End Impunity! Justice For All Victims Of Human Right Violations In The Philippines!
The numerous number of Filipino migrants In Rome joined the protests-actions of thousands of Filipinos and supporters all over the world, to call for truth, accountability and justice, in solidarity with the victims and witnesses, during the International Peoples Tribunal (IPT) in Washington D.C. last July16-18, 2015.
According to the KARAPATAN Year End Report on the Human Rights Situation in the Philippines, since Benigno Aquino III assumed Presidency in July 2010, the cases of extra-judicial killings 229, enforced disappearances 26, torture 106, rape 5, frustrated extra-judicial killing 225, illegal arrests and without detention 293, illegal arrests and detention 700, physical assault and injury 420, destruction of property 12,696, threat/harassment/intimidation 91,381, use of schools, medical, relegious and other public places for military purpose 149,134, restriction or violent dispersal of mass actions, public assemblies, and gatherings 27,129.
In a speaking tour of Mrs Edith Burgos (the mother of missing Jonas Burgos in 2007) In Rome last May 21 and 24, she said; “Buti pa ang may pamilyang namatayan, may pinaglalamayan, ako di ko alam kung nasaan ang anak ko, kung buhay pa sya o patay na (good for a family who is mourning for their dead, while me, I don’t know Where my son is, if he is still alive or dead).”
What Is happening in the Philippines is unacceptable! It Is a great crime against humanity!
We will continue to expose, work and support the call for a just and lasting peace in the Philippines, Enough of Aquino! said Buboy Salle, Chairman and Spokesperson of ICHRP Rome Chapter.
Washington, D.C. — A human rights tribunal opened with a series of witnesses describing killings, abductions and cases of torture allegedly carried out by Philippine security forces and paramilitary groups operating with impunity under President Aquino III.
The International People’s Tribunal, a three-day event that opened Thursday, is meant to pressure the Filipino and US governments to end the “climate of impunity” in the Philippines by exposing human rights violations.
One of the most poignant testimonies came from Lilia Devero, a farmer who told the tribunal that paramilitaries had abducted her husband, killed three members of her family, and burned down her home and those of family members. Her video testimony, recorded in the Philippines in her native tongue, was screened at the tribunal and translated into English.
In her testimony, Lilia said she fled her hometown on Negros Island after a group of about ten armed men raided her farmhouse in July 2011 and kidnapped her husband, Jully Devero. Two other local farmers — Gerald Abale and Michael Celeste — were also kidnapped, according to the human rights group Karapatan. The three men, who were reportedly targeted because they were suspected as members of the New People’s Army (NPA), an armed rebel group, haven’t been seen since.
The kidnappers are suspected of being members of the Revolutionary Proletarian Army-Alex Boncayao Brigade (RPA-ABB), a group that splintered away from the NPA in the 1990s and reportedly works with the Philippine military in its counter-insurgency program. Activists have blasted that program, known as Oplan Bayanihan, as a cover for the violent repression of social movements, done with the complicity of the Philippine and US governments.
Lilia told the tribunal that members of the group also killed her uncle, cousin and an older sibling. “They want to silence the whole family,” she said.
After spending three years in hiding, she returned home to farm the land, despite warnings from neighbours that she could be the next victim. “I don’t care if they’re going to kill me,” she told the tribunal. “I want justice.”
Her house had meanwhile been targeted in an arson allegedly committed by the same paramilitaries, who also allegedly attempted to rape her daughter. The emotional testimony was just one of the most striking on the first day of the tribunal.
The cases are being heard by an international panel of jurors that includes human rights scholars, ministers and social justice activists. They plan to deliver their verdict on Saturday.
The accused include the governments of the Philippines and the United States, along with organizations such as the World Bank and various multinational corporations and banks operating in the Philippines. Organizers said the US and Philippine governments were informed about the proceedings but declined to send legal representatives.
The outcome of the tribunal won’t be legally binding but is meant to exert moral and political pressure on the governments. According to the Philippine news agency Bulatlat, three international tribunals on human rights in the Philippines have taken place, with former presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo both being found guilty, the latter twice.
