Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines:
The Churches’ Response

By CARMENCITA P. KARAGDAG

2006 September 15

Presented at a church consultation on the theme, “Philippine Crisis: Focus on Violation of Human Rights with Impunity”, Utrecht, the Netherlands, September 15, 2006.

A young boy of nine from one of the most militarized hinterlands of Mindanao tearfully recounted his horrible ordeal when soldiers who had come to raid his village ordered him to start digging his own grave with his bare hands. They might as well kill him now, they taunted, since he would probably join the communist New People’s Army when he grows up anyway. Though an empty threat as he was released later, the harrowing experience left the boy traumatized for weeks.

This is just one of the many stories of horror shared by Filipino victims of military atrocities shared with an international delegation in July last year. The high-level team, led by the World Council of Churches, came in response to urgent appeals from Philippine churches alarmed by the brutal murder of an Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI) priest, Fr. William Tadena, and a United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) conference minister, Rev. Edison Lapuz. Both martyrs lived out their faith and prophetic calling by responding to the cries and groaning of those yoked in bondage. Tadena defied powerful sugar barons by supporting plantation workers in Hacienda Luisita even after seven strikers were ruthlessly massacred by military troops and scores of their leaders butchered by assassins. Lapuz championed the cause of peasants and indigenous peoples dislocated by large-scale mining projects of transnational corporations, among them Canadian and British mining companies, which have rapidly moved in following the liberalization of the mining industry at the instance of IMF and World Bank.

Only last month yet another pastor, a Methodist, and a UCCP youth leader were viciously murdered, bringing to 21 church people who have fallen victim to rampant extra-judicial killings under the current dispensation. Church people in the Philippines have been among those literally subjected to persecution because of their long record of political engagement and socio-pastoral ministry since the upsurge of a people’s movement against entrenched elite rule reinforced by outright militarization and repression under the brutal Marcos dictatorship and abetted by the United States, the country’s former colonial master. My own church, IFI also known as Philippine Independent Church, which belongs to the Old Catholic tradition, traces its beginnings to the anti-colonial revolt at the end of the 19th century sparked by the oppressive Catholic frairocracy (friar rule) that lent religious legitimacy to nearly four centuries of Spanish colonial rule in the country. With Spanish and, specially, US colonial legacies persisting to this day, our church is described by Filipino historians as the only tangible fruit of the Philippine revolution,

The Philippines is thus one of the few countries in the South where there remains a mass-based progressive Christian movement whose affinity with a broad people’s movement for social transformation and liberation from neo-colonial and elite rule has kept liberation theology alive and vibrant. Today a government manual circulated widely by the military tags churches like the IFI, the UCCP, the Methodist Church, the National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP) and the Catholic Association of Major Religious Superiors in the Philippines, among so-called front organizations of the underground Communist Party of the Philippines. Those identified in the list are demonized as terrorists to be targeted for neutralization, a term not too infrequently used as euphemism for outright physical liquidation. To my consternation just a month ago, I saw my own name in the latest edition of “Knowing your Enemy”, title of said manual, and allegedly for a subversive act I committed ages ago in the 1980s at the height of Martial law, when I was deployed to Japan with my husband as lay missionary for human rights work under the joint auspices of the Catholic Archdiocese of Tokyo and the National Christian Council in Japan.

Now the daily routine of reading the newspapers or opening emails has become a source of anxiety as again and again we learn of one social activist after another falling in the hands of unidentified assassins, among them friends and colleagues we have worked with, like Noli Capulong, a familiar figure not only in the Philippines but also abroad, having served as a program executive of the NCCP with which I, myself, was also associated in the past. Indeed with politically motivated killings of late happening with nearly daily regularity, the troubling question many of us engaged in peace and justice ministry cannot but contemplate is: who will be next?

Today, more than a year after the WCC pastoral team circulated its report strongly lamenting the bloodbath and prevailing culture of impunity, the killings not only have continued unabated, they have intensified. This has earned the Philippines the notorious epithet as “Asia’s killing fields”. That the situation has so gravely deteriorated has been recognized by the WCC when, only last week in Geneva, the Council’s highest governing body, the Central Committee (which Archbishop Vercammen and I had the privilege of attending) issued a strongly worded statement condemning extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. In fact a number of churches and partners all over the world specially from the US, Canada, Norway, Australia and Japan have responded by sending protest letters to the Philippine authorities, issuing statements, lobbying their governments and local Philippine embassies, deploying pastoral and solidarity missions, or bringing the issue to the attention of UN bodies. These international interventions from the churches, foreign parliamentarians and lawyers in Europe and impartial human rights organizations like the Amnesty International and Asian Human Rights Commission have now drawn wide media attention in the Philippines, prompting the government to form a body to investigate the killings. Not that this belated official response has eased popular outrage, given that the churches and sectoral organizations that have borne the brunt of attacks were not consulted regarding membership to the commission and specially given the pre-emptive official line clearing security forces from any responsibility.

