the anti-nationalist regime that Gaddafi ousted in the late 60s; and turncoats from the Gaddafi camp.

From all indications there exists a stalemate between the pro- and anti-Gaddafi forces even with the all-out backing of the imperialist powers for the latter and intensifying sanctions against Gaddafi, his family members and Cabinet apart from the daily bombings that have affected populated areas in Tripoli and elsewhere in the government-controlled West.

Military intervention by the US and NATO, even with UN legal sanction, has not resulted in its purported main aim, protection of civilians. In fact NATO has been forced to admit its responsibility for the recent mass killing of nine civilians in a building hit by an alleged wayward bomb.

It has not even resulted in its real objective, the overthrow of Gaddafi. Meantime the armed conflict is causing the destruction of lives and property while the economy of Libya takes a beating and all of Libya is suffering.

Calls for a ceasefire, humanitarian aid to all affected Libyans not just the rebels, diplomatic efforts and political negotiations to seek a peaceful way out of the civil war grow stronger even from those who had supported the initial call for “no-fly zone” and for Gaddafi to step down.

The Arab League head has backtracked and says now that a military solution is out of the question. Italy has broken away from NATO in calling for a ceasefire. Both in the UK and US there are stronger criticisms about the US-NATO war including those over ballooning cost, questionable legality, dubious justification and likely unsatisfactory outcome.

Such recent developments give all freedom- and peace-loving peoples more reason to renew the calls for an end to US-NATO bombings and a chance for Libyans to undertake political and social reform without interference from outside forces, least of all those with vested interests that are antithetical to those of the sovereign Libyan people.

The Gaddafi government might do well to heed calls for transparency, an end to the elite cornering the wealth of Libyan oil, greater democratic participation etc. The warring parties must be brought to the negotiating table through the mediation of acceptable third parties including the elders in Libyan society who reportedly exercise moral and political suasion in Libyan society.

Military interventionism by foreign powers under any guise, on any pretext, is a dangerous thing. History has shown this to be so and current events in the Middle East and North Africa continue to underscore the painful lesson. #

Published in Business World

24-25 June 2011

For shame!

2011-06-09T11:28:00.002+08:00

What is there left to do except decry - again and again – the brazen attempts of the country’s political elite to obliterate the people’s victory over authoritarianism, martial rule and the wanton plunder of the nation’s economy and resources, this time by allowing “full military honors” to accompany the burial of Dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos’ refrigerated remains.

After supposedly consulting with “concerned” sectors (foremost of whom were Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, Governor Imee Marcos and Congresswoman Imelda Marcos) Vice President Jejomar Binay has recommended to President Benigno “Noynoy: Aquino III that “full military honors” be accorded to the dictator should his remains be interred in Ilocos province, his political bailiwick.

Mr. Binay nixed burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, presumably because he wished to avoid any impression that the Aquino government considers Marcos a hero, that being far too controversial.

But to say that the late unlamented dictator deserves “full military honors” just because he was a former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, no matter that the majority of the same armed forces mutinied against him in the wake of the EDSA people’s uprising, is not at all a “balanced” solution as Mr. Binay claims. Far from it.

Should Mr. Aquino allow such “full military honors”, it would unfailingly lead to the full reinstatement of Ferdinand E. Marcos to the country’s Hall of Fame rather than where he was right after his ouster and where he should remain forever, the nation’s Hall of Perfidy and Shame.

What’s more, it would be another step in the direction of fully reinstating the Marcoses politically and will give his heirs a stab at the highest positions in the land including the Presidency. This is why the Marcoses are delighted at the outcome of the Binay “survey” although they try to appear coy about it.

The proposal is a grave insult even to the Philippine military, at least the remaining decent and upright members of the military.

Marcos used the armed forces to usurp the people's sovereign power. He then dragged it down to the depths of corruption, criminality and human rights abuse,

The Philippine military's reputation was at its nadir when Marcos' power was at its peak and the military has never quite rid itself not only of the stigma but also of the criminal mindset it had acquired under the fascist dictatorship.

It was only when the military abandoned Marcos did its reputation suddenly improve in the eyes of the people to the extent that wily generals like General Ramos jumped at the opportunity to launder its past and started calling it the “New” AFP.

But no real reforms ever took place as the thousands of extrajudicial killings and billions of stolen AFP funds post EDSA I attest to.

Marcos, who was largely responsible for bringing dishonor to the military as well as bringing the military into dishonor and disrepute, is the last person to deserve “full military honors.”

Mr. Aquino acts in so unpresidential a manner by passing on the apparently politically risky decision to his ambitious Vice President (for whom he has no special feelings unlike his bosom friends, shooting buddies and close relatives).

His moronic excuse is that he will be perceived to be biased, being the son of Benigno “Ninoy”Aquino, Marcos’ arch enemy, and Corazon “Cory” Aquino, his political nemesis.

But, like it or not, he is the President of the country. Eventually, it will be his decision whether to accept Mr. Binay’s seemingly harebrained but supremely foxy recommendation.

More likely, the people pushing for this “grand reconciliation” represent the same vested interests that supported both Noynoy’s and Bongbong’s candidacies. These shadowy figures can not fathom any fundamental differences between the two - except for a complex historical thread tying their past and their future together - that cannot be bridged by practical politics.

The Marcos loyalists have also started crawling out of the woodwork, primarily the politicians in Congress who signed on to a House Resolution calling for a hero’s burial for Marcos.

Apart from being a demonstration of crass opportunism, this development provides ample proof that Mrs. Marcos and her children have not only survived their ouster from power, they have retained enough of their ill-gotten wealth to engineer their political comeback and are now skillfully accumulating even more political capital under the Aquino dispensation.

So where is the “Yellow Crowd” in all this? Except for the members of the Makati Business Club who made it their business to condemn what they rightfully called “historical revisionism at its deceitful worst”, we hardly hear any outraged voices from the vaunted “Corystas”.

Does this indicate that those among the privileged classes who celebrated the so-called restoration of democracy via “people power” (and thereby their restoration to positions of pelf and power) are finally done with “people power” and all its messy implications and consequences to the ruling elite?

The sins of omission and commission of those in a position to finally bury the onerous, odious and completely reprehensible legacy of the Marcos era have caused the creeping collective amnesia about it, now to be capped by “full military honors” for Marcos.

But the human rights victims of the Marcos dictatorship who bear the scars of brutal repression have stood up to say NO! and FOR SHAME!

The progressive legislators have countered the impudent House Resolution of the Marcos loyalists and their backers.

Human rights lawyers and advocates, progressive church people, the social and political activists from all classes and sectors and even some patriotic members of the military have also not forgotten and refuse to give up the fight.

In the name of all the martyrs and real heroes who died in the shadow of martial rule, we hope and pray that they shall, in the end, prevail. #

Published in Business World

10-11 June 2011

Demolition and resistance

2011-06-02T20:21:00.000+08:00

The protest march last Monday called by the urban poor alliance KADAMAY, to denounce a rash of violent demolitions of urban poor communities in Metro Manila, was quite daunting, what with the sweltering heat under the noonday sun. Nonetheless, my activist instincts impelled me to walk with the diminutive but fiery urban poor leader, Ka Mameng Deunida who, at 80-something, remains at the forefront of their uphill struggle.

What struck me immediately was that many of the rallyists were scrawny women who had even scrawnier babies, toddlers and pre-teens in tow. Even the leaders were mostly women, a testament not so much to women’s liberation it seems, but to the extent of desperation that had taken hold of their households and was forcing the mothers to take a stand.

The protesters’ placards showed that things hadn’t changed much since I began as an activist organizing in urban poor communities some 40 years ago, except that it had obviously gone from bad to worse. The demands remained to be “No to demolitions! Yes to jobs, decent wages, affordable housing, education and health care!” and a fairly new one “Stop urban militarization!”

President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III had signed a 10-Point Covenant with the Urban Poor as a presidential candidate and had promised an end to forced evictions. According to the pro-Aquino Urban Poor Advocates, Mr. Aquino was also committed to “decent relocation” that meant “relocation with quality housing, adequate basic services and sustainable livelihood support.”

The return to the practice of forced evictions under the Aquino watch jolted many urban poor communities back to the harsh reality that after elections, they were back to being “eyesores” and “hazards to public safety”.

Six months into his term, Mr. Aquino was forced to grant a four-month moratorium on demolitions after the valiant defense by residents of their sprawling urban poor settlement in North Triangle, Quezon City. Their homes were being wrecked by the National Housing Authority to give way to a public-private-partnership with a real property developer, Ayala Land, whose owners had supported Mr. Aquino’s presidential bid.

The urban poor have shown that pushed to the wall, they can and will fight back. Stopping the demolition teams by sheer street fighting is a valuable lesson that the urban poor have learned instinctively. As they learn about the roots of their poverty and insecure existence in the cities, their true empowerment begins.

Last April, DILG Secretary Jesse Robredo filed a report to Mr. Aquino on the problem of “informal settlers”, using the more politically-correct term in place of the pejorative one, “squatters”, that is still in use by government, mass media and private property owners.

To his credit, the report forthrightly acknowledges the extent of the problem – 556,526 families, whose total members comprise 25% of the projected 11.5 million population in the National Capital Region for 2010 (NSO).

It also candidly states that the “current and projected government shelter programs are inadequate to fully and effectively address the challenge”. The current shortfall is a whopping 523,765 units.

The Robredo report bats for making shelter a top priority of the national government with the requisite mobilization of financial resources from both the national government and LGUs. It highlights the fact that the average Philippine annual expenditure on housing from 2001-2007 was only .089% of GDP, far below what other southeast Asian countries were spending, from a high of 2.089 in Singapore to a low of .383 per cent in Malaysia.

It also calls for “socially inclusive urban redevelopment schemes” or those that provide poor, working people, whose labor is necessary to any society, a decent place to live.

This translates to a policy wherein “on-site housing solutions shall be exhausted first before considering in-city resettlement, then near-city resettlement and as a last resource, off-city resettlement.” And in order to accomplish on-site or in-city resettlement, the report advocates medium-rise or high-rise buildings to increase density of the population using a “vertical solution”.

A critical point is underscored: while initial capital outlay for such vertical housing is higher than current estimates of off-city relocation, most planners fail to take into account the latter’s attendant social and economic costs.

These include additional government costs in providing basic services (eg water systems, schools, hospitals); costs to the urban poor such as loss of livelihood or hiked transportation expense to commute to and from work or school; and separation of breadwinners from their families because livelihood opportunities are absent in relocation sites.

Of course, government has a habit of dislocating slum dwellers from their already difficult and precarious living conditions only to throw them out into the streets or cart them off to unlivable, far-away relocations sites, hidden from view. That way, they don’t have to bother about any added costs to the government. Moreover, who cares about how the urban poor fare.

The Robredo report, though a welcome departure from previous anti-people government approaches to the “challenge” posed by the urban poor, still fails to address the “push” and “pull” factors underlying the relentless mass migration of rural folk to the cities and the exacerbation of urban poverty and blight as a consequence.

In an earlier column, I tried to summarize these factors; to wit: “The underlying causes of this ever increasing rural to urban exodus are deeply rooted in landlessness (farmers dispossessed, evicted from land they till by land grabbers, land conversion, etc.); entrenched rural poverty and agricultural backwardness (aggravated by neoliberal policies of import liberalization and deregulation, e.g. the removal of agricultural subsidies); landlord and state suppression of peasant struggles against feudal oppression and exploitation; and the continuously deteriorating and overall stultifying living conditions in the countryside.” (See “No titles”, Streetwise 30 September 2011.)

This month the Reciprocal Working Committees on Socio-economic Reforms (RWC-SER) of the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) meet again to thresh out the provisions of a bilateral agreement that, if inked, could lay the basis for a negotiated political settlement of the armed conflict that has been raging for more than four decades.

The plight of the urban poor is squarely addressed in a fundamental and thoroughgoing way by the NDFP in its proposals for a Comprehensive Agreement on Socio-economic Reforms (CASER).

The NDFP calls for abolishing land monopoly in the rural areas and redistributing land to the tillers for free; establishing rural industries and supporting agricultural production in order to squarely address the rural poverty that drives mass migration to urban centers.

National industrialization on the other hand is recognized as “the key to a modern and diversified industrial economy” that can ensure livelihoods for the people, guarantee the satisfaction of their basic needs, bring about rapid and sustained economic growth and achieve economic independence from unwanted foreign domination. In this way decent jobs and other livelihood sources are generated for a burgeoning population, greater social wealth is created and government resources are beefed up as well to be used for the common good.

The Robredo report has been sitting on Mr. Aquino’s table unacted upon for more than two months.

Meanwhile the heartless demolitions are back with a vengeance; so too, the people’s growing resistance. #

Published in Business World

3-4 June 2011

Taking a stand on RH

2011-05-26T16:38:00.003+08:00

Having borne two children of my own and having struggled to do my part in raising a family while practicing my profession in the field of public health and avidly pursuing my social and political causes, I submit that I may have something worthwhile to say on the controversy over the reproductive health bill.

Ill health, debilitation and untimely deaths due to preventable and curable diseases are undoubtedly an added bane on the masses, men and women alike. Women, however, by virtue of their reproductive functions, their traditional role as the family’s main caregiver and, more and more, as breadwinners themselves, carry distinct and additional burdens.

Central to the concern is the question of family planning or, technically speaking, fertility control. A woman of reproductive age who is ignorant about her body, how she can get pregnant, or choose not to get pregnant, and how to balance the role of giving life and rearing the young with being a productive member of society, as well as pursuing other aspirations and dreams for herself and for others – is a woman who is shackled and doomed to suffer unnecessarily.

Progressives cannot but be on the side of championing RH for women most especially for poor, exploited and oppressed women who are most disadvantaged and worst affected.

But this is not to agree blindly with the supposition that having many children dooms a woman and her family to a life of poverty or conversely, prosperity comes from having only a few. There are exceptions to this observation even in a backward, maldeveloped economy such as ours where poverty is endemic. The key of course lies in the woman’s economic class and social standing.

Those who carry this line easily slide to the proposition that countries and peoples are poor and backward because they are not managing their population growth.

The fear of the teeming multitude derives from an acceptance of the status quo with the overwhelming majority of the peoples of the world mired in a seemingly unending cycle of destitution, ignorance, disease and early death, pointing to overpopulation as the culprit while denying that a tiny majority appropriates the wealth of the world.

(Yes Virginia, US imperialism has elevated the Malthusian theory about unchecked population growth as the ultimate cause of poverty and the depletion of the world’s resources to the level of an international crusade.)

Progressives and genuine people’s organizations must be wary of, expose and contend with imperialist propaganda and programs disguised as pro-people but in truth serve anti-people purposes.

We can agree with the Catholic Church on the basic assumption that people per se should not be considered burdens to society. A people who are productive, not exploited and oppressed, are able to meet their basic needs as well as enjoy a sufficiently stimulating cultural life and are free to pursue their dreams and aspirations – such people are the limitless source of society’s wealth and constitute humanity’s future.

But while progressives can agree with some of the principles underlying the arguments raised by the opponents of the RH bill, the Catholic Church, in particular, there is no gainsaying that we are definitely on the opposing side on this one.

The Church is raising the bogey of abortion (in the process imposing its dogma on when conception takes place) and of alleged coercive means of undertaking RH education and imposing fertility control in opposing the bill. Some fan fears of a rise in promiscuous sexual behavior, sexually-transmitted disease, and moral and social degradation with the passage of the RH bill.

But the consolidated bill being considered has clear-cut provisions against these or at least reasonable safeguards.

Notwithstanding their good intentions, the CBCP cannot be taken to be an infallible judge of spiritual, much less secular issues, even by Catholic Church doctrine. More than once before, the church hierarchy had succeeded in imposing its collective views on matters that are more secular than spiritual, only to reverse itself after some time. We recall, for example, how for many years the teaching of Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo was banned by legislation pushed by the Catholic Church on the grounds that these patriotic novels depicted it in a bad light.

Rather than attempt to impose its views and will on Congress, the Catholic Church would do well to undertake mass education campaigns to promote its views on family planning methods together with the concrete programs to match, among the people, especially the poor who have most need of them.

This way they can better utilize the Church’s formidable persuasive powers and clout rather than act as an adversary to the laudable aim of raising the level of the health and wellbeing of women and their families in this country.

A word of caution on the RH bill. There are several questionable and even objectionable provisions still. GABRIELA, the country’s premier alliance of progressive women, points to “vestiges of neomalthusianism” in the bills’s “Guiding Principles”, to wit, “The limited resources of the country cannot be suffered to be spread so thinly to service a burgeoning multitude making allocations grossly inadequate and effectively meaningless.”

Also in Section 25 on the “Implementing Mechanism”, GABRIELA asks why the Population Commission is designated as the coordinating body in the implementation of the RH bill when it is primarily a bill on women’s health.

It is clear that some of the proponents and a significant number of supporters of the RH bill are equally or even more impelled by considerations of population control and management than anything else. Thus we can expect them to persist in their tunnel vision and put the lid on discourse about the underlying, more fundamental causes of poverty and underdevelopment.

Consequently the rechanneling of more substantial government resources to RH aka family planning aka population control must be closely monitored to make sure it is more of the first and second which is the objective rather than purely and erroneously, the latter.

The abuses of past USAID-funded population control programs that pushed artificial contraception methods to the detriment of general and women’s health programs, gave rise to opportunities for undue influence by donor agencies and population control hawkers in public health policy-making, as well as for graft and corruption in richly-endowed population control programs must be prevented.

Enlightened legislation on women’s reproductive health is a step in the right direction. Whether it will achieve its intended purpose depends ultimately on women and their families relentlessly fighting for the full implementation of its positive provisions and taking a vigilant stance vis a vis its more questionable ones.

At the end of the day, only a people in charge of their own destinies - whose political leadership represents and carries the interests of the overwhelming majority - can ensure a population management policy which is pro-people and rationally designed to contribute to national development goals geared towards social justice, equity, freedom and prosperity. #

Published in Business World

27-28 May 2011

Marcos is no hero

2011-05-20T17:54:00.003+08:00

Another revolting turn in the stomach-churning political scene in this country confronts us. The heirs to the Marcosian legacy of economic sabotage and plunder of the nation’s coffers, state terrorism and fascist abuse of the citizenry, and kowtowing to foreign imperialist impositions are now calling for the burial of the dictator Marcos’ petrified remains in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

The resurrection of the idea to transfer the remains of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos to what is traditionally regarded as hallowed burial grounds for the nation’s heroes is outrageous and infuriating, especially for the direct victims of martial rule.

But it is an abomination still waiting to happen.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s nerve to sound the call after barely warming his seat in the Senate is not surprising. But the effrontery and collective amnesia of a big majority of legislators in the Lower House who signed HOR Resolution 1135 and the lack of a clear-cut stand much less official resistance from Malacañang is alarming.

In truth, the process of rehabilitation of the Marcos name began soon after his regime was overthrown.

We thought then that the Marcos Dictatorship had been swept away, ignominiously, into the dustbin of history where it belonged. But we were sorely mistaken.

The Cory Aquino regime failed - refused, even -- to lay the ground for the full condemnation and repudiation of the dictatorship.

Marcos-era fascist decrees and laws remain and are still used to suppress dissent and opposition to government policies and programs. Most of the perpetrators of human rights violations among the military and police, especially the most notorious ones, were never prosecuted much less convicted. A yardstick of failure of post-Marcos regimes, especially Mrs. Aquino’s, to prosecute martial law criminals is the failure to identify and prosecute the masterminds behind the assassination of her husband, the martyr, Benigno Aquino Jr.

The Marcos heirs, his cronies and henchmen of various stripes (from ex-generals and politicians to high-living technocrats, well-paid hacks and other apologists) have been able to protect their ill-gotten wealth, reputations and positions of power and influence from any demands for accountability much less restitution.

The public hardly notices that even in the field of education, with its decisive impact on molding the national consciousness, the lessons of martial rule especially its grievous effects on society, are not correctly and sufficiently taught much less emphasized.

It is no wonder that the Marcoses, including Imelda, the other half of the conjugal dictatorship, whose name is synonymous with profligacy of gargantuan proportions, are now no longer social pariahs but are on the guest list of the many “high society” happenings hereabouts.

It follows then that the plunder, brutal suppression of human rights, the culture of impunity as well as the corruption and criminality endemic in government institutions, including the Armed Forces of the Philippines and Philippine National Police, continues unabated. All these can be attributed to the mindset and the practice honed to perfection during the martial law years.

Through all these, the ruling regimes that succeeded Marcos were content to point to the restoration of formal democratic trappings like elections and Congress, as proof that the martial law era and its attendant evils are long past.

What they conveniently obscure, if not conceal, is that the economic and political crisis that brought about the dictatorship, was aggravated by it, and continues to fester even after its overthrow, is still very much around, providing the very same conditions for a return to authoritarianism and fascism.

By continuing the pro-foreign capital and anti-people economic policies of the Marcos era, succeeding regimes plunged our nation to deeper indebtedness and depression, causing increasing hardship and misery on our people, thus reinforcing the claim and illusion that life after martial law was worse and Marcos was a better ruler.

Meanwhile, the HOR resolution from the Marcos camp, at best, is another attempt at testing the waters, and the official response so far sends the signal that "it looks okay so long as it doesn't pull down our popularity and satisfaction ratings". How else to explain the gingerly, tentative, buck-passing and "survey-conscious" response from Malacañang?