WASHINGTON DC– Nearly 200 flocked to Catholic University of America yesterday for the opening of the International Peoples’ Tribunal (IPT) on the Philippines. Victims and families of victims of gross human rights abuses from the Philippines travelled to DC to testify in front a distinguished panel of jurors that include Azadeh Shahshahani, president of the National Lawyers Guild; Camilo Bustillo-Perez, prominent Latin American human rights advocate, author, and lecturer; and Reverend Molofe Tsele, a minister with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in South Africa and former South African Ambassador.
Structural Evil
Bishop Solito Toquero
“There is structural evil in our country,” testified Bishop Solito Toquero of the United Methodist Church and professor at Union Theological Seminary in Manila. Toquero recalled an encounter with the police in 2012 during the State of the Nation Address of President Benigno Aquino III, where police intimidated and violently dispersed a contingent of seminarians he mobilized from his class who were seeking to enter Congress.
“We marched with the most marginalized in our country because we wanted to hear the real state of the nation from their point of view as the poor. It is the mission of Christ to be in solidarity with the poor, the voiceless,” Toquero continued. “Not only to minister to them, but to be with them.”
Toquero described how their contingent was met with violence from the police despite their attempts to peacefully dialogue with them. Toquero and several of his colleagues were brutalized and sent to the hospital that day. Weeks later, Toquero was subpoenaed by the government with charges of sedition and rebellion.
Trumped Up Charges
Coy Gemarino
In another testimony, Coy Gemarino recounted the extrajudicial killing of her husband, fair trade activist Romy Capalla, in March 2014 by Philippine state forces.
“He was brutally shot in front of my mother, who was 91 years old. Prior to that, we received a lot of messages that my husband is being targeted as a supposedly high ranking official of the communist party in Iloilo,” Gemarino testified.
“My mother uses a walker due to a hip fracture and Romy would usually pick her up at our store, which is located at the center of the public market… it was there he was shot,” Gemarino continued. “I was told he was killed by unknown soldiers. The national police supposedly filed charges, but it was dismissed for lack of evidence.”
Culture of Impunity
Los Angeles-based health worker Melissa Roxas recounted her 2009 ordeal where she was abducted at gunpoint while conducting preparations for a medical mission for a poor rural community in La Paz, Tarmac.
Roxas was blindfolded, held in illegal detention, and tortured for 6 days before being released.
“While they were torturing me, they were forcing me to sign papers stating I was a member of the New Peoples Army and that I surrendered. But I refused,” Roxas testified.
Roxas also shared contextual points on how Aquino’s national security program “Operation Plan Bayanihan” is patterned after the US State Department’s Counter-insurgency guide.
Having filed a complaint to the Philippine Department of Justice, the Philippine Supreme Court, the US State Department and the United Nations, not only to the military general respondents remain free, some have been promoted.
According to the Philippine human rights group Karapatan, there have been a documented 238 cases of extrajudicial killings, 26 enforced disappearances, 110 cases of torture, and 723 cases of illegal arrest and detention that remain unprosecuted.
Convened by the National Lawyers Guild, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, and Ibon International, the IPT will continue till Saturday, July 18.
Charges against the Philippine President Aquino and the US government under Barack Obama include violations of the right of the Filipino people to self-determination and liberation.
For more information, visit internationalpeoplestribunal.org.
Witnesses and survivors deliver emotional testimony about the impact of both governments’ collaboration in the so-called War on Terror.
The International People’s Tribunal of the Philippine and United States government kicked off Thursday in Washington, D.C.. (Photo courtesy of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines)
The United States and Philippine governments are collaborating on the mass violation of human rights and self-determination in the southeast Asian country—inflicting torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings through the so-called War on Terror—witnesses and survivors testified Thursday during the Washington, D.C. kickoff of a grassroots International People’s Tribunal.
Organized by numerous groups, including a global network called the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, the historic tribunal has assembled a jury of lawyers, scholars, ministers, and rights campaigners—and enlisted prominent attorney, activist, and former government official Ramsey Clark as their lead prosecutor.