Protests are taking place in many other countries, including in Belgium recently and in London, on the occasion of Macapagal-Arroyo’s visit. I was privileged to join a picket and an ecumenical prayer vigil the other day, organized by British solidarity groups and Filipino migrant organizations, in front of the imposing Westminster Cathedral to honor the fallen martyrs. During the candlelighting, we each read a victim’s name and the organization he or she worked with. It was obvious from the names read that most of the victims were local leaders and members of Bayan Muna, a progressive party-list group with the largest representation in the Philippine Congress. Bayan Muna is clearly a major target for its militancy in championing the cause of the deprived and marginalized, and also for the popular support it enjoys. In February this year when Macapagal-Arroyo declared a state of emergency, all its elected lawmakers, along with those of its coalition partners like Anakpawis and Gabriela Women’s Party, were served arrest warrants and forced to seek sanctuary in the House of Congress for several weeks. But Anakpawis congressman and head of the country’s largest labor union, the ailing 73-year old Crispin Beltran, continues to languish in jail.

Two decades since the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship by Asia’s first people-power revolution, the nightmares of Martial Law are once again lived realities. There is now in the Philippines an undeclared war-a vicious and dirty war-against political dissidents, militant people’s organizations, progressive party-list groups or practically anybody who poses a serious challenge to the ruling dispensation. A virtual reign of terror has set in, characterized not only by the unmitigated killings, but also illegal raids of homes, warrantless arrests, abductions and disappearances, hamletting of villages, forced evacuations and displacement of entire villages, burning and looting of houses. Outright massacres involving military troops, often at the instigation of local landlords or hacienda owners, have also become commonplace. Apart from the slaughter of striking farm workers in Hacienda Luisita in November 2002 which I alluded to earlier, there was also the equally outrageous massacre of nine farmers who were involved in land disputes in the poverty ridden island of Leyte in November last year. In the attacks, scores of villagers were wounded, including women and children, the so-called unfortunate but necessary collateral damage. Also in early 2005 some 27 Muslims detainees in Manila who were protesting their arbitrary detention and terrible prison conditions were shot by security forces.

Indeed today, murderous death squads and anti-communist vigilantes let loose by an illegitimate regime desperately clinging to power and hounded by persisting allegations of massive electoral fraud and corruption, have gone on a bloody rampage, sowing terror far and wide. That these unspeakable atrocities are taking place not in the stealth of the night but in broad daylight and with such blatancy and utter impunity lends strong credence to the charges, made by families of victims and findings of human rights groups as well as international fact-finding missions, that security forces and military elements are directly involved or are at least complicit. When confronted with questions about his terrible record of human rights abuses, General Jovito Palparan, who has gained Macapagal-Arroyo’s lavish praises, but also national notoriety, for boasting that he would wipe out the insurgency in no time, quipped that he did not order the killings, he merely “inspired” it. Earlier he angered many by claiming that military abuses and political assassinations are only a natural fact of life in Eastern Visayas region, one of the most heavily militarized in the Philippines, because 60 per cent of the population are supporting the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the CPP.

Already 750 political dissenters are believed to have been slain since 2001 when the present administration came to power and the Bush war on terror began. No sooner had the US designated the Philippines as the Second Front of the War on Terror in 2002 after Afghanishtan, presumably to hunt down Muslim terrorists linked with the Al Quada in the southern island of Mindanao, had American troops begun entering the country under the guise of joint military exercises. Though foreign troops and bases are explicitly banned under the Philippine constitution, American troops, numbering as many as 5,000 at its height, were deployed to different parts of the country but specially in areas considered strongholds of the Muslim and communist insurgents. So-called Balikatan war exercises included in its package the deployment of US Special Forces tasked with training the Philippine military in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency.