Consider that the resolution merely recycles most of the arguments that have long been exposed as outright lies (e.g. “decorated soldier” versus fake medals) or half-lies (e.g. “built the modern foundations of the Philippines” versus leading the economy to further ruin).

But the biggest argument that deserves to be demolished is that burying the dictator Marcos as a “hero” is a "magnanimous act of reconciliation which will strengthen the bonds of solidarity among the Filipino people".

The resolution outwardly appeals to the magnanimity of Mr. Aquino, son of the most prominent Marcos rival and martial law victim. But in fact, the resolution insults the President, not to mention the Filipino people, counting on their gullibility and total incapacity for discernment.

Mr. Aquino’s tepid response to the outrageous proposal is bound to embolden its proponents. But both grossly underestimate the people's intelligence and their opposition to notions of reconciliation without justice or, simply put, the politics of accommodation among factions of the same ruling elite.

Those whose memory and scruples are not as limited, the victims of gross injustices and all those who would not want their children and grandchildren to suffer the horrors the Filipino people were subjected to by the Marcos rule, are bound to vehemently oppose this effort to bestow honor to a discredited tyrant and despot.

Seven representatives from the progressive party lists Bayan Muna, Anakpawis, Gabriela Women’s Party, Kabataan and ACT Party Lists have sponsored a resolution opposing the Marcos resolution. It sums up the arguments against the proposal to bury Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani thus:

"NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the House of Representatives strongly oppose renewed proposals to bury former President Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani as a grave travesty of justice; a monumental historical distortion tantamount to declaring as a hero a dictator who committed crimes against humanity, plunged the nation deeper into foreign debt and control and plundered the nation’s resources; and a renunciation of the historic 1986 people power uprising which toppled Marcos.” #

Published in Business World
20-21 May 2011

Terrorist bogey

2011-05-05T19:02:00.000+08:00

Osama bin Laden, the elusive head of the Al Qaeda, is dead. The Obama administration thumps its breast as it announces this feat, which reads like an action-thriller movie with US Navy SEALS and CIA-led operatives as the intrepid heroes completing their mission with deadly precision and efficiency, and with not a single US casualty.

This gives the US-engineered “war on terror” new vigor and injects renewed mystique into this touted crusade launched by the Bush administration that has left in its wake a trail of civilian casualties, destroyed physical and social infrastructure and untold havoc and misery on the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention thousands illegally arrested, held in secret detention centers, tortured and interrogated under the aegis of counterterrorism.

To get Bin Laden, the US and NATO invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban government widely believed to be providing the Al Qaeda safe haven. They installed a US puppet who has proven to be true to the tradition of such client regimes – corrupt, elitist, faction-ridden and thoroughly dependent on US-NATO military backing to fight the comebacking Taliban forces.

It goes without saying that the economic stakes of the Western powers in Afghanistan such as the oil and gas pipelines that will deliver Central Asia’s resources to its shores together with their geopolitical interests are being closely safeguarded by the US-NATO-friendly regime.

But much to their unending embarrassment and to the consternation of the American public, the US-NATO forces, for ten long years, could not deliver Osama’s head on a silver platter. Mr. Obama in fact used this as a reason to shift the bulk of US troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and authorize military strikes inside Pakistani territory in flagrant violation of its sovereignty and heedless of civilian casualties.

Iraq was next in the Bush administration’s sights. In the flush of the counter-terrorist, jingoist and anti-Muslim rhetoric post 9-11, the Bush-Cheney-Powell triumvirate successfully pulled the hood on the US and world public with its lies about Saddam Hussein’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction”. Saddam’s WMDS were allegedly poised – in true “terrorist” fashion -- against the US, Iraq’s Middle East neighbors and not least of all, the Iraqis themselves, the Kurd minority in particular.

The massive bombardment of Iraq and the subsequent invasion by US troops also brought about the replacement of Saddam with a US puppet. But the presence and continuing combat role of at least 50,000 US troops as an occupation force remains significant despite repeated announcements by Mr. Obama of their eventual withdrawal.

Meanwhile the scale of violence between the US military, the puppet Iraqi troops and a broad range of armed resistance forces in the country has reached a permanent state of deadliness with more than 4500 US soldiers, tens of thousands of rebels and civilians providing the unending body count.

Iraq’s rich oil resources and economy are now managed within the neo-liberal frame of the IMF-World Bank even as the people are still reeling from the devastation and the deprivations that have come in the wake of the 2003 US invasion and occupation.

In the US, the “war on terror” served to justify fascist measures against the people as never before. The US PATRIOT Act and the creation of the US Homeland Security served to bamboozle constitutionally-guaranteed civil and political liberties heretofore held sacred by the American people including rampant snooping into the private communications of those the government considered security threats and the harassment and actual arrests of suspects on the flimsiest grounds alongside the denial of their due process rights.

In the Philippines, the Arroyo regime immediately sucked up to the Bush government after 9-11 by uncritically and enthusiastically embracing the “war on terror”. Apart from providing the widest latitude for the use of Philippine territory and airspace, military facilities and civilian infrastructure by the US Armed Forces for its imperialist adventures into Central Asia and the Middle East, the Arroyo regime hyped the Abu Sayyaf Group as the Philippines very own local “terrorist” counterpart. She vowed her government would do its part in what Mr. Bush would later on call “the second front in the war on terror”.

In 2002, in order to deal with 300 or so ASG members kidnapping and holding for ransom foreigners and locals alike, the Arroyo regime imposed an undeclared state of martial law in Basilan and Jolo. Scores of innocent civilians were rounded up together with ASG suspects, many of whom are still languishing in detention up to now.

During the first RP-US Balikatan military exercises, 650 US Special Forces troops were allowed to participate in military operations against the ASG in contravention of Constitutional prohibitions. This was put forth as necessary to finally put a stop to the depredations of the ASG and hold the line against international terror in the Southern Philippines. And yet, the Philippine military, in announcing preparations for any possible retaliatory attacks by alleged Bin Laden-sympathizing terrorists in the aftermath of his death, still counts 300 or so ASG, not much less than what the combined US and Philippine armed forces attempted to stamp out nine years ago.

The “terrorist” threat came in handy in justifying the bloody counter-insurgency program of the Arroyo regime – Oplan Bantay Laya – that led to rampant extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances, mass civilian displacements and other grievous human rights violations.

Terrorist labels were also used to smear and demonize legitimate revolutionary movements in the country such as that of the CPP-NPA-NDFP and the MILF-BMLA. It was used to torpedo peace negotiations with both movements. Anti-terrorist legislation was railroaded in Congress to satisfy the demands of the US government.

TV news clips show crowds in Washington DC celebrating the news of Bin Laden’s execution. Elsewhere there does not seem to be much jubilation and in fact the reaction of people around the world seemed to be somber and muted.

From various perspectives and for different reasons, everyone says that the death of Bin Laden will not end “terrorist” attacks against the US and its allied powers. The US on the contrary warns that Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups are expected to retaliate and are still capable of launching further attacks. In this way, the Bin Laden operation serves as a stunning display of US military superiority and sophistication, while the US continues to use counterterrorism as a justification for its intervention and aggression worldwide.

More objectively and significantly, many local news commentators have echoed the view that for so long as the US arrogantly flaunts its lone superpower status and wields its political, economic and military might to dominate and trample on the rights of peoples and nations all over the world, those who suffer unbearable exploitation and oppression shall continue to resist and fight back. #

Published in Business World
6-7 May 2011

MayDay distress call

2011-04-28T21:52:00.002+08:00

No one – not even employers or the government – will dispute the sad state of Philippine labor today. The figures do not lie or dissemble. And yet year and year out, government and employers, merely raise their hands and feign helplessness over the situation.

They repeat the same old line: wage increases would result in inflation causing greater woes for workers including the threat of losing their jobs since higher wages could result in their employers going bankrupt.

What are hidden from view are the huge profits raked in by foreign and local corporations in stark contrast to workers’ starvation wages.

Preliminary results of the 2008 Annual Survey of Philippine Business and Industry (ASPBI) of the National Statistics Office (NSO) as cited by IBON Foundation, show that establishments in the country with total employment of 20 and over had combined profits of Php895.2 billion and 2.74 million employees.

Even more revealing, the Top 1,000 corporations in the country reaped a cumulative annual net income of Php3,788.9 billion over the period 2001-2009.

According to IBON, an across-the-board wage hike of Php125 means workers will receive an additional PhP3,802 per month. Employers will spend an additional Php49,427 per employee per year (assuming 13 months of pay). The total cost of the proposed wage hike will only be Php135.6 billion which, subtracted from total profits, will still leave establishments with Php759.6 billion in profits.

The Php125 across-the-board increase called for by the Kilusang Mayo Uno will only cut employers’ profit margins by 15%. Assuming employers will not pass on to consumers any legislated minimum wage increase, there will be no significant inflationary effect. Because their enterprises continue to be profitable, there is no reason for them to close shop.

Consider that the average daily basic pay that wage and salary workers in the country actually received – as opposed to merely mandated minimum wages that are not necessarily actually paid – increased from Php222 in 2001 to a measly Php301 in 2010 (NSO Labor Force Survey, April 2010). The minimum daily wage of Php404 in the National Capital Region is not even half of the estimated average family living wage (FLW) of Php988 as of March 2011.

A large wage hike will be beneficial not just for workers and their families but also the economy, IBON added. The transfer of money from rich to poor households will increase aggregate demand and stimulate the economy.

Mr. Aquino washes his hands and points to regional wage boards and collective bargaining agreements as the proper means to effect any wage adjustment; the former (dominated by business interests) are notoriously niggardly in providing wage increases while labor repression and the policy of labor flexibilization have decimated the ranks of organized labor and consequently their bargaining leverage.

The other demands raised by militant labor are not unreasonable and quite “doable” by a government that presents itself as committed to serving the people as its “boss”. The more pressing ones include control of runaway prices of oil, electricity, water and food; a stop to privatization and greater public subsidies for public transport, education, health and housing; and a halt to contractual and other forms of flexible work in the country that undercut labor rights and welfare.

Government should not be earning windfall taxes from the unconscionably high fuel prices. Because of the 12% VAT on oil products, the higher the prices, the more taxes collected. Why can’t government immediately suspend VAT on oil as a reprieve for everyone, especially the poor, who bear a disproportionate burden of this indirect tax.

Why doesn’t the government go hammer and thong against profiteering by the local oil cartel of Shell, Caltex, Petron? As pointed out by militant transport and consumer groups, oil companies either jack up prices or fail to roll them back even when warranted by taking undue advantage of the volatility of oil prices in the world market. It is estimated that as much as 7.50 pesos per liter is added on as sheer profiteering.

Note that we are not even talking about the mind-boggling profits of the global oil cartel and finance capitalists derived from monopoly pricing and speculation in the oil futures market.

The subsidies for public mass transport such as the LRT/MRT and the toll fees charged on vital roadways such as the SLEX could have been maintained given the critical situation of the majority of families who are at their wit’s end trying to make both ends meet.

Instead, Mr. Aquino says that government can do nothing to shield commuters but must instead protect the profits of the foreign investors who upgraded the SLEX or make the operations of LRT/MRT profitable so that government can make them attractive to private investors, in a word, reprivatize this public transport system.

Bringing home such a pittance of a wage would be somewhat bearable if government could be relied upon to give meaningful help when it comes to education, health and housing but that is like asking for the moon.

On the other hand, government has justified labor contractualization as a legitimate tool of capitalists to cut labor costs. According to the Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research, the Philippines has one of the highest levels of contractualization in Southeast Asia with 7 out of 10 firms implementing combinations of flexible work arrangements.

KMU underscores that while contractual and regular workers both suffer from unjust labor policies and work agreements, the former are laboring under worse conditions-- lower incomes, lack of job and social security, no right to union organizing and extremely hazardous work conditions.

Over and above pro-labor policies and cognizant that the workers' wellbeing is inseparably linked to the wellbeing of their fellow toilers, KMU has from the beginning called for genuine land reform alongside national industrialization as the twin pillars of a sound, self-reliant, progressive and just socio-economic order.

Unfortunately under the present dispensation, economic policies are set by government officials who are beholden to multinational and domestic corporate interests as well as the landed elite. They are former CEOs of business conglomerates, bankers and fund managers, if not former IMF-WB highly-paid employees hewing to the neoliberal policy framework that has caused mayhem for the last three decades.

The country’s economic managers are appointed by politicians like President Noynoy Aquino who, despite populist rhetoric, also comes from the very same elite ruling circles.

It appears then that the interests of the entrenched local elite and their foreign backers are uppermost in Mr. Aquino’s priorities as he turns a deaf ear to the demand for a just wage, champions the privatization of government projects and programs and justifies more cutbacks in government social spending.

On the other hand, the severity and persistence of the global economic and political crisis is shaking ruling systems everywhere with mass protests, uprisings and revolutions spreading like wildfire, bringing to heel or even ousting ruling regimes and pushing more fundamental and radical reforms.

Mr. Aquino, for his own political health, should consider granting some reprieve to an agonizing people by positively responding to militant labor’s demands to be highlighted at the planned May 1st Labor Day demonstration. #

Published in Business World

29-30 April 2011

Impeachment trial: The people’s stake

2011-04-14T08:29:00.001+08:00

The upcoming impeachment trial of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez should bestir everyone who wishes to hold Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to account for all the harm and wrongdoing that she was responsible for during her nine long years of de facto rule. It is a circuitous but necessary route since Mrs. Gutierrez has used the Ombudsman's office to fend off, sabotage and quash all suits against her benefactress, GMA, the latter’s family members and other partners-in-crime.

All other previous attempts to run after GMA and cohorts appear to have floundered and gone nowhere. President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino’s election promise to go after the massive graft and corruption perpetrated at the highest levels during his predecessor’s term had run aground when the much-ballyhooed Truth Commission he created was adjudged unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

(Some say the Truth Commission was doomed from the start lacking the kind of political and legal mandate that only a revolutionary government with sweeping powers would have. Others say it was immediately undercut by a Supreme Court packed with Mrs. Arroyo’s political appointees. Of course it didn’t help that Mr. Aquino had appointed former Chief Justice Davide, an Arroyo man, to head the Commission nor that the president’s lawyers are reputedly not the most savvy hereabouts.)

It is only recently that Mr. Aquino has started to use the vast powers of the Executive, such as the Tax Bureau, to flush out one of the Arroyo children’s hidden wealth. We have yet to see him utilize the Justice Department to undertake case build up in some of the most notorious graft and corruption cases that hounded the Arroyo regime. We note that a complaint had already been filed by the party list Bayan Muna with the DOJ on the NBN-ZTE scam but has not been acted upon in deference to Mr. Aquino’s pronouncements regarding the Truth Commission.

This is in sense a proxy fight. People are waiting to seeing GMA get her just deserts. The fight to remove Gutierrez as an obstacle implanted by Mrs. Arroyo precisely to forestall attempts to hold her to account is one step removed from nailing the GMA cabal. It requires extra effort at information and education to rouse the people to mobilize on the Gutierrez impeachment trial.

We must all be clear on this: Ombudsman Gutierrez’ conviction should pave the way for GMA and her cohorts’ arrest, prosecution and punishment for plunder and other crimes against the people.

Herein is a question of justice, of restitution, and of serving a long overdue lesson to all abusive, corrupt and anti-people leaders who think they can get away with their crimes. Truly, it constitutes a blow against impunity of the worst type because it is impunity by persons in the highest levels of authority. They have used their powerful positions, not just to commit crimes but to cover these up and evade punishment. They in turn use their ill-gotten riches to further enrich themselves, advance their political careers, deodorize their public image and remove any social stigma that rightfully has been attached to their names.

The end goal is GMA’s comeuppance not just that of Merceditas Gutierrez even though the latter is a party to the cover-up of a long list of crimes by public officials under GMA and likely has been amply rewarded for her efforts.

If this objective is not firmly grasped and pursued, then whatever will be achieved by the successful conviction of Gutierrez will fall far short of what is needed to achieve the ends of justice, the fight against impunity, and ultimately, the fight against entrenched corruption and other forms of malgovernance.

If this objective is not conveyed to the people and constantly brought to their attention, the campaign to remove Mrs. Gutierrez and thereafter appoint a new Ombudsman who will prosecute GMA to the full extent of the law, will fail to garner the kind of strong, extensive and sustained public support required to overcome remaining obstacles.

The political complexion of the Senate and the numbers required to get a conviction (sixteen to convict; eight to absolve) are formidable considerations.

There are articulate and seasoned GMA allies, as well as those left-over from the Lakas-NUCD heyday in the Senate.

There are those who have, chameleon-like, switched sides to be pro-Aquino, but given their track record of opportunism, will go where their political nest will be feathered to the maximum.

The erstwhile anti-GMA camp is now a motley crowd: several have exhibited only a flabby commitment to pursuing GMA’s wrongdoing due to various so-called pragmatic and perhaps less than principled reasons.

Since the Liberal Party has thrown their full support behind Pres. Aquino’s campaign to impeach Gutierrez in the Lower House and then convict her in the Senate, it stands to reason that it will be the Liberal Party stalwarts such as Senators Drilon, Pangilinan and Osmeña who will be working hard to get the numbers to convict Mrs. Gutierrez.

In their minds, Mr. Aquino must not be put to shame by a defeat in the Senate. His party mates know only too well that should such a thing happen, his store of political capital can quickly be dissipated. For whatever else does he have to show for all the rhetoric about ending corruption to end poverty?

The quid-pro-quos between Malacañang and the senators for their votes against Mrs. Gutierrez will indeed undergo hard bargaining, wily maneuvering and will be impacted by the ups and downs of the trial itself and how the vested interests in mass media will work public opinion in one way or the other.

How can the people ensure that the desired outcome of the impeachment trial – Gutierrez’s conviction and removal from office, the appointment of a new Ombudsman who will straightaway file the cases that Gutierrez never did against GMA and her ilk – will indeed be achieved regardless of the inevitable horse trading and backroom deals?

We have a wealth of lessons learned from the Estrada impeachment trial more than 10 years ago. The most important of these is that the outcome of the trial cannot be left in the hands of the Senate alone. The public and private prosecutors will need all the support they can get as do the witnesses who step forward to speak the truth, emboldened by the knowledge that with the people behind them, they have no reason to fear reprisal.

People’s organizations, reform groups and other concerned citizens must exert every effort to transform the people’s cries for justice into a powerful political storm that will convince all and sundry, the Senators first of all, that there can be no other just verdict but conviction and removal from office of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez. #

Published in Business World
15-16 April 2011

US-NATO: Might is not right

2011-03-31T15:53:00.001+08:00

The US-NATO military intervention in Libya is being justified by invoking UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (2011) authorizing all Member States to undertake "all necessary measures" for the protection of civilians and for the enforcement of a "no fly zone" in Libya’s airspace.

It is supposedly based on the Security Council’s determination, in accordance with Article 39 of the UN Charter, that the Libyan conflict constitutes a threat to international peace and security necessitating the imposition of coercive measures, including the use of force, by all member states.

The premise is grounded on the following claims that have yet to be irrefutably established: (1) the Kaddafi regime is that of a brutal, fascist despot despised by his own people; (2) the opposition to the Kaddafi regime embodies the demands and aspirations of the Libyan people and is supported by them; and (3) the unarmed, peaceful protest actions against the government were being met with unacceptable force allegedly “amounting to crimes against humanity”.

Assuming for the sake of argument that Kaddafi is as authoritarian and as repressive as the US, France, the United Kingdom, some Arab countries as well as international media want us to believe, the fact is that many such regimes have enjoyed the unwavering political and economic support from the US and EU countries, allowing them to overstay despite widespread social discontent and organized dissent.

In the face of these regimes’ bloody, strong-arm measures to tamp down the mass unrest and popular uprisings threatening their rule, there are no moves to impose on these regimes international sanctions of any kind much less armed intervention.

A more credible explanation is that the US-NATO interventionists all have their oil rigs pumping out thousands of barrels of oil and gas daily from the Libyan fields. To cite only the major players and their oil corporations, we have the US (Exxon-Mobil, Conoco Phillips, Marathon, Hess and Occidental), France (Total), UK (British Petroleum), Spain (Respol), Netherlands (Royal Dutch Shell), Italy (Eni), and Norway (Statoil).

Interestingly, Kaddafi reportedly announced in January 2009 a plan to
nationalize Libyan oil, raising fears that the share of oil production by US and European corporations would be reduced, if not totally eliminated. The plan however was temporarily blocked by senior Libyan officials who felt the moves were too drastic, and proposed that the nationalization be postponed.

UNSC Resolution 1973 itself deserves more critical study. Prof. Hans Kochler, president of the International Progress Organization which has consultative status with the UN, has submitted a memorandum to the UN Secretary-General denouncing it as “international vigilantism and a humanitarian free-for-all”.

Kochler says that the vague and completely undefined term “all necessary measures’’ can and will be interpreted according to the self-interest of the intervening parties. This invites the “arbitrary and arrogant exercise of power and makes the commitment of the United Nations Organization to the international rule of law void of any meaning.”

What is even more ironic is that a closer look at the UN structures and system reveals what realpolitik democracy it practices: the truly representative General Assembly has no teeth to enforce its resolutions, while all the real power resides in the Security Council, which consists of a minority of five self-appointed permanent members (each one with absolute veto power) and ten temporary lesser members chosen on rotating basis.

