By: Carlito Pablo, Special to Asian Pacific Post
A dirty little war in being waged in the Philippines, the "second front" in the United States-led global campaign against terrorism, and it's wrecking havoc on the lives of thousands of Filipinos.
Vancouver City Councillor Tim Louis, a long-time peace and social justice advocate, made this indictment amid growing concerns in the international community about the deteriorating human rights situation in the Philippines.
"US imperialism is entering its most aggressive and dangerous phase ever into the unipolar world without any checks and balances," Louis said in an interview last August.
"The US is on a rampage with wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines and elsewhere," Louis also said.
Louis' view jibed with the findings of an International Solidarity Mission, composed of about 100 delegates from 15 countries, which visited the Philippines to document reported gross violations of human rights.
The ISM findings were later submitted to an International People's Tribunal which held a mock trial last Aug. 19 at the University of the Philippines campus and issued a guilty verdict against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her American counterpart US President George W. Bush.
The ISM and tribunal were endorsed by Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General and founding chair of the International Action Center; prominent scholar and U.S. foreign policy critic Prof. Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Jitendra Sharma, former justice of the Supreme Court of India, according to reports from Manila.
The Canadian delegation to the ISM was headed by Barbara Waldern, chair of the BC Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines.
Waldern also sat in the 11-member "college of jurors" composed of lawyers, human rights figures, and educators from Belgium, Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, the U.S., Canada and Turkey, which judged President Arroyo guilty for crimes against humanity.
The same verdict was affirm during the trial by the "Presidium of Judges" of the tribunal composed of American law professor Lennox Hinds of Rutgers University; Nobel Peace Prize nominee Irene Fernandez of Malaysia; and lawyer Hakan Karakus of Turkey.
Hinds was a lawyer for Nelson Mandela, independent South Africa's first president while Karakus is the president of the International Association of People's Lawyers (IAPL).
A total of 4,207 cases of human rights violations allegedly committed by the Arroyo administration from January 2001 to June 2005 were presented to the tribunal.
The cases affected 232,796 individuals, 24,299 families and 237 communities. At least 400 were victims of summary execution; 110 were victims of forced disappearances.
Twenty of those killed by military and police personnel were human rights volunteers.
The cases range from extra-judicial killings or summary executions; assassinations, massacre, disappearances, torture, forced evacuation and displacement, illegal arrest and detention, and other violations constituting crimes against humanity.
The said cases were documented from provinces where Philippine state forces are battling communist and Muslim secessionist rebels.
Washington had previous declared the Communist Party of the Philippines and its affiliate groups, including armed wing New People's Army, as a terrorist organization.
The US government had also tagged the extremist Abu Sayyaf as an Al-Qaeda organization, and the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front as having ties with Asia's home-grown Jemaah Islamiya terrorist network.
The Jemaah Islamiya has been blamed for terrorist attacks in Asian countries.
In letter to the ISM dated Aug. 5, 2005, Louis said that the international community should be aware of the "role of President George W. Bush's administration in the US in supporting state terror in the Philippines and speak out."
"The US 'war on terror' has given free reign to state terrorism in the countries under imperialist control, fuelling an upsurge in human rights violations. The US declared the Philippines to be the second front in its 'war on terror' in 2002. Thousands of US troops, tonnes of US equipment and millions of US dollars have been deployed in the Philippines," Louis said in his letter.
Louis was referring to the continuing presence of American military forces in the Philippines, which is allowed under the RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement.
Although they are not engaged in direct combat operations, US soldiers are training their Filipino counterparts and forming elite and well-equipped anti-terrorist special forces.
In the interview, Louis said that Canadians must become informed and "speak up to our own politicians and to the Philippine government."
"I will continue to write letters to Ottawa urging our foreign affairs department to be very clear with Bush, to be clear with the Filipino government that we in Canada are concerned about human rights in the Philippines," he said.
"If we are blind to human rights abuses elsewhere, it will only be a mater of time before we end up with human rights abuses here in Canada," Louis said.
"The Canadian government should pay attention and require humanitarian standards and political solutions to the crisis in the Philippines. There are grounds for a pause in its relations with the Philippines given the present circumstances. Arms sales to the Philippines should stop. The peace talks about the civil war should resume," Louis noted in his Aug 25 letter to the ISM.
The documented evidence and testimonies presented to the tribunal will be used to pursue charges against the Arroyo government earlier cited at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, it was also learned. Similar reports also came from the Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even the U.S. state department, according to media accounts from Manila.