The war on terror has thus provided the government not only with a convenient excuse, but also the financial resources, to clamp down on progressive oppositionists and organizations, crush legitimate dissent, suppress basic civil and political rights, and allow the re-entry of foreign troops. The victims come from a wide range of backgrounds: they are peasants, workers, indigenous peoples, human rights lawyers, journalists, church workers, women organizers, youth and students who have been in forefront of the movement to oust an illegitimate and increasingly isolated president. They are activists protesting labor repression perpetrated by Nestle and other foreign conglomerates, or WB-funded dams and corporate mining that rob indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands and damage the environment, or heavily subsidized agricultural imports pauperizing already landless peasants, or the re-entry of American troops deployed in war zones under the guise of joint military exercises.

For her tight embrace of the Bush war on terror, Macapagal-Arroyo has been amply rewarded. US military aid has increased tenfold since 2001, making the Philippines the world’s fourth largest recipient of foreign military financing. It is also Asia’s largest recipient of the international military exercise program. Now hostage to the US-trained military and awash with funds from its imperial sponsors, the Manila regime is waging a revitalized counter-insurgency campaign to wipe out and decimate the legal component of a broad people’s movement that has experienced a resurgence with the onslaught of neoliberal globalization and escalation of empire building.

In the latest national security blueprint called Oplan Bantay Laya (or Operation Freedom Watch) to neutralize the progressive movement, civilized warfare making distinction between combatants and civilians, between armed insurgents and defenceless dissidents, are thrown overboard. A total war, reminiscent of the US-sponsored low-intensity conflict in Vietnam and Latin America during the 70s and the 80s, has thus been unleashed, with horrible consequences specially in the rural parts of the country, home to 70% of our population. In this scheme the military labels individuals and groups as terrorists based on so-called “secret intelligence” thereby criminalizing their right to protest or resist oppression and subjecting them to unrelenting psychological warfare operation. The creation of these lists of so-called “enemies of the state” is outside the pale of judicial scrutiny and puts serious constraints on any legal recourse for the redress of the victims’ grievances.

In Asia nowhere perhaps is the US empire’s hand most keenly and pervasively felt than in the Philippines, the lone superpower’s first and hence highly prized colonial possession secured only after a long and bloody war of pacification that cost nearly one million Filipino lives. So stubborn and insidious is the hegemon’s hold on its former colony that more than half a century after independence, the country remains a compliant appendage of the US: a source of raw materials and market for its industrial produce, a staging ground for projecting its military power, the linchpin of its geopolitical project in the Asia-Pacific. It is this long-entrenched neo-colonial dispensation, aggravated by the globalization agenda of western industrial countries led by the US, that has doomed the majority of our people to desperate poverty, the very root cause of the insurgencies that the military is now determined to stamp out.

Today therefore the country is arguably in one of the darkest periods of its history. Social injustice is discernible every where with the gap between the rich and the poor ever-widening, the economy lagging behind its Asian neighbors most of which have benefited from the so-called Asian miracle. The current administration, whose legimacy remains in question and which continues to be mired in charges of corruption, is totally bereft of any capacity to address the longstanding problems. Seeing itself as beleaguered by destabilizers connected with the military and allegedly working in collusion with the underground Left, it is able to remain in power only by uniting the fractious military under the national security strategy focusing on the common enemy: the communists, the NPA, and any non-armed, totally defenceless individuals or groups, legal mass organizations, party list groups and even churches perceived or suspected as supporting the underground movement. Thus the government has stated the main focus of its energies: crushing the communist insurgency, no matter the collateral damage this entails, transforming the country into five super-economic regions, and renewed commitment to the US war on terror.

This brings me to my concluding remarks and some theological reflection. Our life-denying experience today of empire, a system of global domination enforced through benevelont assimilation or through wars of occupation and made possible through repressive local surrogates, harkens us back to ancient biblical times, marked by the long history of the Hebrew people’s resistance to Roman and earlier empires. Initially dismissed as a pesky Jewish sect, Christianity grew to be a considerable political and religious threat to powers and principalities, thus inviting grave persecution. But the early Jesus movement chose to reject the false idols and pretenders to God’s kingship, leading exemplary lives in ekklesia, breaking bread and worshipping together, giving up their wealth and sharing what they had in common. It is these alternative Christian communities in ancient times resisting Baalite idolatry, built around egalitarian and communal values, that offer us in this time of kairos a compelling vision of a radically transformed social order, impelling us Christians today to confess and denounce our complicity with empire, to relentlessly seek and build life-sustaining alternatives, to defend life and protect basic human rights and civil liberties.