Within weeks the Security Council was persuaded to shift from its earlier Resolution 1970 (2011) adopting a travel ban and asset freeze on Kaddafi, his family members and other high officials of his regime and an arms embargo to Resolution 1973 (2011) or outright military intervention. This is also highly questionable.

Consider that it was generally conceded that the actual situation inside Libya could not be reliably ascertained at the time and even up to now. Reports of civilian casualties, the outcomes of see-saw battles between government forces and the rebels as well as the nature and strength of the motley groups that were fighting the Kaddafi regime could not be independently verified.

The truth is there are alternative assessments of Kaddafi’s almost four decades of rule in Libya that cast further doubt on his touted propensity to massacre his own people. For one, he used income from nationalized oil production to raise the living standards of Libyans way above that in the rest of Africa, considerably higher than in feudal Saudi Arabia which has vastly bigger oil reserves and revenues and generally higher than in the rest of the developing world.

He was generous in his political and financial support for national liberation movements and governments in Africa and Latin America that emerged from colonial struggles before he zoomed to the top of the list as a “rogue” regime targeted for assassination, subversion, foreign-sponsored rebellion, and outright bombardment. Thereafter he was forced to be more circumspect and even to backtrack in his support.

After the Iraq invasion in 2003, Kaddafi tried to ward off further threatened aggression by making big concessions to the imperialists. He opened the economy to foreign banks and corporations; he agreed to IMF demands for “structural adjustment,” privatizing many state-owned enterprises and cutting state subsidies on necessities like food and fuel.

As to the anti-Kaddafi groups depicted by the intervening powers and international media as part and parcel of the democratic winds sweeping the North African and Arab regions but not much more, a close, hard look reveals disturbing information.

The National Front for the Salvation of Libya was reportedly formed and trained by the US and Britain from Libyan soldiers captured by the Chad army, with funding also coming from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel and Syria. It was involved in attempts to assassinate Kaddafi in the 1980s. It took part in the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition in London in 2005, which is now the umbrella formation of the rebels in Benghazi.

The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (Al-Jama'a Islamiyyah al-Mugatilah bi-Libya) is an Islamic fundamentalist group with links to Al Qaeda. Like the Abu Sayyaf and counterparts in other countries, it consists of former mujahedeen who fought in Afghanistan, trained and funded by the US CIA. It has also been reportedly involved in several assassination attempts on Kaddafi as well as on other Libyan officials, soldiers and policemen. The LIFG is in the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.

With the justification for military intervention and its UN fig leaf of legitimation brought under serious doubt, it becomes crystal clear that what is taking place in Libya today is big powers intervention into the internal affairs of a sovereign country in order to depose a regime not to their liking.

This has spawned more casualties among the civilian population.

This will lead to a prolongation of the armed conflict, greater economic dislocation and hardships for Libyans and foreign workers, and the worsening of political turmoil and social tensions. It could lead to partitioning the country into pro-Kaddafi West and anti-Kaddafi East and foreign control over Libya’s oil and gas resources.

There is no guarantee, not even a clear prospect, that any regime change will result in a better life for the Libyan people. On the contrary, foreign intervention has deprived the Libyan people of their right to determine their own destiny.

History is replete with examples of societies being plundered and destroyed by foreign powers imposing their values and will in the name of humanitarianism, civilization, progress and democracy. There is no iota of evidence that Libya’s case will be an exception. #

Published in Business World
31 March - 1April 2011

Libya: Unmasking humanitarian intervention

2011-03-25T09:16:00.002+08:00

Barely a week into the massive bombing and shelling of Libya by the US, France, the United Kingdom and their allies, it has become abundantly clear that regime change and not so-called humanitarian intervention is the real object: Kaddafi himself is the target.

Once Kaddafi is removed, the Western powers aim to install a much more pliant client regime with “democratic” credentials signed, sealed and approved by them. Big power and corporate control over the oil, gas and other natural resources of Libya and the Libyan people themselves will thus be secured.

French and British top government officials were at first unabashed about getting rid of Kaddafi but backtracked when members of the Arab League which had previously acceded to the no-fly zone drew the line on this and as more criticism and condemnation from Latin American and African leaders arose.

The US has tried to make it appear that they are abiding by the limits imposed by UN Security Council Resolution1973 (2011) to “protect civilians.” But Obama’s earlier clear-cut statement that Kaddafi must step down has prompted speculation about how the US intends to pull the rug from under him.

This is where purported “surgical strikes” to take out Kaddafi and other key Libyan political leaders and field commanders of the Libyan army comes to mind. Kaddafi’s residential compound itself was bombed on the second day of the attacks and the reason given was that there was a “command center” inside. No evidence of this was provided reporters covering events in Tripoli.

Despite repeated claims by Obama that there will be no deployment of ground troops into Libya, there is little doubt that American, British and other countries’ Special Forces operatives and intelligence agents are already in action inside Libya as proven by the capture of British SAS operatives escorting an MI6 agent disguised as a diplomat even before the bombardments began. Moreover, regardless of claims that the bombing targets are identified through satellite and aerial surveillance photos, it is always the ground observers who verify the targets as well as confirm the hits.

The US-led military intervention provides the anti-Kaddafi forces all the leeway to regroup and re-arm, fortify their hold on Benghazi and other areas and utilize Kaddafi’s political isolation to position the self-proclaimed opposition Transition Council as Libya’s legitimate government. In this way the US and its allies ensure their hold on the regime that will take over if and when Kaddafi is brought down.

All these constitute flagrant violations of international law using the United Nations approval no less as a means to launch a war of aggression in Libya.

In the same way that the US justified the invasion of Iraq by lying about non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Hussein’s hands, the US-led coalition utilized unverified and out rightly biased reports (albeit aided by incendiary statements from Kaddafi and his followers) to paint the scenario of an impending civilian massacre in the strongholds of anti-Kaddafi forces.

Earlier, the same interested parties succeeded in portraying Kaddafi as a corrupt and exceptionally brutal despot such that the Libyan people were groveling in misery and ignorance. The overwhelming majority of Libyans purportedly despised Kaddafi and, inspired by popular uprisings in neighboring countries, finally rose up in protest only to be mowed down by government forces.

What strikes one immediately is that there is a clear double-standard here because Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron are clearly not about to condemn much less bomb the equally if not more corrupt, brutal and despotic leaders in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia who are using armed might to deal with the turmoil at their doorsteps.

This is obviously a question of whether the particular SOB is theirs or not.
Moreover, while the allied marauding powers continue to hide behind the smokescreen of “protecting civilians” in Libya, it is becoming more obvious that their military strikes are themselves causing unacceptable numbers of civilian casualties and destruction of civilian infrastructure. The US has a long bloody record of deliberately inflicting massive civilian casualties in military actions, inventing and invoking the term "collateral damage" to mitigate if not cover up culpability for murder.

Of course, this is vigorously denied by them but Russia and China, countries that had opposed the no-fly zone to begin with, give credence to reports to this effect. There are renewed calls for a ceasefire and mediation by the UN and independent parties to initiate dialogue and negotiations to end the conflict.

The US and NATO have capitalized on their successful demonization of Kaddafi over the past four decades so much so that they have been able to get away with the UN mandate to bomb Libya in the name of giving the Libyans a crack at "democracy".

Yet from numerous reports that have emerged after the eruption of the conflict, including accounts of OFWs, the Libyan people are not in as bad straits socially and economically as they are depicted by the Western press to be.

If it means anything at all, Libya rates a high 7.8 in the UN Human Development Index, much higher than the world average and the highest in Africa. The HDI provides a composite measure of three basic dimensions of human development: health, education and income and represents a broader definition of well-being over conventional measures of national development.

Libya ranks 53rd in the world while the Philippines is number 97. Surely this achievement is nothing to scoff at and do not provide the sort of indicators that would automatically spawn rebellions and uprisings.

Do the Libyan people, reputed to be strongly nationalistic, really want foreign, especially military, intervention, in their internal affairs? There has been no definitive proof or evidence so far that they do. On the contrary, reports that have emerged shortly after the conflict cite statements from rebel groups themselves that they object to the attacks by US and its allies.
The Libyan people have seen what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan where the US and its allies had intervened militarily in a sovereign country under various pretexts.

Apart from millions killed and maimed, vital social and physical infrastructure destroyed, and cultural treasures ruined, Iraq and Afghanistan have been reduced to occupied territories and vassal states of the US. Their peoples and natural resources are under the control of the Western powers that claim to have liberated them from allegedly authoritarian and “rogue” regimes only to replace these with their stooges who are even worse in many respects.

It is high time the peace-loving peoples the world over voice out their protest and condemnation against the wanton trampling of the Libyan people's sovereignty and the deceitful use of the UN to legitimize this naked act of aggression. #

Published in Business World
25-26 March 2011

Libya: Separating grain from chaff Part I

2011-03-17T15:07:00.001+08:00

Most Filipinos generally lack information as well as interest in the countries of North Africa. But in time Libya, a country rich in oil resources and ruled by Moammar Kaddafi, has become a favored destination for migrant workers because of the relative ease in securing well-paid work there and eventually as a springboard for moving to Italy and other European countries where even better economic opportunities hopefully lie.

In the past month, when armed clashes between loyalist and anti-government forces threatened to develop into a full blown civil war, the face of that war to Filipinos was still that of thousands of overseas Filipino workers caught in the crossfire. With no defenses and nowhere to turn (one OFW sent a video showing embassy officials abandoning their posts), they desperately tried to get out, literally crossing the vast Libyan desert with only their clothes on their back.

But they faced the bleak prospect of finding themselves poor and jobless once more back in the Philippines, a fate they had tried escaping by working in a far away country and a culturally unfamiliar society.

The little that was reported on about the fighting between the pro- and anti-Kaddafi forces centered on alleged excessive force inflicted by government forces on unarmed protesters turned armed insurgents; the quick victories by the rebels in capturing Benghazi (the second largest city in Libya north of the country’s richest oil fields as well as close to most of its oil and gas pipelines, refineries and its LNG port) and several other towns east and west of the capital, Tripoli; and the establishment of a “transition government” which France and Portugal immediately recognized as the legitimate government of Libya.

Local mass media outlets have depended almost entirely on reports by international wire agencies about what is going on inside Libya. Most of these have been sketchy, relying on unattributed sources such as purported “witnesses” and unnamed “rebels” who were obviously biased against the Libyan government.

The US and its European allies were quick to condemn Kaddafi and called on him to step down, imposed travel and asset sanctions, poised their warships for an attack on Libya, and are now working for the enforcement of a “no-fly zone” over Libya, all under the pretext of “international humanitarian intervention”.

Critical voices that questioned the demonization of Kaddafi and the legitimacy, popularity and strength of the anti-Kaddafi forces (particularly the pro-monarchy National Front for the Salvation of Libya) in representing the demands and aspirations of the Libyan people have been drowned out by the chorus of Western governments, Arab leaders and pseudo-expert political analysts hostile to Kaddafi.

But even the Western-dominated global media, the United Nations Security Council and the Pentagon concede that not enough is known about what is really happening on the ground. For the moment, this is one big factor that has forestalled any overt and drastic military intervention by the US-NATO such as the “no-fly zone”, even as US and British Special Forces and covert intelligence agents that serve as advance units are confirmed to be already operating inside Libyan territory.

In the last few days reports filtering out of Libya indicate that the Kaddafi government has regained the initiative, pushing back the rebels from important captured towns and controlling not just Tripoli but large swathes of the country as well.

It is conceded that Kaddafi’s loyalist forces are composed of well-trained and better-equipped soldiers with the advantage of fire-power from warships and an air force that his opponents lack.

What is slowly becoming clearer is that Kaddafi’s staying power can not only be attributed to his military prowess but to the continuing support of significant, if not majority, segments of the Libyan populace.

Moreover, while Western media constantly point to so-called black mercenaries, other sources describe these non-Libyan forces as volunteers from African nations and liberation movements that had benefitted from Kadaffi’s well-known acts of solidarity and generosity and were now fighting to defend his government as well as Libyan sovereignty.

Such support provides Kaddafi political legitimacy despite the campaign early on to demonize him before the international public. It lends justification to the increasingly successful military offensives of his loyalist forces as part of the right of the Libyan state to defend itself against an armed rebellion.

Conversely, it would mark any direct US-NATO military intervention as an outright attack on the sovereign will of the Libyan people especially since even anti-Kaddafi forces are divided on whether such intervention would help their cause or serve to undermine it. Even Western media sources have reported that most of the Libyan opposition vehemently oppose it.

But why all of a sudden are these great western powers exhibiting such inordinate concern for the seven million or so Libyans?

Military action to overthrow the Kaddafi government on the pretext of “humanitarian intervention” will not be as easy to explain much less justify. This much the US and its NATO allies are now realizing based on their interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and earlier in the Balkans.

Aside from the truth having been exposed especially with regard to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, questions are raised why these powers were not concerned about the lives lost and the destruction wreaked on Gaza when it was being bombarded by Israel in 2009, or when Palestinian refugees were massacred in Sabra-Shatilla in 1982?

Why are they not as quick to condemn and call for international intervention - diplomatic, economic and military – against the continuing mailed-fist treatment of unarmed protestors in other North African states such as Egypt and Yemen and those in the Middle East such as Bahrain, home to the US Navy’s 5th Fleet. Bahrain has already declared martial law, killed scores of demonstrators, and has welcomed 1000 elite Saudi Arabian troops to help quell the unrest.

The truth is that as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US and its NATO allies are jumping at the opportunity presented by the internal strife in Libya to control the latter’s oil resources by deposing Kaddafi and installing a more friendly and pliant regime. Libya has the largest confirmed oil reserves in Africa, three times that of the US and nearly one tenth of the world total.

After Kaddafi nationalized the Libyan oil industry in the 1960s until the 1990s when Kaddafi gave in to Western pressure rather than risk being the next US target after Iraq, the West had only limited access to Libyan oil, and much of the oil revenues were funneled to support Third World liberation movements and revolutionary governments. After Libya accepted the imposition of neoliberal policies on its economy, US and European oil companies such as Chevron, Exxon, Total, British Petroleum and others were allowed to explore and extract oil.

No doubt, these foreign monopolies want more, if not all of Libyan oil and natural gas. They will settle for nothing less than absolute, not partial access and control of these abundant strategic resources. #

Published in Business World
18-19Mrch 2011

A woman’s liberation

2011-03-10T20:12:00.000+08:00

Last March 8, GABRIELA, the foremost Filipino women’s alliance championing women’s rights, held a nation-wide mobilization to commemorate 100 years of International Women's Day (IWD).

Let us recall that it was Clara Zetkin, an outstanding German socialist and a fighter for women's rights, who proposed in 1910 that an international working women's day be held on March 8 of each year. March 8 marked the day when hundreds of women workers in the United States of America demonstrated for the right to suffrage and to build a powerful garments union.

The following year in March 1911, more than one million women and men in Europe attended IWD rallies campaigning for women's rights to work, vote, to hold public office, equal pay for equal work, maternity and child benefits and better working conditions as well as for the general upliftment, emancipation and empowerment of women.

GABRIELA emphasized that this year, IWD will be commemorated as, worldwide, women join their menfolk in mass protests and uprisings “spurred by the burgeoning impact of protracted global depression” especially in poor and backward countries in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Further, the alliance said, “Filipino women, like our toiling sisters in other countries, suffer from the same torment of poverty, hunger and violence caused by imperialism's last ditch attempt to salvage its moribund existence by plundering poor nations and further enslaving the working class people.”

GABRIELA concluded that Filipino women must demand immediate respite from the Aquino government through urgent socio-economic reforms as well as join the rest of the Filipino people in struggling for fundamental change, for genuine freedom and democracy, against an elite-ruled and foreign-dominated social order.

At the March 8 rally, as I waited to deliver my speech to the thousands of women gathered at some distance from the Presidential Palace, I could not help but reflect on my own sojourn as a woman, from a carefree middle class upbringing to one defined by the social and political struggles and upheavals of my generation.

I thought about how I had been surrounded by feisty, assertive and articulate women all my life: a mother who transcended social stereotypes, was an outstanding operating room nurse and a working woman all her life; aunts who despite economic hardships guided their brood to stable and successful careers; sisters who are capable and personable individuals, accomplished in their own fields; friends and most of all comrades who have struggled to combine the roles of working/career women, activist/revolutionary and wife/mother/daughter - to varying degrees of success.

My father gave us a very liberal upbringing. He made sure his children had all the opportunities to excel in school and have an active social life. There was never any stereotyping of girls as good cooks, homemakers, fashionistas. But he did expect his daughters to serve him his coffee while the only boy was free to gallivant.

My education in an all-girls’ school run by socially-oriented nuns, who were exacting in academic work and disciplinarians to boot, gave me the basic skills, self-confidence, and empathy for the poor and underprivileged that served me well in my adult life. It also provided the inestimable benefit of growing up in an academic environment where being a male was no advantage. There weren’t any.

In high school, I was introduced to the concept of women’s liberation by my eldest sister who left for the US to do graduate studies and eventually settled there. She had strained against the social conventions of her time that kept even middle class, educated women from being equal to men and achieving their full potential as individuals. She became a feminist and an active participant in the US women’s liberation movement.

When I entered the University of the Philippines, the liberal arts program of the general education course (which UP has since abolished) reinforced my openness to feminist views from the West, my involvement in moderate social activism at the UP Student Catholic Action, and later, in more radical student activism as a member of the student council and while doing organizing work among jeepney drivers and the urban poor.

My stint at UPSCA was a major venue for male-female socialization. A milestone in my life took place in the friendly environs of Delaney Hall and the UP Chapel: that is where I met my first boyfriend who eventually ended up as my lifelong partner.

My husband deserves several sentences in this narrative. Being much older than me, he was mature where I was immature. Being an engineering graduate, he was practical-minded where I was an idealistic AB Psychology student. Being a patriot, a democrat, and a closet Leftist, he was supportive of my political activism.

And being the self-confident, loving man that he was, he let me pursue my passions and my commitments with nary a hint of jealousy nor insecurity even as he worried and watched out for me at every turn. (Yes, of course, we wrangled about the inherent dangers and the time away from family that was the offshoot of my political activities.)

As I grew more deeply involved in the national democratic movement, my ideas about egalitarianism, social progress and commitment to a cause higher than oneself resonated with the movement’s Marxist philosophy, revolutionary political analysis and program and its mantra “Serve the People”.

This includes the presumption that being a woman is no barrier to being a dedicated activist and revolutionary. It also meant subordinating boyfriend-girlfriend relationships to political considerations.

It meant making independent decisions that entailed risks and sacrifices including the risk of being separated from one's boyfriend or husband. This was a harsh reality especially during martial law when the tempo and direction of one's life were altered in major, unanticipated ways.

The struggle for women's emancipation from feudal culture as well as bourgeois stereotypes had to be carried through inside the “nd” movement. Notions of sexual roles were rapidly being transformed even as there was also resistance to change and the vestiges of old-type relationships persisted.

More important, the need to organize women who, as Chairman Mao said, “hold up half the sky”, to achieve their own liberation from economic, political and cultural bondage was met by the conscious effort to build a distinct women’s movement integrated into the people’s movement for national and social liberation.

I will always credit and be grateful to the two major influences towards my liberation as a woman – the national democratic movement and the people – women and men alike - who fostered my full development as an activist/revolutionary and as an emancipated wife and mother. #

*Published in Business World
11- 12 March 2011

Reality check

2011-02-24T16:26:00.002+08:00

The resumption of formal peace negotiations between the Philippine government (GPH) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) in Oslo from February 15-21 almost ended in a cliffhanger with the two sides unable to agree on certain key points in the Joint Statement well over the original 3pm timetable for the closing ceremonies. The Joint Statement was finalized at 7pm after more hard bargaining, with the two panels both keenly aware of the ominous implications of not coming up with one at the same time holding fast to what each side deemed to be non-negotiable positions.

It is no mean feat what with clear-cut agreements on steps to bring the negotiations forward. At the same time any impression created in the media by government press releases that the 18-month timetable for arriving at a final peace settlement is a shoo-in and that the NDFP has softened up and is willing to sign a peace accord short of ensuring that basic reforms are put into place must be corrected with a reality check.

The closing statements of the two negotiating panel heads indicate the difficulties that lie ahead as the negotiations hunker down to the implementation of the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL), the substantive points on socio-economic reforms and preparing the ground for talks on political and constitutional reforms while effecting the protection of JASIG for negotiators, their staff, consultants as well as other resource persons.

It is not just mistrust but the wide chasm that has to be bridged in perspectives, understanding of the problems, and preferred modes of resolution that will make arriving at agreements more difficult than the GPH panel seems to recognize and broadcast to the public.

As we see it, the 18-month timetable can only be achieved if the Aquino administration musters its political will to forge agreements that will resolve the roots of the armed conflict, including addressing the problem of landlessness, industrialization, US/foreign domination and control of the economy, etc.

In essence, these are agreements that will benefit the people as against the vested interests of those who are already in power and benefit the most from the iniquitous social and economic system.

If we understand correctly, the NDFP is prepared even now to enter into a “truce and alliance” with a government so long as it co-signs a concise agreement that upholds the national and democratic interests of the people, as culled from the common points in both the GPH constitution and the NDFP's 10-point program.

However government perspective appears to veer farther from “mutually acceptable principles including national sovereignty, democracy and social justice” as stated in The Hague Joint Declaration.

The GPH, while agreeing to jointly reaffirm The Hague Joint Declaration and all bilateral agreements previously entered into with NDFP, insisted on submitting its “separate and unilateral affirmation with qualifications” as some kind of framework for disagreement -- a wellspring for all kinds of future obstacles that the two panels will need to hurdle and could threaten to disrupt the 18-month timetable if not altogether render it impossible.

The NDFP was then compelled to register its rebuttal of the GPH's qualifications. It asserts that no matter how much the GPH argues that it is the only sovereign power, the reality of dual political power or authority in the Philippines can no longer be denied what with extensive guerilla zones governed by NDFP “organs of political power”. Moreover, the GPH has had to face the NDFP across the negotiating table de facto as an equal or else there could be no negotiations at all.

It has also been argued by the NDFP that the GPH's continual acquiescence to US and IMF-World Bank impositions, if not subservience to foreign interests, makes a mockery of its claims of being the sole sovereign power.

The inclusion of national sovereignty as a mutually acceptable framework and foundation principle for the talks was meant to establish and enhance an essential basis of unity and acknowledge that both Parties hold this principle as sacrosanct.

It is thus grossly unfortunate that the new GPH panel has chosen to persist on the derogation of what was meant to be an essential anchor for the talks by implying that The Hague Joint Declaration is a source of “perpetual division”.

All this can be explained by the reality that the GPH, as its panel chair reminds us, is not a monolithic creature and cannot be expected to be solidly behind the peace negotiations with the NDFP, much less the goal of forging a political settlement with it. Aside from, or more important than having to deal with the militarists and the powerful elite who benefit tremendously from the iniquities of the current ruling system, the GPH must contend with foreign, mainly US, imperialist interests.

We shall see in the coming months whether or not the GPH under President Noynoy Aquino would or could stand up to such powerful pressures or find ways of circumventing them if it were to join the NDFP as a partner in addressing the roots of the armed conflict in order to reach an enduring political settlement that would lead to a just and lasting peace.

It is deja vu, not quite apparent but very real, as the nation celebrates the fall of a hated dictator and the ascension to the presidency of a most popular widow. The parallel does not end with the replacement of an unpopular leader by the widow's son 25 years later.

Just as President Cory was faced then with the opportunity to reverse decades of neocolonial and anti-people state policies that served the interests of big landlord and compradors collaborating with foreign capital, so now Pres. Noynoy is facing the real possibility of doing so and negotiating a truce leading to the end of decades of civil war.

The GPH call for support from the people is a positive step but there is a lot more to be done, beyond marching in peace processions, towards building a potent and vibrant peace constituency that could serve this end.

Both the GPH and NDFP must step up their information and peace education efforts to involve the broadest and largest sections of the population in the discourses on social and economic reforms, and eventually, on political and constitutional reforms.

It is only through the people’s support that the two Parties can draw the strength needed to withstand all negative pressures, ensure the efficacy of bilateral agreements and the successful end-result of the peace negotiations. In the final analysis, that is the meaning of the people being the true sovereign power, a fact which neither side disputes.

Difficult and daunting as it is, forging and signing a peace agreement is by itself not the guarantee that peace would reign in our land. That peace agreement must be an expression of the people's will and uphold their interests if it is to lead to the fruition of their long-held aspirations. #

Published in Business World
25-26 February 2011

Thaw in the winter freeze

2011-02-18T05:12:00.001+08:00

It was 11 below zero last Feb 15 in Oslo, a thick blanket of snow had turned the panoramic view outside Holmen Fjordhotel into a monochrome of white and grey with scattered dots and slivers of black. Our Norwegian hosts described this winter as "extremely cold".

But the atmosphere was definitely warm and sunny inside the conference hall, Bryggesal 3, where formal peace talks between the Government of the Philippines (GPH nee GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) finally resumed after more than six years of suspension.

The opening statements of OPAPP Secretary Teresita Quintos Deles, representing the GPH, and NDFP Negotiating Panel Chair Luis Jalandoni reflected the thaw after the longest running suspension of the formal talks under the Arroyo administration in the 20-year peace negotiations between the two Parties.

From Secretary Deles: "... (T)here is a growing, surging current that says No more to war and war games. From the remotest mountain and coastal village to our own urban poor and middle class communities, the clamor for peace cannot be denied. Our people are saying, the landscape of war must give way to the imperatives of peace."

From NDFP Chief Negotiator Jalandoni: “(W)e stand at the threshold of a new beginning… We are resolved to do everything we can to make these talks succeed and move us forward towards forging fundamental social, economic, political and constitutional reforms that will address the roots of the armed conflict and be of lasting benefit to the Filipino people.”

There is good reason to believe that the optimism of the two Parties and their kind, conciliatory words to each other were not mere political rhetoric put on to add spice to the occasion.

Clear commitments were made that ended the impasse in the talks and set into motion the operationalization of the Joint Monitoring Committee tasked to implement the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL)), the substantive talks on social and economic reforms (SER), as well as the formation of
working groups to jumpstart the work on political and constitutional reforms (PCR)
ahead of the formation of the Reciprocal Working Committees on PCR.

It will be recalled that in the preliminary talks last month that paved the way for this historic occasion, the two sides had already agreed not only to proceed with the substantive agenda defined by the Hague Joint Declaration, but on a general, if flexible, time frame of concluding the talks in three years or so with a comprehensive political settlement.

Secretary Deles noted: “Clearly, there is much that divides the two panels that come to this table…but there is also much that unites us – the vision of a just society, the desiderata of national sovereignty, the wish to reverse the drain in human and natural resources, the imperative of good governance and more. It is on this common ground…that we come to the negotiating table, seeking to negotiate our differences and to deepen our unities.”

NDFP Panel Chair Jalandoni cited the presence of NDFP RWC- SER members Rafael Baylosis and Randall Echanis as "concrete proof of the efficacy and respect for the JASIG" (Joint Agreement for Safety and Immunity Guarantees), that had been unilaterally and illegally suspended by the Arroyo regime in 2005.

He expressed the NDFP's expectation that the GPH will continue to work for the lifting of the warrants of arrest and withdrawal or dismissal of charges against Baylosis, Echanis and Vicente Ladlad as well as facilitate the "expeditious release of detained NDFP consultants and JASIG-protected persons in compliance with JASIG as well as in the spirit of goodwill or for humanitarian reasons".

Even more remarkable, if not surprising to many in the audience, was the NDFP Chair's offer for an “alliance and truce” based on a “concise agreement for an immediate just peace”.

While this proposal may sound radically new to those who are not too familiar with the recent history of the negotiations, it is really a reiteration of a proposal made by the NDFP six years ago, in August 2005, which the GRP panel of the Arroyo regime totally ignored.

The reiteration comes in the light of the continuing acute global and domestic economic crisis containing proposals that the NDFP deems “doable” in the medium and long range. It is "a challenge to the Aquino regime to release itself from the dictates of US imperialism, especially the already bankrupt neoliberal economic policy and the futile US Counterinsurgency Guide... to strengthen national independence and carry out national industrialization.”

For her part, Secretary Deles said, “We have no illusions that signing a peace treaty will solve all our problems. Not at all, for peace without justice, peace without development is a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal. But a political settlement, a peace treaty, will be a beginning. Stilling the guns of war is essential for harnessing all our resources for nation building, especially at a time when the global economic crisis has hit hard countries like the Philippines.”

Notwithstanding all the reasons for optimism and hope that the peace talks are finally on the roll again, the two Parties agree that the way forward is a formidable challenge, strewn with unexpected twists and turns and fraught with pitfalls and obstacles.

In this regard, both the GPH and NDFP panels expressed their gratitude to and acknowledged the invaluable support of the Royal Norwegian Government in facilitating the negotiations since 2001 and in particular its efforts to help surmount the obstacles to the resumption of formal talks.

Secretary Deles sounded the call for “building and strengthening our peace constituencies”.

We can only resonate to that call and expound on it by calling for our people’s unwavering support to the GPH-NDFP peace talks under the Aquino government.

Such a peace advocacy must: 1) eschew the militarist solution to armed conflicts; 2) acknowledge the underlying socio-economic roots of the war and therefore the need to address these in order to achieve a just and lasting peace; and 3) call for accelerating the peace talks along the course agreed upon by the two Parties, i.e. tackling each substantive agenda in sequence and working out and implementing agreements as basis for a comprehensive political settlement that will finally still the guns of war.

Indeed, the only guarantee that the GPH-NDFP peace talks can and will bear the fruits that future generations can partake of rests entirely on our people’s burning desire and continuing struggle for freedom, justice, equity and an enduring peace.#

Published in Business World
17-18 February 2011

Faking peace advocacy

2011-02-10T21:52:00.000+08:00

The resumption of formal exploratory talks between the Philippine government (GPH) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and formal talks between the GPH and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) has spurred a flurry of activities in peace advocacy especially on the part of certain “civil society” groups working hand-in-hand with the government.

In the spirit of contributing to a healthy and conducive atmosphere for the peace talks between the government and the two armed revolutionary movements, allow us to dissect the framework and objectives of such peace advocacy and its usefulness in the current resumption of talks.

We understand that a series of consultations had been held upon the instance of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP) or in cooperation between certain schools and non-government organizations (NGOs) and the OPAPP, AFP, PNP and other government agencies seeking an exchange of views on “peace and security” issues.

This is apparently part of the current "peace and security" (read: counterinsurgency) program of the Aquino government entitled Oplan Bayanihan and a complementary government-NGO plan for “peace constituency building”.

While Oplan Bayanihan is long on the rhetoric of shifting from an “enemy-centric” approach to one that is “people-centered” and of mobilizing all “stakeholders” in pursuing the Aquino government’s “Internal Peace and Security Plan” it all boils down to the same objective of suppressing the revolutionary forces and the people to keep them from overthrowing the status quo and replacing it with their vision of a just, prosperous, equitable and democratic system.

The basic problem is in the attitude towards armed conflict, or the relationship between "insurgency" and development. The government and the AFP have consistently harped on the line that the “insurgency” is the obstacle to development, to wit: "If only the armed rebels stop fighting the government and lay down their arms, there will be peace and development in our country".

This argument turns the truth upside down and stands it on its head. This kind of thinking is totally blind to the real roots of the armed conflict and is incapable of appreciating, much less grasping, the need to address these roots in order to achieve a just and lasting peace.

Concretely, Oplan Bayanihan says that “there is no direct causal link between low economic status and armed conflict”. What exists are “perceptions of relative deprivation” which are “correlated with the emergence and persistence of conflict in the Philippines”.

Thus, instead of acknowledging and addressing concrete socio-economic and political issues like landlessness, unemployment, grinding poverty and injustice that drive people to take up arms against the government, the government will work on changing “perceptions” that the system is not working for the people by bringing in or improving government services including the much ballyhooed “anti-poverty” programs pushed by the World Bank.

While OPAPP and the AFP seek to mobilize "civil society" support for and pay lip service to the attainment of a just and lasting peace, their statements appear to seek merely an end to violence without necessarily eradicating its only too real causes.

A document, “Working Paper for Peace Constituency Building”, prepared by the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations (J3) for a planning meeting of government agencies and NGOs reflects this same point of view: “The resumption of the peace talks is a golden opportunity to finally put an end to the violent conflicts that have ‘hostaged’ (underscoring mine) the country’s development for so long…”

According to them, the goal is to “mobilize a constituency for peace and security (and) make the silent majority declare their commitment to peace.”

Yet the document is silent on what constitutes peace and security in the first place. Is it the suppression of dissent, the cooptation of revolutionaries and reformers and the entrenchment of the ruling system?

One specific objective is “(to) apply social pressure to (sic) armed groups to give up violent acts”.

Obviously this refers only to the CPP-NPA and the MILF since the AFP and the PNP are clothed with the authority to engage in acts of violence while cloaked with impunity in undertaking extrajudicial killings, torture and other human rights violations in the course of their so-called “internal security operations”.

But what about the kind of state terrorism resorted to, for example, by the AFP’s Special Operations Teams or SOTs in the rural and even some urban areas?

“The SOTs most of the time disguise themselves as rebels to sow terror on the civilian populace in order to malign the revolutionary groups. Development projects are implemented in a piece meal basis. It was not for the purpose of improving people’s life but as a tactic to pacify and neutralize the people’s cry for change.” (Total War, Ma. Socorro Diokno).

What underlies this brand of peace advocacy is a reprise of the “active non-violence” line peddled by the likes of die-hard anti-communists Jesuit priest Fr. Archie Intengan and PDSP’s Norberto Gonzales that condemns the revolutionary violence resorted to by an exploited and oppressed people against the violence of class exploitation and oppression but obscures the latter, much less draws the connection between the two.

The purpose is only too clear, the government hopes once more to appropriate for itself the mystique of “peace” advocacy while at the same time misrepresenting revolutionary movements as “violence-prone” and purportedly consumed by the desire to topple the government in order to seize power.

They would deny the revolutionary movements the political legitimacy of waging revolutionary armed struggle precisely to overhaul society for the betterment and liberation of the people.

Instead of just the OPAPP, AFP, PNP and other government instrumentalities repeating this, they would like the “silent majority” led by government-organized, -subsidized and otherwise -approved NGOs to echo this erroneous line.

In the final analysis, who are the real actors and beneficiaries of the quest for a just and lasting peace?
Is it not the Filipino people, especially the toiling masses, who, by varying means of struggle, are trying to achieve their aspirations for national and social liberation?

The peace negotiations must address the underlying causes of social unrest and armed conflict. Failing to do so, no amount of fake peace advocacy can change the unbalanced equation. #

Published in Business World
11-12 Februrary 2011

Only the tip

2011-02-03T20:15:00.001+08:00

Former military budget officer Lt. Col. George Rabusa’s revelations of big-bucks, institutionalized corruption within the Armed Forces of the Philippines during the Senate investigation into the deal struck between government prosecutors and Gen. Carlos Garcia, former AFP comptroller charged with plunder before the Sandiganbayan, has opened up a veritable can of worms.

Heidi Mendoza, a former state auditor who examined the financial accounts of the AFP in connection with the Garcia case, subsequently testified that she found evidence of anomalies in the handling of a P200 million UN fund transferred to the AFP during the time of Gen. Garcia and other serious irregularities. She was prevented from pursuing her investigation by her superiors in the Commission on Audit, one of whom said that a Malacañang official had expressed concern about the inquiry.

When a new Ombudsman was appointed, prosecutors suddenly changed tack, claiming that the evidence against Garcia was weak and it was better to enter into a plea bargain that would allow the government to recover some of the money Garcia purloined in exchange for which he and his co-accused wife and sons would be spared hefty jail terms.

This development would have gone by unnoticed had it not been leaked to the press and caused much uproar.

Which way the Garcia trial and the renewed investigation into high-level shenanigans in the AFP will go and what reforms, if any, can be brought about remains to be seen.

On the one hand, it is of utmost urgency that the deal between the Ombudsman and Garcia, which the Sandiganbayan has acted upon by allowing Garcia to post bail, be struck down. Either the Ombudsman rescinds their accession to the plea bargain and/or the Sandiganbayan rejects it, plain and simple.

Should the plea bargain be upheld, public opinion must be mobilized and legal action taken to put a stop to this insulting and injurious conspiracy by the accused, prosecutors and the court itself to flout justice.

Mendoza’s account of how her efforts to find a paper trail documenting Gen. Garcia’s and possibly other officials’ wrongdoing were being thwarted, her reports disregarded, and eventually, her findings junked as useless in prosecuting Garcia, must be thoroughly investigated.

The revelations of Col. Rabusa regarding hundreds of millions of people’s money being systematically siphoned off into a slush fund for the generals and other senior officers during the Arroyo regime also deserves a major investigative effort by the Aquino administration.

This should not be difficult for Mr. Aquino to do since the people eagerly look forward to seeing guilty Arroyo officials, if not Mrs. Arroyo herself, finally get their just deserts – their ill-gotten wealth confiscated, their reputations exposed to match their ignoble careers and the rest of their retirement years served in prison.

In particular, the AFP’s rank and file including still idealistic young officers, would be a strong ally of a determined presidency to uncover and run after the top brass who have treasonously appropriated money that should have been used for proper armaments and supplies, the soldiers’ salaries and welfare but instead were diverted for the generals’ and their families’ lavish lifestyles.

Likely there are several more Col. Rabusas and Heidi Mendozas waiting to be provided the right incentive and environment to reveal what they know and thereby lighten the burden of their consciences. Already, Lt. Col. Antonio Ramon “Sonny” Lim, has stepped forward to add what he knows and corroborate and support the testimony of Col . Rabusa, having been Col. Rabusa's assistant in the AFP budget office.

There is the purported concern by active and retired officers that the military institution would be placed at risk by a thoroughgoing and systematic examination of the extent of the corruption that has seeped into it. But this is the refuge of the guilty – by those who profit from the corrupt system and those in responsible positions who look the other way for one reason or another – in order to fend off a wide-open investigation.

It will not be enough to run after the military officials who presided over and benefitted from the corrupt system during the Arroyo years. Two senators, both former military officers, have already pointed to the culpability and likely complicity of Mrs. Arroyo herself as Commander-in-Chief as well as Defense officials in allowing such abusive practices such as the Provision for Command-Directed Activities or PCDA slush fund.

Apart from a hefty military budget that the erring AFP officials could then plunder at will, there were juicy military contracts, generous US military aid, dollar-denominated UN peacekeeping funds and even the poor foot soldiers’ savings and loan associations that the money-grubbers were allowed to get their hands on.

The motives of the Arroyo clique are not hard to fathom: the military, the generals to be precise, stood as the last line of defense for a thoroughly unpopular, if not despised, and embattled Chief Executive who was on the verge of being ousted at several points in her nine-year rule.

All must be reminded though that to get at the root of why corruption has become so pervasive and institutionalized in the military (and the police establishment for that matter) one must take a good look not just at the last nine years of the Arroyo reign.

Let us recall how the state security apparatus became transmogrified by the US-backed Marcos dictatorship into its private army to suppress dissent and crush opposition using all sorts of bribes and inducements.

Let us study history and understand how the military and police evolved from a mercenary and reactionary tradition of protecting the interests of foreign interlopers and their partner elites. Such an anti-people history and orientation cannot but lead to the current depraved and debauched outcome.

Seen in this light, it is clear that Garcia, to borrow a cliché, is only the now visible tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is much more to this sordid affair than plunder and certainly more people in higher places than Gen. Garcia who are not only complicit but guiltier.

Justice will certainly not be served and there can be no real “pagbabago” or “daang matuwid” until all the rot that has festered so long in the AFP - and above it - is thoroughly exposed and exorcised. #

Published in Business World

4-5 February 2011

Welcome breakthrough

2011-01-20T21:21:00.002+08:00

"We look at our brothers and sisters in the NDF as not being enemies nor terrorists but rather as partners in trying to build this nation again…knowing their history of struggle..." - Alex Padilla, head, Philippine Government peace panel

"It is an important endeavor to try to achieve a just and lasting peace through a negotiated settlement...we do not underestimate the difficulties but we are willing to grab the opportunities and challenges.” - Luis Jalandoni, head, NDFP peace panel

Upbeat statements from both Messrs. Padilla and Jalandoni auger well for the resumption of the formal peace talks on February 15 to 21. The talks had been stalled since 2004.

It will be recalled that upon the behest of the Arroyo regime, the United States, the European Union and several other countries categorized the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army, as well as NDFP chief political consultant Jose Maria Sison as “terrorist”, thus throwing a monkey wrench into the already faltering peace process.

The signing of the joint statement as a result of the preliminary talks is a departure from the practice of the government panel under the previous regime. The latter had engaged several times in backdoor talks but whenever it came to the point of signing a communiqué to cement the agreements, it would decline citing “higher-ups”.

The joint communiqué on the preliminary talks is short and sweet but is packed with several firsts.

For the first time in 6 years, both parties agreed to reaffirm the validity and effectivity of all prior bilateral agreements, reconvene the Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC), resume negotiations on the Comprehensive Agreement on Socioeconomic Reforms (CASER) and set up working groups to start discussions on Political and Constitutional Reforms (PCR).

The two parties also agreed to work on appropriate measures to enable NDFP consultants and other JASIG-protected persons who are either detained or facing warrants of arrest to again freely and safely participate in the talks and negotiations.

For the first time “(b)oth panels agreed to recommend to their principals a ceasefire from February 15 to 21, 2011 as reciprocal goodwill measure to mark the resumption of formal talks after so many years.”

As far as we can recall this agreement is unprecedented.

As a backdrop, in November 2008 during one of the informal talks, the NDFP panel had already agreed to have a limited ceasefire during actual formal talks. However when this was included in the draft agreement for signing, the government panel changed the term to "formal negotiations". The NDFP objected stating that this ambiguity could be interpreted to mean that such a ceasefire will cover the period when there are no talks, e.g. if they are suspended, even as negotiations are technically ongoing.

The reconvening of the JMC, the agreed upon mechanism under the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) for implementing the landmark accord, is a big breakthrough.

The JMC was formed, operationalized and first convened in the Oslo formal talks in February and June 2004. However, for the next six and a half years the GRP refused to convene it, arguing lamely that there was no point in the JMC meeting when there were no formal talks and more so after it unilaterally suspended the formal talks in August 2005. Nonetheless, there is nothing in the CARHRIHL which says the JMC should or could not meet when the formal talks are recessed or suspended.

This constitutes a litmus test of the determination of the Aquino government to investigate and render justice on HR and IHL violations of the Arroyo regime, not to mention its own, especially since many of the perpetrators are largely believed to still be in active service within the AFP and PNP. This will also test how serious is the avowed focus on human rights in the new counterinsurgency program, Oplan Bayanihan.

In addition, the reconvening of the Reciprocal Working Committee on Socioeconomic Reforms (RWC-SER) is another major step in the right direction. Negotiations on a CASER had already begun in April and June 2001. The two panels took this up again in the June 2004 formal talks but like the JMC it became hostage to the government’s subsequent suspension of formal talks.

Honest to goodness negotiations on CASER creates an extraordinary opening and arena for serious public discourse on the roots of poverty, non-development, the persistent economic and social crises, and a window for forging broad national consensus on what the problems are and how to address and solve these.

Needless to say, a successfully negotiated CASER would set into motion a seismic change in the political configuration seeing as this would constitute one of the major planks in a comprehensive peace settlement.

The government panel says it is aiming for an agreement on SER in six months and the political settlement in three years so that there would be enough time to implement the reforms under the current administration's term.

There is no reason to believe the NDFP is not serious in achieving basic reforms. Even political analysts harboring opposing viewpoints concede that it is the only major political formation that has a comprehensive program for achieving national independence, genuine democracy, social justice and economic development, and has consistently stood by and fought for this program over the decades.

The six-month timetable the GPH panel proposes for finishing talks on socioeconomic reforms appear to be next to impossible, but the NDFP panel itself has not ruled it out.

Whether this is an overly optimistic estimate or a cautiously realistic one remains to be seen.

The important thing is that both parties have publicly announced their commitment to work double time in undertaking this important endeavor, made more urgent and pressing by the continuing global and domestic economic crunch.

Both panels must be credited for being flexible, creative and willing to meet halfway just so mutually acceptable agreements could be reached in this groundbreaking effort under the new Aquino administration. The painstaking efforts and sustained positive role of the Norwegian government as Third Party Facilitator must also be acknowledged and lauded.

Certainly, the usual spoilers -- militarists, big business, foreign interests who profit immensely under the present system -- will continue to attempt to stall the talks and derail the negotiations. More than ever, the vigilance and participation of the public becomes crucial in ensuring that they do not succeed as they had for the past six years. #

Published in Business World

21-22 January 2011

Illusions and real prospects

2011-01-12T17:14:00.001+08:00

The past year seemed to usher marked change with the ending of one of the most despised presidencies since the Marcos dictatorship and the inauguration of one steeped in the rhetoric of reform and aglow with the mystique of the new president’s larger-than-life parents, both of whom had figured prominently in the struggle to topple the dictator.

The people heaved a sigh of relief that time, options and machinations had run out for the former Malacañang occupant: the pre-set national elections finally pried Mrs. Arroyo loose from her hold on the presidency whilst repeated attempts to oust her via a people’s uprising cum military withdrawal of support had unfortunately failed.

The populist campaign taglines and slogans, repeated and magnified by billions worth of paid advertisements as well as sympathetic mass media coverage helped generate a gigantic cloud of illusions about forthcoming change in politics and society once a new leadership was elected.

The illusions have persisted, fostered by the people’s unquenchable thirst for a genuine overhauling of the rotten system and great expectations stoked by the new regime’s patrons, pillars and drumbeaters.

But the changes so far exhibited by the Aquino regime have been superficial, insubstantial and tend to cover up the real causes of the chronic crisis besetting Philippine society.

After the elections, extra-judicial killings continued. No corruption, electoral fraud nor human rights violations cases were filed against Mrs. Arroyo and her subalterns.

The call for genuine land reform does not merit presidential attention; Hacienda Luisita continues to be mired in the muck of social injustice and political noblesse oblige.

The anti-national and anti-people economic policies of deregulation, privatization and liberalization have been recycled as pro-development and anti-poverty. The World Bank-peddled Conditional Cash Transfer program implemented by the Arroyo regime with no significant impact has been ambitiously expanded and given a reformist spin.

The Hong Kong hostage crisis and the jueteng exposes revealed both the fractiousness of the new regime and who are the new untouchables.

President Aquino’s US trip highlighted the same dependence on foreign investments, loans and aid to prop up the ailing economy at the expense of upholding and protecting national sovereignty and patrimony.

With the continuing global depression, the World Bank itself had advised so-called developing countries such as the Philippines to focus on their internal markets and productive sectors and reduce reliance on the vagaries of foreign markets. It would seem that the Aquino administration is oblivious to these adverse global conditions.

As to foreign policy, the Aquino government appears content to follow the baton of the US. Mr. Aquino has reiterated the need for continuing US-Philippine “special relations” and acknowledged the preeminence of the US as lone Superpower whose geopolitical interests dwarf and subsume those of its former colony.

To illustrate, in the midst of the armed provocations and counter-reactions in the Korean peninsula between the two still warring parties and the interventionism exhibited by the US, the government has been content to echo the US line regarding North Korea’s “belligerence”. It acquiesces and justifies the mounting of US-South Korea joint war exercises involving tens of thousands of troops, a score of warships, hundreds of aircraft and live-fire exercises.

Recently the Aquino government unveiled its new counter-insurgency plan dubbed Oplan Bayanihan replacing the notoriously murderous Oplan Bantay Laya of the previous regime.

It purports to shift the emphasis from offensive military operations and campaigns to operations that support development and uphold human rights in order to "win the hearts and minds" of the populace in rebel-influenced if not controlled areas. But there is neither novelty nor originality in this, having been evidently lifted from the 2009 US State Department's Counter-insurgency Guide.

The upcoming talks between the GRP and NDFP peace negotiating panels on January 14 to 19 preparatory to the resumption of formal peace talks in February is an opening that could lead to what now appears to be the most likely, if not the only remaining avenue, short of revolutionary armed struggle, for the introduction of reforms that strike at the roots of the social crisis.

If the preliminary talks go well, the formal talks are expected to immediately tackle the operationalization of the Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC) and the resumption of negotiations on Social and Economic Reforms (SER).

Operationalizing the JMC means acting on or addressing the numerous complaints of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law which have been collected and semi-processed by the Joint Secretariat of the JMC since 2004.

It thus provides an unusual opportunity for the Aquino government and the AFP to show they are serious about Oplan Bayanihan giving primacy to the observance of human rights. They should see the JMC as a fitting mechanism to cleanse the ranks of the AFP of human rights violators and scalawags.

While negotiations on SER still need to break out from the inertia of the past and are understandably more complicated, progress on the implementation of the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL), the first substantive agreement, can provide the confidence and much needed conducive atmosphere for the talks to gain momentum.

The negotiations on the SER have an even greater significance and potential impact on the people’s movement for genuine change. While the existing proposed drafts from both Parties are more than a decade old, they nevertheless identify, albeit to different degrees, the basic social problems that in truth are the main roots of the social crisis and armed conflict.

The SER negotiations thus provide a golden opportunity to open up and generate a broad and comprehensive discourse on the roots of poverty, inequity and social injustice beyond corruption or malgovernance, and perhaps the brightest if not the only prospect for achieving a national consensus on how to solve these festering problems. #

Published in Business World

7-8 January 2011

Free all political prisoners!

2010-12-16T09:45:00.002+08:00

Pundits, activists and civil libertarians alike are still speculating on what actually led to last week’s order by President Aquino, auspiciously announced on Human Rights Day, for the Justice Department to withdraw all charges against the Morong 43, a move expected to lead to the court’s ordering their immediate release from prison.

Mr. Aquino had hemmed and hawed interminably about what he would do about the 43 health workers arrested in Morong, Rizal just months before the end of Mrs. Gloria Arroyo’s term of office. They stood accused of being members of the New People’s Army who were undergoing training to make bombs. They were subsequently charged with the non-bailable offense of illegal possession of explosives and firearms.

In time Mr. Aquino publicly acknowledged that the arrest of the Morong 43 was illegal and therefore all the so-called evidence being brandished by the military were next to useless in pursuing a case in court.

Still he insisted that the matter was out of his hands and only the courts could order the detainees’ release.

This pronouncement sat quite well with the Armed Forces of the Philippines. The AFP spokesmen continued to harp on the guilt of the 43 and to deny any illegality in the raid on the Morong seminar house and the rounding up of the health workers. But they were in complete agreement with Mr. Aquino that only the courts should decide the fate of the 43.

Facing the government’s intransigence, the detainees undertook their ultimate weapon: they began an indefinite hunger strike. This was accompanied by sympathy hunger strikes and fasting by their supporters including other political prisoners.

Still, Mr. Aquino was unmoved. As late as three days before his order to the DOJ to withdraw the charges against the 43, he was quoted by media as saying “with finality” that he would leave the decision to the courts.

What allowed the Morong 43 to eventually prevail? Undeniably it was their courage; the refusal of the majority to be cowed in the face of torture, threats and cajolement by their captors; and their steadfast struggle to prove their innocence that made this astounding victory possible.

Equally important, the health workers strength of spirit arose from their not giving in to selfish impulses, i.e. each going their own way and trying to save his or her neck regardless of the rest. Perhaps being health workers, they were wont not to think only of their own well being; they were also fighting for the rights of others.

Underlying their fortitude is the reality that truth has always been on the Morong 43’s side. The facts and circumstances of the their arrest pieced together from their own accounts and from the investigation and public hearings conducted by the Commission on Human Rights provided incontrovertible proof that, at the very least, their rights against unreasonable search and seizure had been grossly violated.

What aroused local and international outrage was the way the 43 were blindfolded, manacled, tortured and subjected to all sorts of threats and indignities the whole time that they were in military custody, all in the name of “national security”.

The campaign to vilify and demonize the 43 as “communist terrorists” who constituted a “threat to society” utterly failed when it became obvious that this was part and parcel of the military’s squid tactics to cover up their human rights fiasco.

No longer would reckless accusations that one is an NPA so easily justify the military and police practice of egregiously violating basic human rights as part of the government’s counterinsurgency campaign.

The government also grossly underestimated public sympathy for these doctors, nurses and community health workers ministering to the health needs of poor and underserved communities. The head of the Philippine Medical Association asserted that it mattered little if in the course of their humanitarian work these health workers actually treated members of the NPA since theirs is not to discriminate against patients on the basis of political beliefs.

Perhaps the case of the Morong 43 had dragged on for far too long with no indications of going away.

Perhaps, Mr. Aquino’s advisers were able to convince him that the political cost of his continuing to wash his hands of the military’s blunder was already too high while the legal remedies were quite simple and straightforward.

After all, objectively speaking, it was the unsavory leadership of Mrs. Arroyo over the military that was on the line not that of the new commander-in-chief.

With Human Rights Day coming up, it seemed most propitious that Mr. Aquino should make the much-waited announcement that his administration was taking the necessary steps to bring about freedom for the 43.

Whatever and whoever convinced Mr. Aquino to do the right thing, it is entirely to his credit that he finally did so, for he could have chosen to tread the same crooked path as his predecessor.

Perhaps the more important question at this time is what Mr. Aquino’s action on the Morong 43 signifies for other victims of human rights violations under the Arroyo regime.

Of immediate concern are the more than 350 detained all over the country on politically-motivated charges, i.e. like the Morong 43, illegally arrested and charged for crimes they did not commit or alleged officials and members of the CPP/NPA charged with common crimes like murder, kidnapping, arson and robbery, instead of with the appropriate crime of rebellion.

There are also the special cases of individuals designated as consultants of the National Democratic Front in the GRP-NDFP peace talks who are either languishing in jail or who have been forced to go underground to avoid arrest on persecutory charges invented by the Arroyo regime’s now defunct Inter-Agency Legal Action Group. The latter include Messrs. Rafael Baylosis, Randall Echanis and Vic Ladlad.

Not only do these cases highlight blatant violations of safety and immunity guarantees jointly agreed upon by the two parties, these constitute continuing stumbling blocks to the progress of the peace negotiations.

It can only be hoped that the impending resumption of the formal GRP-NDF peace talks may provide forthwith the favorable conditions for granting freedom to all political prisoners. #

Published in Business World
17-18 December 2010

Looking forward: the GRP-NDFP peace talks

2010-12-09T20:01:00.003+08:00

Contrary to skeptics’ views, there are objective conditions that auger positively for the upcoming resumption of formal peace talks between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), the revolutionary alliance that includes the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed component, the New People’s Army (NPA).

The new President, formerly a member of the anti-Arroyo opposition in Congress, whose battle cry then and now is the call for “change” and “reform”, is in a very good position to jump start the stalled talks amidst renewed hopes that a just and lasting peace may again be on the horizon.

Historically, any change in administration presents a unique opportunity for departing from, if not overhauling, its predecessor’s policies and approaches to festering problems such as the decades-old armed conflict between government and the CPP-NPA-NDF. President Benigno Aquino III has promised as much in sweeping terms vis a vis the sins and failings of the Arroyo regime as he sees it as well as on the specific issue of peace and security.

The head of the government peace panel Atty. Alex Padilla and the NDFP chief negotiator Luis Jalandoni, met informally last week in Hong Kong and emerged with the announcement that a holiday ceasefire would take place and preliminary and formal talks would resume in January and February of next year.

This announcement together with specific guarantees that the person and liberty of Mr. Jalandoni and his wife and co-peace panel member Coni Ledesma while in the country for a “private visit” would be respected has generated some excitement about the possibilities for a peace pact between the warring parties.

To anchor heightened expectations on peace prospects under the Aquino administration, certain premises and historical antecedents need to be recalled, clarified and reiterated.

Neither skepticism nor uninformed peace mongering should be allowed to rule the day.

The Hague Joint Declaration is a foundation agreement that everyone advocating a just peace must grasp firmly and uphold as the indispensable general framework without which the GRP-NDFP negotiations could not have taken place much less advance to the point of inking four more bilateral agreements, including the landmark Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL).

It states that the purpose of the peace negotiations is to arrive at a just and lasting peace by resolving the roots of the armed conflict. It contains the essential principle that the talks are not about getting either side to surrender but on negotiating the terms of a peace settlement covering the major areas of 1) human rights and international humanitarian law, 2) social and economic reforms, 3) political and constitutional reforms, and 4) end of hostilities and disposition of forces.

Deceptively simple and straightforward, the Hague Joint Declaration makes clear that government cannot hope to convince, hoodwink or coerce the NDFP to agree to give up its arms without addressing the abovementioned areas of contention not just with token promises of reform but with iron-clad agreements that stand the test of concurrent implementation such as on respect for human rights and IHL.

The Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees or JASIG, on the other hand, ensures that the negotiating panels on either side, including their staff and consultants who may or may not be organic to or intrinsic to their principals’ organization, will not be subject to surveillance, arrest and to being charged in court for their involvement in the peace negotiations during and even after the peace process is terminated.

Obviously, without this agreement, the NDFP would be at an extreme disadvantage since it is a proscribed, underground organization in the Philippines, albeit an armed revolutionary one. The comings and goings of staff and consultants necessary to buttress and support the work of the NDFP panel would unavoidably lead them to incur serious risk in operating in enemy territory, that is, in areas where the CPP/NPA/NDFP have no control or influence.

The listing of the CPP and NPA in the “terrorist” roster of the United States, the European Union and other countries, including the Netherlands where the NDFP office is located, upon the instigation and with the cooperation of the Philippine government, has already grossly undermined the purpose and effect of JASIG.

In the aftermath, Chief Political Consultant to the NDFP peace panel, Prof. Jose Ma. Sison had been arrested and detained for several weeks and the NDFP office and residences of its officers and staff had been raided and properties confiscated.

JASIG was unilaterally suspended by the GRP August 2005. Since then one NDFP consultant has been assassinated, at least eleven are under detention, five have been abducted by suspected state security agents and have not been surfaced since and scores, including Mr. Jalandoni and Mr. Sison, have been charged for various crimes with pending arrest warrants.

It stands to reason why the NDFP seeks categorical affirmation of the effectivity of JASIG and that this commitment of the GRP is relayed widely to the military, police and even to state prosecutors and the courts for their proper guidance and action.

CARHRIHL is the first bilateral agreement to be inked on one of the four substantive agenda of the peace negotiations, eloquent proof that it is after all possible for the two warring and seemingly irreconcilable parties to craft and sign a crucial agreement.

Not only does it constitute a breakthrough in terms of a mutual commitment to adhere to clearly defined HR and IHL standards, it also set in place a concrete mechanism by which both sides could be held accountable by human rights victims together with the domestic and international human rights community,

Unfortunately, while the Joint Secretariats of the GRP-NDFP Joint Monitoring Committee (JMC) that is mandated to monitor implementation of CARHRIHL has been constituted, the JMC itself has never met. The Arroyo government insisted that the JMC could not function while the peace talks were suspended, a position that finds no basis under the terms of CARHRIHL.

Thus cases of human rights violations filed by both sides have piled up but no joint investigations much less joint efforts to attain justice and prevent future violations in accord with CARHRIHL have taken place.

Without progress in the implementation of this vital agreement, the prospects for inking binding agreements on more contentious socio-economic, political and constitutional reforms appear dim.

The clamor for a peaceful settlement to armed conflicts must be attended by an informed and critical understanding of what had gone on in the past, what had caused snafus and breakdowns and what will be needed to move forward.

Without a doubt, past agreements that have gone through painstaking and hard-nosed negotiations must be upheld and complied with by both sides or risk having no substantial starting point to speak of.

On the part of the Aquino government, a clear manifestation of openness and resolve to discuss basic social and economic reforms that would address the underlying reasons for the poverty, oppression and injustice that drive people to protest and rebel, would be a gesture peace advocates everywhere would welcome and applaud.#

10-11 December 2010
Published in Business World

Education blues

2010-12-03T11:21:00.001+08:00

The adage that Filipino families put top priority on education – after basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter – is often held up as an example of traditional values that we can be proud of as a people and that holds us in good stead in our endeavors, nay struggles, to achieve a better quality of life for our children.

But this seeming truism appears not to be shared by government as records show how education as a budget priority has been steadily and alarmingly eroded over the decades until today, students and faculty are up in arms over extensive cuts in budgets of state colleges and universities (SUCs). Campus-wide walk-outs, student strikes, rallies to Congress and to Malacañang have taken place involving hundreds if not thousands in Manila and other major cities in a span of a few days.

The Aquino government, with its claims to practicing transparency and accountability to its constituents, has disappointed many over this controversy. Mr. Aquino, his budget secretary and Liberal party mates, have engaged in so much double talk in order to becloud the issue.

Budget Secretary Abad and Senators Drilon and Sotto chorus, “No, there is no budget cut.” Accordingly, the old budget allocations were never given in the first place since these were only “congressional insertions” and the Arroyo government simply vetoed the budget items arguing that there were no funds available. Therefore, these are tantamount to “ghost” appropriations and were simply removed from the proposed 2011 budget.

The Aquino administration and its allies would still want to pass the blame on the unlamented Arroyo regime that it has replaced by arguing that what Congress had approved as much needed additions to the 2010 budget of SUCs had practically been torpedoed by Gloria. That being the case, the supposed increase in their budgets was illusory. However since the SUCs managed to survive with much less than what was appropriated, in 2011, they can do so again.

The protestors on the other hand are saying that historically, the budget the SUCs have been getting has been so inadequate that the quality of their physical facilities and of education in general has been on a continuing decline. Moreover, SUC administrators always invoke the constantly diminishing budget especially in real money terms as the reason for hiking tuition and other school fees and for leasing or disposing of their so-called idle assets such as land and buildings to private entities for commercial and not educational purposes.

Mr. Aquino appears to do one better than his subalterns and loyalists by readily admitting in ambush interviews that there is indeed a budget cut thereby validating what he said in his budget speech in August, to wit:

“We allocated P23.4 billion to 112 State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) in 2011. This is 1.7 percent lower than the P23.8 billion budget for 2010. We are gradually reducing the subsidy to SUCs to push them toward becoming self-sufficient and financially independent, given their ability to raise their income and to utilize it for their programs and projects.”

That should settle the matter yet Mr. Aquino also attempts to dissemble by saying that education as a whole got an increase although basic education is the focus since more of the poor avail of elementary education while it is those who can afford who go on to tertiary education.

In the first place a huge chunk of the 32 billion peso increase in the education budget, 23 billion or seventy per cent, will go to an automatic increase in salaries because of the Salary Standardization Law.

The remaining amount is a paltry sum and will hardly make a dent in the tremendous backlog in classrooms, textbooks and teachers the country faces.

But it is also intellectually dishonest to argue that government money is better spent on poor students still trying to get some basic education than students, many of them also economically disadvantaged and struggling, who have managed against great odds to step into a state college or university. The latter’s achievements are now used against them in the matter of enjoying a state subsidy for the education prized so highly but now priced beyond reach for a vast majority of our youth.

Mr. Aquino only manages to affirm that his administration’s “reform budget” has nothing by way of reforms underlying it since the same old mispriorities exist. Concretely, 58 centavos for every peso will go to debt servicing; for the military, 7 centavos; while only 1.6 centavos will go to all 112 state colleges and universities.

Put it another way, there is no money for SUCs but plenty for legislators’ pork barrel - increased by more than P13.9 billion for a total of P24.8 billion and Malacañang’s lump-sum funds amounting to P245 billion of which P68 billion is audit-free presidential pork.

But there is more to the SUCs and the education budget cuts than diverting more funds from basic social services to debt service, pork and military expenditures.

The more fundamental question underlying the raging debate and the heated street protest is that of education for whom?

In the seventies, the Dictator Marcos instituted educational reforms that issued out of the Presidential Commission to Survey Philippine Education (PCSPE). It was funded and pushed by the International Monetary Fund to orient Philippine education towards vocational courses and thus provide more skilled workers and technicians for multinational corporations. The tradition of higher education in the liberal arts was derided as a waste of government money citing the lack of employment opportunities for graduates in such fields.

What was deliberately glossed over was the fact that such a tradition had provided intellectual space for the development of a radical counter-culture that was nationalist, anti-imperialist and fiercely anti-authoritarian and democratic. It breathed life into a vibrant youth and student movement that threatened the US-backed dictatorship and the status quo.

The Aquino regime has propounded as its far-reaching educational reform the enhanced K-12 program, that would overhaul the basic and secondary education curriculum by adding two more years to the system. Mr. Aquino has said that he wants to concentrate on reforming at the basic level rather than attempt to try to “fix the problem” later on. This would allegedly bring Filipino graduates at par with global standards.

Does this mean that the Aquino administration has made a conscious decision to abandon the hundreds of thousands of Filipino youth who aspire to attain college or university degrees to their own devices? Is this why he has no qualms much less sympathy for the students’ appeals to rescind the budget cuts? #

Published in Business World
3-4 December 2010

Tragic loss amid climate of impunity

2010-11-18T17:06:00.000+08:00

Leonard Co, unarguably one of the country’s foremost botanists and biodiversity experts, as well as an indefatigable conservationist, was killed in a forested area in Kananga, Leyte last Monday, together with two of his companions, while undertaking scientific explorations under the auspices of the Energy Development Corporation. Two others survived.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) immediately claimed that the three killed were “collateral damage” in a legitimate military operation against rebel New People’s Army (NPA) who had been sighted in the area.

More than seven years ago, also in Kananga town, nine civilians were reported by Tacloban human rights groups and people’s organizations to have been tortured and massacred by soldiers of the 19th Infantry Battalion under the command of Lt. Col. Oscar Lactao, dubbed the "Palparan of Leyte". The AFP reported the incident as an “encounter with the NPA”.

Human rights groups decried that eight of the victims were shot in the head, at close range, and that there was evidence of torture as shown by scald burns found on the victims’ bodies. Among the dead were Eugenio Tazan, 54-year-old peasant leader of the San Isidro Small Farmers Association, and 24-year-old Rowena Superior of the Bagalungon Small Farmers Association, who was three months pregnant. Four others killed were minors with ages ranging from 13 to 17.

In another infamous case in Palo, Leyte on Nov 21, 2005, a group of farmers resting by a make-shift warehouse before they start work on their plots were viciously attacked by elements of the 19th IB. Hurling five grenades and firing continuously for 30 minutes, the soldiers killed seven farmers, including a pregnant woman, and wounded several others. Not satisfied, the soldiers hit the survivors with rifle butts, forcing them to confess they were armed and members of the NPA. Failing to extract confessions, the soldiers brought in a sack of old rifles and claimed these belonged to the farmers, in the same fashion that the 16th IB PA planted firearms and explosives as evidence against the Morong 43 early this year.

As in most cases of human rights violations in the rural areas, the planners and perpetrators of the Kananga and Palo massacres remain unpunished despite numerous evidence and testimonies. The victims being ordinary folk have been consigned to oblivion, just another statistic in the government’s counter-insurgency drive, as “rebels” who had been properly “neutralized” or as "collateral damage".

Apparently, this is what the AFP wants to happen in the case of Co and the two other victims, forest guard Sofronio Cortez, and farmer Julius Borromeo, who were acting as Co’s assistants. But since the military cannot impugn the character of Co nor raise questions about the legitimacy of his group’s presence in the virgin forest surrounding the EDC geothermal facility, their claim is that the victims were killed in the supposed crossfire between clashing soldiers and rebels.

Unfortunately for the AFP, such claims are being belied by the two survivors of the massacre. “I only heard a continued burst of gunfire. There was no answering gunfire. None. That was what I heard…,” said Policarpio Balute, a member of the Tongonan Farmers Association who served as Co’s guide.

According to Niño Gibe as recounted by Co’s wife, “(Gibe) said that when my husband tried to get up from the ground, another burst of gunfire hit him in the back.” “After the second volley of gunfire, Niño said he held up his hand as sign of surrender and shouted, ‘Tama na, tama na’ (Stop it), and the gunfire suddenly stopped,” the wife said.

Compare these eyewitness accounts to that of Lt. Col. Federico Tutaan, commanding officer of the 19th IB who, in a press conference held in Tacloban, claimed that before the shooting started, his soldiers saw a person wearing black and holding an M-16 rifle, prompting them to assume a combat formation. Denying earlier reports that he said a soldier fired the first shot, Tutaan now says, “There was a volume of fire. The bullets ricocheted to different directions.”

Tutaan added that since early November, the 19th IB was on “heightened alert and always on a combat mode” because of intelligence reports that NPA members were planning to attack the EDC complex. He claimed that it was the EDC that had tipped them off on the presence of the NPA yet he also claimed they were uninformed that there were EDC employees in the area.

CENCOM Commanding General Ralph Villanueva betrayed the AFP's mindset and default mode of shifting the blame to the NPAs, if not to the victims themselves, when he said that investigations are being conducted to determine whether the bullets that killed Co and his companions came from the soldiers' rifles or from the NPAs. Assuming without granting that the bullets did not come from 19th IB firearms, how could he tell that these came from the NPA minus ballistic tests on such rifles?

Meanwhile the family of Co has raised pointed questions about the AFP's version of what took place. They want to know why Co was allowed to enter the area if rebel presence had been reported there. And if the military was in such close coordination with the EDC with regard to their ongoing operations, why was Co not forewarned about imminent danger to his group of being “caught in a cross fire”?

Most poignantly, Co’s wife, Glenda asks in disbelief, “Nangyayari pa rin ang ganito kahit na sa ilalim ni Pnoy, bakit?” (“This is still happening under Pnoy’s administration, why?”)

The climate of impunity that pervades the entire AFP and other state security forces evidently emboldens them to continue perpetrating atrocities against perceived or even imagined "enemies". Surely, the impunity with which the 19th IB had perpetrated several massacres and gotten away with them is behind this most recent tragedy.

The AFP has of late been attempting to refurbish its tarnished image with grand claims of upholding human rights.

A day after the killings, General Ricardo David Jr, AFP chief, proudly announced that the AFP was setting up human rights offices in all three major services - the army, navy and air force - and would designate HR officers down to the battalion level. The aim was purportedly “to demonstrate the AFP’s resolve and enhance its campaign in ensuring observance of human rights, international humanitarian law and the rule of law.”

However, an objective appraisal of these welcome words of institutional commitment to human rights in light of the AFP’s most recent actuations and track record leads to the inevitable conclusion that this latest pronouncement is nothing more than a public relations move.

It is in line with the so-called security sector reform being flaunted by Malacañang, whose aim is not really to reform the military, police and other state security forces but to clean up and improve their public image and make them more acceptable and credible.

How President Aquino, AFP Commander-in-Chief, will deal with this indiscriminate and wanton slaughter of a brilliant scientist and his assistants will again test his willingness and capacity to uphold human rights over and above the military’s protestations of innocence. #

Published in Business World
19-20 November 2010

Take two on the Morong 43

2010-11-11T19:11:00.001+08:00

One would wish that at least part of then presidential candidate “Noynoy” Aquino’s campaign line were unequivocally true - that having been a victim of oppression under martial rule when his father “Ninoy” was kept in solitary confinement by his arch enemy, dictator Ferdinand Marcos, he knows what injustice means.

If so, then he would have empathy with the plight of the Morong 43, health professionals and workers all, who have been detained unjustly for nine months now on the basis of spurious charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives.

The military had raided a seminar house in Morong, Rizal owned by a well-respected infectious disease expert from the Philippine General Hospital, using a faulty warrant of arrest for a person whose existence, nobody, not even the authorities, has verified up to this time

They rounded up all the participants in a health training course being given under the auspices of the non-government organization, Council for Health and Development, known for its pioneering work in community-based primary health care.

They produced firearms and alleged bomb-making paraphernalia as evidence; since these were garnered without benefit of independent witnesses such as baranggay officials, there are grounds to believe that these were planted by the raiders themselves.

The 43 were hauled off, blindfolded and handcuffed, to a military camp. They were interrogated, subjected to various forms of physical and mental torture, and kept incommunicado until their lawyers and the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) were able to assert their right to counsel and visitation by relatives and human rights workers.

A public prosecutor brought in by the military hastily conducted inquest proceedings (to determine if there was probable cause to charge the detainees) but did so without affording the forty-three their right to counsel.

A case was then filed with the regional trial court in Morong for which reason the Court of Appeals (CA), rejected the defense lawyers’ petition for a writ of habeas corpus, on the technicality that the filing of the case “cured” any irregularities in the arrest of the hapless forty-three.

The CA ruling is pending on appeal with the Supreme Court. Defense lawyers argue that the gross violations of the forty three’s right to due process and the flimsiness of the evidence call for the dismissal of the charges against the health workers. The defense lawyers have so far prevailed on the Morong RTC to defer arraignment of the accused in light of the SC appeal.

Meantime, despite resistance from military and police authorities, thirty eight of the forty three were transferred to a regular police detention facility. In this way, they were spared further harassment and rough treatment coupled with enticements to cooperate with their military captors.

Unfortunately, five of the detainees succumbed to the “bad cop-good cop” tactics of the military, purportedly confessed their guilt and currently remain under the custody of the military. Some of their relatives however attest to the severe pressure made to bear on them including threats made by interrogators against their family members.

Hearings conducted by the CHR under then Chair Leila de Lima were able to establish the plain truth that the case of the Morong 43 is a case of a military operation pretending to be a police action for which a patently defective arrest warrant was obtained.

Acting on raw intelligence information, the military pounced on the forty three, initially claiming that they were NPA combatants undergoing training in making bombs. Later, when it could not be denied that the forty three were indeed either medical professionals or community health workers, they amended their line saying they were NPA medics undergoing training in “combat life-saving techniques and bomb-making”.

The AFP trumpeted that the “accomplishment was the biggest victory of the government’s counterinsurgency campaign in recent years”. To underscore the point, they awarded the head of the raiding team a medal for his role in the “accomplishment”.

For the past nine months, numerous prominent groups and personalities have joined calls for the immediate release of the Morong 43. They include several former secretaries of the Department of Health; the dean and professors of the University of the Philippines College of Medicine; the Association of Philippine Medical Colleges; the Philippine Medical Association; the Philippine Nurses Association; and several lawmakers in the House of Representatives and Senate. International and national groups of lawyers, human rights advocates and churches have also joined the clamor.

But bottom line is the forty three are still languishing in jail. Dr. Alexis Montes, the sixty-year-old physician in the group expressed his frustration by saying that every second in jail feels like an eternity. Two pregnant mothers among the forty three have given birth. Another doctor, Dr. Mary Clamor was rushed to the hospital because of uncontrolled diabetes, hypertension and infected skin wounds aggravated by poor jail conditions. The rest are straining under the weight of uncertainty and the difficult conditions they and their families are subjected to.

Justice Secretary de Lima has submitted to President Aquino her recommendations and, by all indications, these are favorable. The latter has already acknowledged that the “evidence” against the forty-three was obtained through irregular means. He rightly stated, “It is a generally accepted principle that what the lawyers call the fruit of the poisoned tree, evidence wrongly gotten, cannot be used.”

Yet Mr. Aquino chooses to drag his feet on the case arguing that it is “up to the courts” to decide.

In fact, the Executive Department can expedite the release of the Morong 43 in two ways. The Office of the Solicitor General can concur or not object to the defense petition for habeas corpus pending with the Supreme Court and thus give way to the grant of the petition. Or the justice department can order the reinvestigation and thereby reverse the erroneous filing of the case filed by its errant fiscal. The Morong court can then dismiss the case accordingly and order the instant release of the forty-three.

In contrast to Mr. Aquino’s decisive, some say precipitous, grant of amnesty to alleged military rebels, his continued inaction on the Morong 43 rankles. It is also fuelling suspicion that Mr. Aquino is hostage to the generals who object to the release in the guise of such being a setback to the government’s counterinsurgency campaign.

No ifs and buts, it’s time Mr. Aquino mustered political will on such a blatant case of injustice: Mr. President, release the Morong 43! #

Published in Business World
12-13 November 2010

For those who wish to email me their comments or queries, please use carol_araullo@yahoo.com

Old and tired solutions

2010-11-05T19:22:00.001+08:00

The Aquino administration’s conditional cash transfers (CCT) scheme is a quick fix, band-aid solution aimed at giving substance to Pnoy’s claim that he is addressing the poverty problem. It toes the line of the World Bank regarding the right “anti-poverty strategy” and covers up the fact that the same failed neoliberal socio-economic policy framework of previous regimes is in effect. Not least of all, the CCT is bound to be another tool for political patronage favorable to Pnoy’s camp while he turns a blind eye to another huge window of opportunity for corruption in his government.

In sum, the CCT is a jazzed up dole-out program – complete with technocratic justification, a more complex administrative infrastructure, the ideological and political laundering conducted by Pnoy’s allies who used to be critical of the previous regime’s exact same programs, and the big bucks to complete the swindle.

Let us take the more sophisticated arguments used by the CCT defenders including erstwhile critics of the unlamented Arroyo regime’s anti-poverty programs.

There is the disarming admission that the CCT is not a solution to poverty.

It is acknowledged that jobs that bring in decent incomes must be generated and that providing accessible and sufficient social services are key. As for Pnoy loyalists still trying to strike a progressive pose, there is talk about the need for economic growth and the equitable sharing of its fruits as the only way to overcoming poverty. Having said as much, they then proceed to justify the CCT albeit admitting that it is an “ambitious project” that is being rapidly expanded.

In a nutshell, the spin is that CCT saves the so-called poorest of the poor who “have fallen through the cracks of a ruthless market economy.” Since economic policy makers are not about to change gears nor shift tracks in so far as their “free market” orientation, it is reasonable to anticipate more numbers of the absolutely poor to grow hence the need to escalate the CCT.

Doesn’t this line sound familiar?

Recall the much-ballyhooed safety nets that were being touted as the lifeline for those who would lose out when the ruthless structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF-WB were implemented?

Those safety nets were full of holes which left the disadvantaged free falling into greater want, disease and misery than ever before.

Why not do something about the ruthless policies dictated by international financial institutions (IFIs) and carried out by succeeding governments and put a stop to and even reverse them instead of just trying to alleviate the suffering of those who are left destitute in their wake?

The approach is so old-hat and unenlightened it would shame today’s social workers who have long ago realized that dole-outs, no matter what the good intention, are temporary, unsustainable, and encourages mendicancy. They also serve to postpone or even avoid the more fundamental and far-reaching socio-economic policy reforms that only a seriously reform-minded government can initiate and follow through.

And yet the CCT’s current proponents, especially the all-powerful IFIs dangling their grants and loans together with technical briefing papers and so-called expertise, present the CCT as a more elegantly designed program since it will weed out the not-so-desperately poor who may line up for the cash; thus it is said to be more cost-efficient.

Not only that, it is supposed to modify the poor’s behavior for the better, i.e. they will bring the kids to school and mothers will have post-natal check-ups. Of course the working presumption is that they wouldn’t do so on their own while conveniently overlooking the fact that such behavior is not forthcoming because the family doesn’t have the sufficient income to meet basic needs in the first place.

One CCT defender sheepishly concludes that while the program will not restructure the existing iniquitous social relations nor even significantly alter the behavior of poor people, it will at least alleviate hunger and disease and give hope to the despairing.

But if this is the best argument that they can come up with, we daresay it is no argument at all because it merely states the obvious relief that such dole-outs aka cash transfers can give to those at the end of their rope with not much else.

Such an intent and outcome would be enough for charitable institutions and relief agencies but can not be accepted as the government’s approach to tackling poverty, especially the endemic and intractable kind we are afflicted with.

The excuse that generating jobs is not the department of social welfare’s business also doesn’t hold water. The CCT is obviously being touted as a major anti-poverty program of the Pnoy administration considering the amount of money the government has allotted for it even incurring new foreign debt in the process.

The issue of the CCT reveals once more just how lacking in ideas and bereft of true reforming intent is the Pnoy administration for all the soaring rhetoric about bringing about meaningful change. His approach and actual policies and programs are clearly more of the same failed and discredited ones of the Arroyo regime that he so fervently campaigned against.

It is worth quoting in full think tank Ibon Databank’s summation of what is in order in so far as seriously addressing the poverty problem in the country.

“The poor and worsening welfare of tens of millions of Filipinos is a serious development challenge. A genuine poverty-reduction effort means fundamental changes in economic policy towards improving the country’s domestic productive sectors.

“The severe income, wealth and asset inequities in the country also mean that radical redistributive reforms in favor of the poor majority are in order.

“Universal access by all Filipinos to health and education will be more likely achieved through strengthened public health and education systems, not privatized ones and certainly not by selective, targeted and temporary interventions.

“If these progressive socioeconomic policies were in place then programs such as the 4Ps/CCTs would not be necessary – and without such policies no amount of 4Ps/CCTs will ever be enough.”

It can only be concluded that the CCT will merely deepen poverty because it hides the real causes and obfuscates the real solutions required. Not only this, the CCT justifies continuing the wrong policies that have entrenched poverty and inequality in the first place. Politically, what it hopes to achieve is the appearance of poverty alleviation in the new style approved by imperialist funding agencies and in tune with Pnoy’s increasingly tiresome rhetoric. #

Published in Business World
5-6 November 2010

On amnesty and other intriguing questions

2010-10-21T17:00:00.000+08:00

The debate on whether President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III’s amnesty proclamation for soldiers who had rebelled against the government of Mrs. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is justified begs for more clarity. A confirmed putschist, retired colonel Rex Robles, twitted Senator Joker Arroyo, a political ally of Mrs. Arroyo and President Corazon Aquino’s executive secretary, for the latter’s general amnesty of communist rebels when she assumed power from the dictator Marcos in 1986.

Mr. Robles reduced the issue to one of red-baiting. He implied that Mrs. Aquino’s policy on the communist-led rebellion was soft due to the influence of human rights lawyers like Sen. Arroyo. In contrast, Mr. Robles sees amnesty for military rebels more than justified because they were impelled by noble motives, i.e. the desire to rid the military and police establishments of corruption and to expose the Arroyo administration’s complicity if not instigation of wrongdoing.

Mr. Robles does a disservice to the cause of his boss, Senator Antonio Trillanes (the preeminent military officer accused in the alleged Oakwood Mutiny of 2003) by resorting to this low blow.

Sen. Arroyo is perfectly correct in reminding all and sundry: “That policy initiative was in recognition of the immense contribution of these armed groups to the downfall of President Marcos. They suffered casualties, death, wounded, hamletted, tortured, imprisoned without charges in the fight against martial rule.”

As for Trillanes and company, they were protesting corruption and other criminal activities by the top brass of the Philippine armed forces under their commander-in-chief, Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo.

Mr. Trillanes’ victory in the 2007 elections is significant considering he campaigned while in detention charged with leading a coup d’état. Yet he convinced enough Filipino voters disgusted with the Macapagal-Arroyo regime that as senator he would act as a fiscalizer in government.

With the change of administration to one that ran on a platform clobbering corruption and other malfeasance in the previous regime, it stands to reason that Mr. Aquino would eventually grant amnesty to the rebel soldiers. The decision is a popular one except for loud protestations from the former president’s camp and legitimate questions about the timing of the presidential proclamation.

Criticisms that the amnesty will embolden future coups seem to be overtaken by sympathy for the rebel soldiers’ avowed cause. It has been pointed out and rightly so that military rebellion is here to stay so long as government misrule, and other social evils that urge soldiers to rebel, persist.

Sen. Arroyo, tongue in cheek, now uses the argument to oppose the amnesty saying that all other rebels can now rightfully demand amnesty for themselves as well.

He cites the infamous case of the 43 health professionals and community health workers arrested and detained on military claims that they were New People’s Army rebels undergoing training in bomb-making, collectively dubbed Morong 43.

But the national and international clamor for the release of the Morong 43 is not about pardoning political crimes. It is about rendering justice to innocent people wronged by their own government.

The incorrect comparison has been triggered by calls for their release in the wake of amnesty for the rebel soldiers. The question raised is if the Aquino administration can pardon military rebels – even ahead of the verdict promulgation by the court that had been trying the case for seven years -- why can't he act with greater dispatch on the case of the illegally arrested, tortured and unjustly detained forty-three health workers.

The grounds for correcting the injustice inflicted on the Morong 43 are even more pressing, the executive act required less complicated (the prosecutors simply withdraw the charge since the accused have not been arraigned) and there is little substance to any charge that Malacañang would be
Interfering in the independence of the courts.

Meanwhile, the real revolutionaries in this country, be they from the NPA or the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), are not exactly clamoring for amnesty nor showing any indication that they would be open to this in lieu of a negotiated peace settlement or outright military victory.

Nonetheless, the communist-led National Democratic Front (NDF) has consistently joined peace and human rights advocates in demanding the release of political prisoners, i.e. those unjustly detained for dissenting against the previous regimes.

This is not the same as calling for amnesty for CPP/NPA/NDF or the MILF rebels.

While not the crux of the matter, it might also be worth pointing out that all but buried beneath the debate is the fact that the offense for which the soldiers were imprisoned and are on the verge of being amnestied stemmed from their strong aversion to and protest against grand corruption in the military (not to mention implicating their superiors, all the way up to defense sec Angelo Reyes, in the bombings of civilian establishments in order to create “terrorist” scenarios).

The question begs to be asked, why is President Aquino now saying that Mr. Trillanes and the Magdalo soldiers may have been victims of injustice, while his administration does not go after the big-time corrupt generals in the military and police establishments against whom these soldiers rebelled?

There is still the question of timing. Some quarters have observed that the amnesty comes at a time when a group, trying to pass itself off as the anti-government opposition with the distinction of having military men in their roster, was poised to come out with a statement against the Aquino regime. Is the amnesty of soldiers more a political maneuver than a decisive move to render justice?

With what has been happening so far, Mr. Aquino is not just failing in giving firm direction to his fledgling government, he is also creating confusion if not dismay among those who want to know where his “daang matuwid” is leading and how he plans to get there.

But if indeed Mr. Aquino knows where he is bringing this country, why is he caught not telling us the entire truth or giving us the entire picture thus triggering self-inflicted controversies for his administration. #

Published in Business World
22 – 23 October 2010

email: carol_araullo@yahoo.com

No transparency, no accountability

2010-10-14T16:53:00.000+08:00

President Benigno Aquino III’s handling of the Incident Investigation and Review Committee (IIRC) report on the August hostage-taking fiasco exposes his administration’s lack of transparency; his abuse of presidential prerogatives in order to shield his friends and allies from accountability as public officials; and his propensity to operate by means of ad hoc “reviewers” of policy when it suits him even when this jeopardizes the rule of law and undermines the authority of government agencies and institutions.

In suppressing critical parts of the IIRC report thereby preventing full accounting of responsibility for the fiasco, Mr. Aquino also undermines serious efforts to prevent similar crises from ending once more in tragedy when proposed measures are applied selectively, unevenly and in a band-aid fashion.

The foremost purpose of the IIRC, after determining the facts and circumstances of the botched hostage crisis management, was to determine official culpability.

The Palace acknowledged that the findings of facts contained in the IIRC report are correct and indisputable. Thus Mr. Aquino’s order for a review of the IIRC report, purportedly “to find the viable legal actions which can be taken against the concerned parties” and thus avoid “frivolous lawsuits” smacks of a complete cop out.

What better judge of legal viability is Mr. Aquino looking for when the head of the IIRC is no less than the justice secretary who supervises and oversees all prosecutors’ work?

Unless, as many quarters suspect, Mr. Aquino used the review to gain time and eventually let certain people of the hook, pick out those who would take the rap (yet still soften the blow by merely recommending administrative charges), and design a “communications plan” to help sell the whitewash.

Not only did Mr. Aquino set aside the principle of command responsibility by exculpating Local Government Undersecretary and de facto National Crisis Management Committee head Puno and former Police Chief Verzosa, he also did the same with Manila Mayor and Local Crisis Management Committee head Lim, who merely got a slap on the wrist with an administrative charge.

Why does the Aquino review implicitly uphold the position that the crisis was a local one when it is loud and clear, especially from the IIRC report no less, the hostage situation had developed into a crisis of national proportions?

Not only were there twenty five hostages, twenty one of whom were foreign nationals, the situation was dragging on and in fact deteriorating in the wake of the patent incompetence of the ground command and the weak and later wrongful overall leadership provided by the local CMC.

At the minimum, the corresponding national supervisory authority, from the police headed by General Verzosa, to the National Crisis Management Committee headed by Usec Puno, are guilty of criminal neglect of duty.

In fact, Mr. Puno’s decision “to downplay the situation due to the apprehension that the hostage taker might ask bigger demands if national officials are seen” is not only a mistake in judgment, it led to the concerned national officials abdicating their role of supervising government response in light of the dangerous and volatile situation.

Mr. Aquino, after giving the impression that he means business and wants to get to the bottom of the messy incident, was faced with a dilemma when the report pointed to people close to him as being administratively and criminally liable for the hostage-taking fiasco.

Mr. Aquino was looking for scapegoats given the international uproar over the incident and the need to assuage the Chinese government and the Hong Kong people. When his initial attempt to blame the media did not wash, he accepted responsibility in principle and created the IIRC.

He tried to buy time as the IIRC, a quasi-independent body composed of credible government and private individuals, labored to investigate and piece together the evidence. But their findings and recommendations didn’t come up to Mr. Aquino’s expectations and liking.

While he was forced to give the IIRC report right away to the Chinese government in order to squelch further diplomatic repercussions and bad international press before his US trip, he kept crucial parts of it secret from the public. He then subjected it to review by two of his lawyers who would acquiesce to his desired outcome.

Aquino’s avowed interest in determining where police and civilian officials went wrong in order to correct mistakes and prevent future ones was overtaken by his desire to cover up for his friends and allies, shield them from prosecution and justify maintaining one of them within his circle of trusted aides.

It is also important to point out that Mr. Aquino stripped the Interior and Local Government secretary of his mandate and authority over the national police and handed it over instead to his buddy, Mr. Puno.

Until the hostage crisis, many trusted in the Aquino administration being all too transparent. If not for the fiasco, we would not have known the real reason why the DILG post took so long to fill with Aquino even considering taking it on himself. It turns out the only reason Mr. Puno was not given the post, according to him, is that he shuns scrutiny by the Commission on Appointments.

Then the justice secretary de facto loses her mandate and authority to decide whether a government official should be charged criminally or not, that being given to the presidential legal counsel and executive secretary who constituted the low-caliber IIRC “review” committee.

In both cases, the winner is the self-proclaimed closest friend and longtime business associate of the president himself.

Malgovernance is too mild a term to describe the series of anomalous decisions Mr. Aquino has been making.

Indeed, there is a thin grey line between misuse and abuse of presidential prerogatives. That line is easily breached, along with public trust, when there is no transparency and no accountability. #

Published in Business World
15-16 October 2010

Ominous first one hundred days

2010-10-11T10:16:00.000+08:00

President Noynoy Aquino’s spinmeisters dubbed his speech assessing the first 100 days of his administration as “Isang Daang Araw Sa Isang Daang Matuwid: Report Kay Boss”. The clever play on words is meant to once more invoke the image of a presidency hewing to the straight and narrow path against corruption in government and of Mr. Aquino’s professed accountability to the people as his “boss”.

It is not at all surprising that Mr. Aquino and his supporters have ended up congratulating themselves on the administration’s claimed achievements and deriding his critics as seeking to merely set back his so-called reform agenda and maintain the status quo. Ominously, he even issued a veiled threat to these critics saying that their days are numbered.

Too bad for Mr. Aquino, there are a growing number of Filipinos who are tired of simplistic campaign rhetoric and crowd-pleasing gestures. They are looking for concrete actions and policy measures in the immediate and a platform of government for the remaining five years and nine months of his term.

Unfortunately too for this administration, while strong survey outcomes and carefully crafted and executed public relations measures are good grist for the media mill, the reality of the ongoing socio-economic and political crises of Philippine society is already catching up with Mr. Aquino’s hyped-up mystique.

In the first hundred days of his administration, Mr. Aquino’s ideological and political mind set - that is, his overall framework, priorities, inclinations and outright biases – has more clearly come to the fore.

Rather than reinforce his claims as a harbinger of much-needed reforms in government, he cuts a more and more conservative if not unabashedly reactionary figure, a traditional politician who will protect, uphold and promote foreign and domestic elite interests rather than those of the common tao.

Organizations of workers, peasants, urban poor, the student youth and professional sectors as well as faith-based organizations say Mr. Aquino has failed dismally where it counts.

He has not moved an inch in the criminal prosecution of former President Gloria Arroyo or any of her minions for graft and corruption on a grand scale.

He has not put a stop to extrajudicial killings and the body count is rising. He refuses to acknowledge the government’s counter-insurgency program, Oplan Bantay Laya, as directly responsible for the Arroyo regime’s bloody human rights record, and he has extended it as his government’s program.

He curries favor with the military and police generals by giving them huge increases in their budgets while looking the other way in so far as their crimes of murder, abduction and torture as well as thievery of soldiers’ pay, benefits and equipment. He has done nothing to break the culture of impunity with which the AFP and PNP perpetrate corruption and human rights violations.

He says hardly a word and takes no steps towards addressing the feudal tenurial relations in the country benefitting big landlords such as the Cojuangco-Aquino clan of which he himself is now the most prominent member. But he and is spokespersons have favorable comments for the management of Hacienda Luisita as they employ all kinds of vile tactics to frustrate land reform from reaching the Cojuangco-owned estate.

He continues with the honorable-debtor policy that was the legacy of his mother and all post-Marcos Dictatorship regimes, not only persisting in the payment of onerous debts but in prioritizing debt servicing over any and all government expenditures, especially basic services such as health, education and housing.

The Aquino administration’s neoliberal economic policy framework is completely unchanged from that of the Arroyo regime with its liberalization, privatization and deregulation thrusts. The result: more joblessness, more poverty and misery, greater environmental destruction and further denationalization and deindustrialization of the economy.

Not only does Mr. Aquino fail to see the connection between the endemic poverty and backwardness of the Philippine economy and these failed policies, he attempts to portray them as something innovative.

This is the case with the private-public partnerships (PPP)held up by Mr. Aquino as his centerpiece economic strategy though they are nothing more than the joint ventures of old. In fact many of such build-operate-transfer projects have ended up over-priced and, for the most part, graft-ridden, with the debts incurred in their implementation guaranteed by government and recovered through unconscionably high user fees and taxes.

US-Philippine relations under Mr. Aquino’s watch are still framed in the old neocolonial mold which Mr. Aquino even continues to describe as “special” apparently oblivious to all nationalist reassessments of the historically and currently unequal, lop-sided relations.

Mr. Aquino’s speech and Q & A in a forum sponsored by the US Council for Foreign Relations during his US trip is revealing. He declared the Philippines as “open for business under new management”. He assures US business interests that his regime will be “investment friendly” and that the doors are wide open to private investment in infrastructure projects, tourism, mining and business process outsourcing.

Mr. Aquino reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to uphold US geopolitical interests and foreign policy thrusts in the Philippines and in the Asia-Pacific region to the point that he was speechless about the RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement, the permanent presence of US troops on Philippine soil and related national sovereignty issues.

He displayed first and foremost, for his US audience of big business and policy makers, that he is a leader of the same kowtowing mold as Mrs. Arroyo and even his mother before him. Then he touted his popularity and credibility as one that can - in a gross perversion of “people power” - rally the people behind his regime’s policies, no matter how anti-people and undemocratic these turn out to be.

Mr. Aquino has not taken any steps to end the decades-old armed conflict in the country through peace negotiations and addressing its root causes. Instead he parrots the military’s line that the New People’s Army is a terrorist organization and that a ceasefire is a precondition to any reopening of peace talks.

From Mr. Aquino’s first one hundred days, it seems that the only change our people can expect is a change for the worse. #

No titles

2010-09-30T20:58:00.000+08:00

Last week’s violent demolition of shanties in a sprawling urban poor community in Quezon City highlighted once more the intractable problems of homelessness and urban blight and government’s generally myopic, piecemeal and anti-poor approach to solving these. It reminded us as well how the urban poor – their travails and struggles -- have contributed immeasurably to the political awakening and continuing education of the urban youth, notably the students, about what ails this society and what it will take for far-reaching, radical reforms to take place.

It is thus disconcerting that the news reportage on the demolition, the consequent resistance mounted by the residents and the aftermath was generally quite superficial and unsympathetic. The preeminent line was this: Since the residents of Baranggay San Roque do not have titles to the land, they have no legal right to be there. Ergo they - being “squatters” on government property - have neither just nor reasonable grounds whatsoever to fight for their homes against the demolition teams.

The fact is the phenomenon of poor people in cities and towns building their make-shift homes in empty private lots or in unused government land and the consequent growth of huge slum settlements is a long-standing social problem. It is not just the result of the lack of urban planning and law enforcement.

Studies of migration trends in the country over the past decades show that the movement of people from rural to urban areas has been unremitting. Metro Manila's annual population growth rate from the seventies to the eighties was 3.6 per cent, far higher than the national average of 2.5 per cent. Within Metro Manila, Quezon City and Caloocan were booming at 4 per cent and 3.5 per cent, respectively.
While government figures for 2005-2010 show that the national population growth rate slowed to 1.9%, the rate of urban population growth still remained at a hefty 3%.

The underlying causes of this ever increasing rural to urban exodus are deeply rooted in landlessness (farmers dispossessed, evicted from land they till by land grabbers, land conversion, etc.); entrenched rural poverty and agricultural backwardness (aggravated by neoliberal policies of import liberalization and deregulation, e.g. the removal of agricultural subsidies); landlord and state suppression of peasant struggles against feudal oppression and exploitation; and the continuously deteriorating and overall stultifying living conditions in the countryside.

Peasants streaming into urban areas seeking jobs and a better life merely add up to the mounting urban unemployed and underemployed with local industries going bankrupt and no government programs to build, strengthen and protect the industrial sector, especially manufacturing.

That is why the approach of government to the teeming numbers of urban poor – of resettling them back to the provinces or relocating them to far-flung areas outside Metro Manila and far from jobs, opportunities for making a living, schools and other social amenities and services – cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered solutions, not even short-term ones.

It is obvious that violent demolitions and literally throwing out the displaced families into the streets to survive willy-nilly without any kind of government assistance is condemnable and breeds even more problems.

What is not so obvious is that drawing up grand development plans to beautify, commercialize and make profitable what was once considered an eyesore while not making any provisions for the urban poor -- the working class and underclass -- in this development plan is inhumane, unjust, unsustainable and bound to meet with resistance from those who would be most adversely affected.

The Quezon City-Central Business District (QC-CBD) project is the over-arching plan in which the joint project of the National Housing Authority and the Ayala Corporation (currently already established in one corner of the disputed North Triangle with their Trinoma Mall) is included. Essentially, government undertakes to consolidate and develop 340 hectares of government land currently occupied by government agencies, hospitals and schools, public parks and urban poor settlements for “mixed-use”.

In other words, like other so-called CBDs, we will see the establishment of more shopping malls, upscale office and residential buildings, recreational facilities, manicured gardens and parking buildings with connections to mass transit systems that will ferry shoppers and other consumers in droves.

All this in the name of “modernization” and “urban development” but development for whom?

The more than a hundred thousand residents of the five major informal settlements to be demolished to give way to the QC-CBD have reason to ask: will this project bring jobs and a better life not only for them but for others like them? Or will they be sacrificed so that foreign investors and their local partners have more business opportunities and hefty profits while government bureaucrats can collect more taxes and earnings from lease arrangements/joint ventures that they can then plunder and dissipate in more anti-people projects?

It is the easiest thing to condemn the residents’ violent resistance especially when viewed from the purely legalistic standpoint that these people are "squatters" and have no legal claim to these lands, that their "relocation" (read: eviction) is necessary to give way to "development" (read: business opportunities).

However, the grim reality of the urban poor cannot be swept under the rug by throwing them far away in uninhabitable places to die the slow death of poverty and neglect. This approach not only fails to solve the problem, it aggravates it and fuels even more social unrest and more resistance that the government and the ruling elite have never and can never put a lid on. #

Published in Business World
30 September - 1 October 2010

The Cojuangco compromise agreement

2010-08-12T19:23:00.001+08:00

The so-called compromise agreement announced by the management of the Cojuangco-owned Hacienda Luisita Inc. (HLI) comes ahead of an upcoming decision of the Supreme Court on the legality of the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council (PARC) decision to revoke the 16-year-old stock distribution option (SDO). The SDO took the place of outright distribution of land to the hacienda farm workers as mandated by the 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL).

A close study of the agreement reveals that it does not address any of the grounds cited by the PARC as to why the SDO is illegal and grossly inimical to the interests of the farm workers. Worse it allows the continuation of the SDO under even more onerous terms, lays the ground for continuing agrarian unrest at the hacienda and provides ample fuel to the raging agrarian-based armed conflict nationwide.

Land reform at Hacienda Luisita was subverted twice during the administration of Pres. Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino, herself part-owner of the hacienda.

A 1985 Manila RTC decision ordering the Cojuangcos to turn over control of the hacienda lands to the Ministry of Agrarian Reform for distribution was pending at the Court of Appeals. In 1988, the Aquino government filed a motion to dismiss the civil case against the Cojuangcos on the ground that Hacienda Luisita would be covered by agrarian reform anyway. The case was dismissed.

In 1988, the agrarian reform law legislated under the Aquino watch included the SDO scheme that permitted the distribution of shares of stock in a corporation dominated by landowners instead of actual land distribution to farm workers.

In Hacienda Luisita, a referendum was held in 1989 wherein farm workers were said to have overwhelmingly voted for the SDO. Land reform was thus effectively circumvented and the Cojuangcos hold on the estate perpetuated.

In 2003, leadership over the two major unions in the hacienda passed on to the hands of officials who were not beholden to the hacienda owners. Petitions were filed at the DAR to revoke the SDO because it grossly failed to improve the lot of the supposed agrarian reform beneficiaries and in fact, actually worsened it.

In 2004, the joint massive strike by the hacienda farm workers and the sugar mill workers took place due to the illegal dismissal of 327 farm workers and a deadlock in the CBA between management and sugar mill workers union. The violent dispersal of the strikers by soldiers, police and hacienda security guards caused the death of seven strikers and injuries to many others.

Prior and subsequent extrajudicial killings of church people, local government officials and other supporters of the struggling hacienda and azucarera workers upped the ante by way of human rights violations related to the hacienda dispute.

National and international condemnation of the massacre and other human rights violations together with government’s failure to end the oppressive feudal system holding sway at Hacienda Luisita pushed the Arroyo government to respond to the farmers’ demand to end the SDO.

DAR undertook a factual investigation and a legal study of the HLI SDO that resulted in the 2005 PARC resolution revoking it and placing the hacienda under the compulsory coverage of CARP. However in 2006, the HLI was able to get a temporary restraining order from the Supreme Court that kept the DAR and PARC from terminating the SDO.

Even on the basis of DAR and PARC findings alone, the legal and moral grounds for annulling the SDO are more than compelling.

First of all, shares of stock were not distributed outright to the more than 5000 beneficiaries as provided by law but were programmed to be parceled out over 30 years on the basis of “man days” or the number of hours a worker works in a year at the hacienda, something that was entirely under the discretion and control of management.

If the farm worker had no "man days " for one reason or another, he could not earn or be issued a share of stocks.
A farm worker who is separated, terminated or dismissed earlier for any reason will no longer receive any shares of stocks and ceases to be a shareholder.

On the other hand, management can continue to hire workers as they please and thereby bloat the number of “stockholders” to their liking, to the prejudice of the original farm workers in the hacienda.

Secondly, the HLI has not given a single cent of dividends to the farm workers cum supposed stockholders.

Whatever “added benefits” the farm workers received from HLI, such as the 3% share from gross production and home lots, are in fact not due from the SDO but from other provisions of the agrarian reform law.

Thirdly, contrary to the provisions of the SDO Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) to keep the agricultural lands intact and unfragmented, the HLI management converted 500 hectares for industrial and commercial purposes. It gave the farm worker-stockholders a pittance for their share in the sale of this parcel of land. Subsequently more land was disposed of without benefitting the hacienda workers.

But more than anything else, what is beyond dispute is that the lives of farm workers and their families did not improve; instead, they were pushed deeper into poverty and misery by the one-sided SDO.

The so-called new compromise agreement bears all the hallmarks of HLI management’s manipulation and deception. Apart from questions about whether the HLI had any right to initiate and preside over such an agreement when PARC had already revoked the SDO, there is the nagging question about whether any form of coercion, duress or misrepresentation attended this management-engineered agreement.

In truth, this “agreement” is so patently against the interests of the form workers. It upholds the discredited and rejected SDO. It swindles the farm workers by arbitrarily allotting only one third of the remaining 4,102 hectares of agricultural land for distribution. Furthermore it deprives the farm workers from ever questioning any violations that may have happened in the past or may arise in the future in relation to the 1989 SDO MOA.

President “Cory” Aquino, sadly, presided over the emasculation of agrarian reform and allowed her relatives to take undue advantage of the law’s loopholes to retain their hold over HLI.

President “Noynoy” Aquino, her son, is today burdened by this odious legacy, just as he is challenged to set this historical injustice to right.

His pretense that he has nothing to do with the “agreement” and his obvious lack of interest in using his vast powers to see social justice reign in his family’s hacienda exposes his glaring unconcern for the poor and downtrodden peasantry who make up a majority of the people in this country. #

*Published in Business World
13-14 ugust 2010

Smoke and mirrors

2010-07-29T21:10:00.001+08:00

“Pnoy the Magician” in bright yellow. This was how activists depicted President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino in effigy in last Monday’s annual State-of-the-Nation street demonstration. They were proven prescient in more ways than one as soon as Mr. Aquino started delivering his SONA that turned out to be vintage smoke-and-mirrors demagoguery.

Rather than lead the people to an understanding of the true state of the nation, his seemingly straightforward rhetoric was used instead to conjure illusions and deceive not unlike the way a magician uses optical illusions to create believability while actually performing tricks.

The main trick is to continue to appear as the harbinger of the “change that people can believe in” that worked well enough to get Mr. Aquino elected.

However, despite the effort to make the Aquino regime appear poised to undertake far-reaching reforms in government, in the economy, in resolving armed conflicts and even in turning around public sentiment from pessimism to hopefulness, cynicism to unity and cooperation, Mr. Aquino’s SONA only confirms that there is nothing new, innovative, not to mention any attempt at a radical break from the past, in his prescriptions.

What we heard are more of the same policies and programs of old dressed up to dazzle and give false hopes.

Once more corruption is presented as the overarching problem. Mr. Aquino’s speech used simple and folksy language to whip up the public’s hatred for corrupt politicians and other government officials by laying out more horror stories from the previous regime: Mrs. Arroyo’s pampering her province with government funds to boost her congressional bid; the over-procurement of imported rice at the cost of billions of pesos which was then left to rot in government warehouses; MWSS top officials wallowing in pelf and privilege while the country suffers a water crisis.

Salacious new details these but nothing surprising. Why not tell us the progress in case build-up on the biggest corruption scandals that plagued the Arroyo administration? Why is the Truth Commission still nowhere in sight, much less near to having Mrs. Arroyo and her partners in crime brought to the bar of justice?

Mr. Aquino stated categorically that his administration would not tolerate murderers and plunderers. He crowed about solving “50% of the cases of extralegal killings” that occurred soon after his assuming office or three out of six reported cases with the identification of suspects.

Assuming this to be true, however, his complete silence on government’s current counterinsurgency or COIN program as the underlying cause of most of the killings as pointed out by independent international human rights bodies places in serious doubt Mr. Aquino’s earnestness in putting a stop to and solving these murders by state security forces.

More specifically, the lack of immediate action to disband the legalized private armies called “civilian volunteer organizations” that the military uses to augment its COIN operations, renders Mr. Aquino’s boast inconsequential in ending criminal impunity. Such a reign of impunity gave rise to the still unresolved Maguindanao massacre on top of the more than a thousand unsolved extrajudicial killings in almost a decade of Oplan Bantay Laya.

It is not surprising that Mr. Aquino’s take on the peace talks reveals his apparently shallow and short-sighted view about armed conflicts and how to resolve them. His insistence on a permanent ceasefire as a precondition to the resumption of the talks with the CPP/NPA/NDF and his insinuation that the NDF has not made any worthwhile proposal on the matter indicates either ignorance of what has previously transpired or a dangerously militarist mindset intent on throwing a monkey wrench on the talks rather than in undertaking the fundamental reforms needed to attain a just and lasting peace.

Stopping corrupt practices, judicious use of government resources, and so-called private-public partnership are touted as the strategy to lift up the economy and miraculously solve all other related problems such as massive unemployment and underemployment, the budget deficit, decrepit social services as well as crumbling public infrastructure.

Mr. Aquino completely and conveniently overlooks genuine land reform not just as a basic social justice measure but a question of breaking free from a backward, semi-feudal agricultural economy.

He is completely mum about neoliberal policies that destroyed whatever was left of manufacturing, further undermined agricultural development and food self-sufficiency and rendered the domestic economy more than ever vulnerable to the vagaries of the international market as shown in the recent regional and global financial crises.

We can safely presume that his macro-economic policy framework will not depart from those of all his predecessors including Mrs. Arroyo.

So much ado about how Mrs. Arroyo wasted public funds for narrow political ends leaving the Aquino government with little left to undertake vital programs and services. But he says not a word about the P300 billion pesos automatically set aside for debt payments considering many of these are onerous debts that date back to the Marcos dictatorship as well as to the graft-ridden Arroyo regime.

Ibon Data Bank puts forward concrete doable measures to address the fiscal deficit but apparently Mr. Aquino does not countenance any of them.

These include implementing increases in tariffs and withdrawing huge incentives given to foreign investors. IBON estimates government losses of around P200 billion in potential revenues each year because of tariff reduction. Fiscal incentives to foreign investors have in turn led to huge tax losses estimated by the Finance Department to be around P43 billion.

Mr. Aquino has a fondness for using the metaphor of crossroads to describe his administration’s core values and trajectory. He likens a leader’s choice to taking the straight path of “good governance” or the crooked one so dishonorably exemplified by the Arroyo regime. What all this clever use of metaphors has been concealing all along is the truth that corruption is not the root cause of our nation's poverty and hardship.

It is the wanton exploitation and oppression of our people by foreign powers, mainly the US, with the collaboration of the local ruling elite. Together they appropriate the social wealth produced by our people's labor. Together they impose and implement socio-economic and political programs and policies that deliberately favor foreign capital and their local agents while relegating our economy -- our local industries and agriculture -- to backwardness and dependency.

All this magic may serve to deceive and even entertain our hungry and suffering masses. But they will not forever drive away the pangs of hunger, the homelessness and the scourge of disease. No matter how many SONAs repeat the same deceptive tricks and clever lies, more and more in the streets, in homes, factories, fields and mountains, will see the through the smoke and mirrors, see the truth and find the real path to freedom, democracy, progress and peace. #

Nothing personal (Or why Akbayan's Etta Rosales is not fit to be CHR Chair)

2010-07-22T18:41:00.002+08:00

The controversy over the possible appointment of former Akbayan party list Representative Loretta Ann Rosales as Chair of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) merits closer scrutiny. Apart from the importance of appointing a new chairperson who can carry on the outstanding work left behind by Atty. Leila de Lima, it is as important to clarify certain human rights concepts and principles that the controversy has brought to the fore so that the CHR’s mandate is not undermined at the outset by distortions coupled with plain ignorance and muddle-headed thinking.

Ms. Rosales declares that the main reason for the opposition to her appointment by people’s organizations like the Kilusang Mayo Uno and human rights groups like Karapatan harkens back to her stand to fight for the “universality” of human rights. She said some groups get angry when she criticizes human rights violations allegedly committed by the communist New People's Army (NPA).

Ms. Rosales says further, “It is not just the military and police that commit human rights violations but non-state agents such as private armies. If the military and police try to extort, I condemn that. But if the New People's Army tries to extort, I also condemn that."

On the surface, her position appears fair and neutral. But in fact it rests on the fallacy of her concept of "universal human rights" to mean that the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and NPA are equally liable for human rights violations and therefore the CHR should address NPA violations as much as those of the AFP.

In the first place, the facts and circumstances of more than a thousand documented extra-judicial killings (EJKs) of activists and others critically opposed to the Arroyo regime all point to the involvement of state security forces including paramilitary groups cum warlord private armies allied to the regime.

They also reveal a pattern: The victims were at one time or another demonized by the AFP as “communist terrorists” or “communist fronts”, harassed and shadowed by military or paramilitary forces prior to being assassinated under suspicious circumstances such as close proximity to military camps or police check points. Investigations into the murders are marked by stone-walling on the part of the AFP and foot-dragging and white-washing by the Philippine National Police (PNP).

In the debates in Congress on the recently passed Anti-Torture bill, Akbayan representatives Etta Rosales and Riza Hontiveros, were isolated and failed to push their view that supposed “non-state actors” - the category where they lump the NPA with private armies and alleged “terrorist” groups -should be included as equally liable.

Civil libertarian senators and congress persons clearly saw that to do so would render the bill out of focus and defeat its purpose.

It would obfuscate the real perpetrators and real victims of torture leading to the failure to serve as a deterrent against state security forces employing torture as a means of extracting information and self-incriminating “confessions”.

It would also blunt the law’s effectiveness as a means to identify, prosecute and punish those state forces that use torture despite clear prohibition by law.

Ms. Rosales and Ms. Hontiveros only managed to display their ignorance, if not deliberate distortion, of international human rights norms which define torture as acts committed "at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity." (UN Convention on Torture)

These two pseudo-leftists follow the tack of various right-wing ideologues and politicians abroad in inventing new semantics to discredit and stigmatize people’s movements fighting for national and social liberation. By calling the CPP-NPA-NDF "non-state actors", they denigrate these revolutionary forces in contrast to “duly-constituted state actors”.

They then proceed to put them in the same criminal basket together with the “private armies” (in reality, these are government-financed paramilitary groups legalized as “civilian volunteer organizations” under the supervision of the AFP) or misrepresent them as “terrorist” in the same league as the dreaded Abu Sayyaf Group.

In the recent elections, Akbayan, and prominently Ms. Hontiveros, took this a step further and plunged even deeper into the dung heap when they persistently toed the AFP line of linking Makabayan senatorial candidates Satur Ocampo and Liza Maza to the CPP-NPA, hoping thereby to demonize Ocampo and Maza and win more votes for Akbayan and Hontiveros.

It is not true that the problem lies in Ms. Rosales’ denunciation of alleged NPA human rights violations.

The controversy lies in her propensity to magnify these in a way that she equates their importance to the violations by the AFP, to the point that she even wittingly or unwittingly contributes to the AFP/PNP line that the victims were killed by their own comrades, i.e. the NPA, for a variety of reasons.

These purportedly include: internal conflicts, infractions of the NPA rules or for having a change of heart and cooperating with the military.

This line not only totally lacks credibility, it maligns the victims, tries to instigate intrigue among those they left behind, and certainly ends up protecting the real killers.

If Ms. Rosales’ only point is that the NPA should also be held liable for HRVs, she is arguing a false issue.

Being a proscribed organization, the NPA has, for several decades, been the object of unrelenting military and police operations. The full force of the law is being made to bear on the NPA for waging armed revolution, how much more their alleged HRVs?

Furthermore, in 1998, the CPP-NPA-NDF, through peace negotiations, signed the landmark Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) with the Philippine government. Even a cursory reading of the CARHRIHL would clearly show that the CPP-NDF-NPA acknowledges that its forces may be liable for human rights violations and agreed on a mechanism for accepting complaints, investigating and taking proper action on these.

The new Aquino regime may hope to utilize Ms. Rosales to put the national democratic movement on the defensive on the issue of alleged NPA human rights violations, pacify the AFP and contribute to the illusion that the regime gives top priority to implementing a counterinsurgency program that is HRV-free (an oxymoron). But he will be sorely mistaken.

Indeed, we wager that the torturers, hit-teams and other human rights violators within the AFP, PNP and the paramilitary units would be mighty pleased to have Ms. Rosales chair the CHR. #

*Published in Business World
23-24 July 2010

Mr. Aquino, stop the killings!

2010-07-09T22:21:00.000+08:00

The cold-blooded assassination of Bayan Muna Aklan coordinator and Lezo town councilor Fernando Baldomero last Monday is forcing the hand of President Benigno Aquino to not only denounce extra-judicial killings (EJKs) and promise to go after their perpetrators but to deal with its obvious link with the government’s counterinsurgency program called Oplan Bantay Laya (OBL).

Will he acknowledge it as something he has inherited but abhors and intends to put an end to? More important, what he is going to do about it, knowing full well that the people, his acknowledged "Boss", would demand more than the same avowals and promises they had likewise heard from the murderous Arroyo regime?

Mrs. Arroyo herself was forced to make some general condemnation of EJKs after the indignant reaction to the fulsome praise she heaped on a notorious general accused precisely of ordering such killings. Rising concern in the international community about the unabated murders of unarmed activists and other progressives may also have pushed Mrs. Arroyo to appoint a feisty chairperson for the nonetheless toothless human rights commission.

But there have been no credible investigations; no arrests; no successful prosecutions; and most of all, no acknowledgement that EJKs have become part and parcel of government’s counterinsurgency operations.

Thus although the numbers of EJKs and other gross human rights violations came down for a while, these started to climb up once more especially as the government’s self-imposed deadline for ending the insurgency drew near.

Mr. Aquino’s pronouncements so far about national security and peace talks and his latest address to the Philippine military in turn-over ceremonies have fallen far short of sending an unequivocal message of his administration’s commitment to uphold human rights.

Despite the gravity of the problem, it is not clear at this point whether part of building “strong, capable and disciplined security forces” includes weeding out those guilty of EJKs and their cover-up. Will Mr. Aquino give them the same leeway as did Mrs. Arroyo or will he relentlessly go after them, in as much as he is called upon to uncompromisingly seek the truth and achieve justice with regard to all the anti-people crimes of her regime?

Even with regard to the so-called Truth Commission, Mr. Aquino has so far been quite general in its announced goals, i.e. anomalies under the Arroyo government, without mention of human rights violations despite local and international outrage over hundreds of unsolved cases and clear signs that these are continuing despite a change in leadership.

The ambiguity in Mr. Aquino’s policy statements leaves much room for perpetuating the climate of impunity that persists to this day. As if on cue, the military spokesperson’s blanket denial of any AFP involvement in Mr. Baldomero’s killing and the innuendo that the NPA are more likely to be the culprits behind it reveals the military’s unchanged attitude and line on EJKs.

The victims of human rights violations expect nothing short of concrete and effective steps from the Aquino administration to put a stop to the killings and render justice to the victims. These include:

1) Investigate, arrest and prosecute the direct perpetrators of EJKs, enforced disappearances, etc and the high government officials and military/police officers who provided policy direction and political justification, praised and promoted the notorious military/police officers implicated, provided systematic cover-up and gave all-out support to Oplan Bantay Laya.

2) Put on hold, subject to review and disavow OBL as part of actualizing the statement of Presidential Spokesperson that “EJKs are not a policy” of the Aquino administration.

3) Immediately put a stop to the military’s vilification
campaign against activists and progressives, specifically linking them to the New People’s Army, thereby setting them up for “neutralization” (a military euphemism for elimination) first politically, and eventually, physically. There should be a clear repudiation of the AFP document "Knowing the Enemy" which set the direction, justified and lined up the targets for "neutralization" by the military.

4) Issue a strong warning and undertake summary action against military commanders in areas of responsibility where EJKs take place and against police superintendents who make no headway in investigating EJKs and other gross HRVs.

5) Stop the widespread practice of arresting, detaining and convicting leaders and members of progressive organizations for alleged criminal offenses on the basis of fabricated charges and evidence. Release all political prisoners detained on the basis of false charges.

Moreover, this blight on the government’s human rights record and the rule of law should not be tackled selectively. It is hoped that Mr. Aquino will not take a leaf from the way the US ambassador recently and notably called for quick official action on media killings while being conspicuously silent on the murders of activists known to be on the Left of the political spectrum.

It must be pointed out that prior governments’ track record with regard to EJKs has been dismal including the assassination of Mr. Aquino’s father, Sen. Ninoy Aquino, where the real masterminds were never officially determined, much less prosecuted and arrested.

It is perhaps a testament to the country’s real state of affairs, where the military and police are now more than ever the armed protectors of an intolerably unjust social system and whoever is the current oppressive regime presiding over it. So much so that whatever their abuses against the people, these are swept under the rug, tolerated and even justified in the name of counterinsurgency and protecting the state.

Sooner than later, the Aquino regime will be unmasked by the festering problems of Philippine society that continue to erupt with such manifestations as EJKs, fiscal crises and unmitigated poverty that no amount of feel-good rhetoric can contain and paper over.

Mr. Aquino will then be forced to confront these and will be ultimately judged by his actions and not mere promises. #

*Published in Business World
9-10 July 2010

Empty rhetoric?

2010-07-02T14:57:00.001+08:00

The Aquino presidency is finally ensconced. If only because this signals the end of the Arroyo nightmare, our people have reason to cheer. But how much different will the Aquino administration be from that of Arroyo or any of the previous regimes for that matter?

During the electoral campaign, Mr. Aquino did not state categorically that he would be the exact opposite of Mrs. Arroyo, the way his mother Cory promised she would be the antithesis of the dictator Marcos. He merely said he would not be a crook while in office; he would run after the crooks in the previous government and would not tolerate them in his; and that he would help the poor and deliver basic services.

The anti-corruption rhetoric is a staple of campaign speeches of politicians everywhere. In the Philippines, Mr. Aquino’s promises resonated with Filipinos who are not only sick and tired of the Arroyo government’s shenanigans but who have had it with “traditional” or old-type politicians running an endemically corrupt system.

What is cleverly hidden in all the sound and fury about corruption, then and now, is that it is only the symptom of a more pernicious disease called bureaucrat capitalism; i.e. government officials using their positions to protect and amass more wealth and privilege at the expense of the people.

Hence one can have different factions of the same ruling classes taking turns running the government, with different and even distinctive styles of preserving the status quo. Invariably the bureaucrat capitalists end up using deception combined with repression in varying proportions and with differing degrees of effectiveness.

Mr. Aquino’s popularity rode on the back of his parents’ combined political mystique, on massive rejection of the odious Arroyo regime, and on inchoate hopes for meaningful change -- a break with a rotten system that has all but destroyed the people’s livelihoods, made their lives even more miserable and robbed them of their future.

But after all the flag-waving and cheering, the excitement and the relief at seeing Mrs. Arroyo being driven out of Malacañang finally, albeit still in the presidential limousine, what do the Filipino people have to be hopeful and thankful for?

It is becoming clearer by the day that there is not much change to be expected from the Aquino presidency judging from his pre-inaugural statements, the composition of his Cabinet, and his inaugural speech.

His promises can be said to be a rehash of the lofty promises of previous presidents in their inaugural and SONA speeches. Nothing much happened afterwards for we all know it takes more than promises to bring about genuine change.

The central weakness of Mr. Aquino’s line is still his trite, superficial and misleading framework that falsely reduces the roots of entrenched and widespread poverty to corruption, followed by the promise to eradicate the latter by means of uprightness in government service.

Mr. Aquino has nothing new to offer in this regard. Cory’s good government commission went after Marcos' cronies and ill-gotten wealth but the Marcoses are back in power. Mr. Ramos went after the so-called oligarchs and monopolies but he merely entrenched them and created new ones. Mr. Estrada went after Mr. Ramos but was ousted himself before he could make anything stick. Mrs. Gloria Arroyo went after Mr. Estrada and had him convicted for plunder but quickly pardoned him anyway.

Corruption has never been rooted out and in fact continues to thrive especially at the highest reaches of government.

Mr. Aquino will have to do much more than go through the motions of prosecuting those who have committed supposed transgressions. In his inaugural speech, he did not even mention what transgressions he was referring to or who these transgressors were. It was noticeable that there was no pointed reference to Mrs. Arroyo and her cabal as criminally culpable for wanton plunder and grievous human rights violations.

His appointment of former Chief Justice Hilarion Davide to the Truth Commission that will purportedly uncover the truth about “unresolved controversies” is not a cause for celebration either considering Mr. Davide’s close and mutually beneficial relationship with Mrs. Arroyo who had amply rewarded him for his services to her regime.

Holding over foreign affairs secretary Romulo and recycling the finance and economic managers from the Cory Aquino, Ramos and Arroyo regimes indicate that the Aquino government will pursue the same IMF-WB-WTO imposed neoliberal policies that are a greater and more direct cause of poverty than corruption.

There is also no mention of land reform, not even the recycled form of his mother’s emasculated land reform program, CARPER. He says absolutely nothing about his clan’s landed estate, the Hacienda Luisita Incorporated (HLI), whether his administration will finally distribute land to the tenants and render justice to the victims of the HLI massacre and related extra-judicial killings.

Mr. Aquino turns a blind eye to US domination of the country’s economic and military affairs. He even echoes the old slogan of former President Ramos to "level the playing field" for foreign investors; that is, to allow the multinational corporations and banks to ride roughshod over Filipino enterprises and productive sectors and foreclose all possibility of national industrialization.

All these negate the possibility of success and reduce to empty rhetoric Mr. Aquino's ambitious plan to "defeat the enemy by wielding the tools of justice, social reform, and equitable governance leading to a better life".

Consistently, Mr. Aquino makes no reference to the need for peace negotiations with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, the umbrella formation that represents the communists and other revolutionary organizations in peace talks with government. Instead, he stressed the need to double the strength of the military and police supposedly because the population has doubled but betraying his propensity, like all previous presidents before him, to resort to military means to resolve armed conflicts.

The NDFP Peace Panel’s Chief Political Consultant, Mr. Jose Ma. Sison has pointed out that Mr. Aquino follows the 2009 US Counterinsurgency Guide which says peace negotiations are dispensable for the purpose of destroying, coopting and debilitating the so-called insurgency so long as there is good governance, delivery of services, a strong military and effective use of intelligence and propaganda.

The reappointment of Ms. Ging Deles, who oversaw peace talks with the NDFP and MILF under the Arroyo regime, to the same position may be perceived as a continuation of the failed approaches and tactics of old and does not augur well for any breakthrough in the peace negotiations.

We have yet to see what the feisty former human rights commissioner can accomplish as Justice secretary; the same with the gutsy anti-Arroyo dissenter and former president of De La Salle University, as the new Education secretary.

We shall certainly see in the next few weeks and months who, indeed, is Pres. Aquino's “boss” -- the people or vested interest groups? #

*Published in Business World
2-3 July 2010