Those gathered for the emotionally-charged testimony demanded that the administrations of Philippine President Benigno Aquino III and U.S. President Barack Obama answer for their atrocities.
Coy Gemarino testified to a crowded auditorium at the Catholic University of America Thursday that her husband was extra-judicially killed in 2014, “brutally shot in front of my mother who is 91 years old.”
The killing of Gemarino’s husband and other civilians was “the result of the Philippine’s counter-insurgency plan ‘Oplan Bayanihan,’ which is patterned after the counter-insurgency guide of the U.S. government and is funded by U.S. military aid,” said Bernadette Ellorin, chairperson of BAYAN-USA, an alliance of Filipino organizations in the U.S, in an interview with Common Dreams.
Filipina-American Melissa Roxas testified that she was abducted and tortured by the Philippine government during a 2009 medical mission: “Anytime that you work with the poor community, they automatically label you as the New People’s Army and they try to vilify your work and justify the abduction and torture.” The NPA is the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
At times, the sound of sobbing could be heard in the room, prompting hosts to pass around boxes of tissues. But witnesses ultimately struck a tone of defiance, urging the jury to hold both governments accountable for their crimes.
Philippine social movements have long opposed U.S. power over their country, manifested in more than 50 years of direct colonial rule, the backing of the ruthless dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and a heavy military presence. In 1992, those movements finally forced the Philippine government to evict the U.S. military from the country and shut down the last permanent base.
However, the U.S. military has returned, with the administration of George W. Bush in 2001 declaring the Philippines to be the “second front” of the War on Terror.
And Obama has aggressively pushed to expand U.S. military presence as part of a “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific to hedge against China. Last year, the U.S. and Philippine governments signed a 10-year pact—the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement—opening the country to troops, warships, and fighter planes.
The results, many charge, have been devastating. U.S. military service members perpetrate sexual assault and violence against civilian populations, including in the infamous Subic Bay rape case in 2005. The 2014 alleged murder of transgender woman Jennifer Laude by a U.S. Marine stoked widespread anger at the U.S. military presence.
Earlier this year a botched U.S.-backed commando raid in the Mamasapano municipality in the southern Philippines led to dozens of deaths, sparking widespread outcry.
Furthermore, the U.S. military brings environmental destruction, including severe harm to the Tubbataha Reef in the Sulu Sea.
The International Tribunal declared in a purpose statement that the U.S. military presence in the Philippines, enabled by the administration of Aquino III, breaches the most fundamental principles of Philippine sovereignty:
Violations of the rights of the people to national self-determination and liberation through the imposition of the U.S. war of terror; U.S. military intervention; as well as the perpetration of crimes against humanity and war crimes; misrepresentations of the people’s right to national liberation and self-determination as ‘terrorism’ and the baseless ‘terrorist’ listing of individuals, organizations and other entities by the U.S. and other governments.
Throughout the course of the trial—whose verdict will be announced Saturday—numerous witnesses will testify, including a member of the Philippine Congress.
Katrina Abarcar of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines declared in a statement: “It’s time for U.S. taxpayers to understand the role of their government in the human rights crisis in the Philippines, including the impact of U.S. militarism on the Filipino people and their environment.”
WASHINGTON DC — In the first day of an International Peoples’ Tribunal in D.C. yesterday, victims and expert witnesses to torture, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, forced evacuations, and violations of international humanitarian law gave testimonies drawing strong connection between the U.S. and Philippine governments’ collaboration and culpability in perpetrating these abuses.
Cynthia Jaramillo shared details on the torture and murder of her husband, a member of the New Peoples’ Army, along with 6 other combatants and 2 unarmed civilians in September 2014: “They were not killed during a legitimate running battle with the AFP. The state of their bodies when recovered clearly indicated the torture, willful killing, and desecration of the remains. Almost all of them suffered from non-encounter wounds according to the post-mortem reports and the review of evidence by forensic experts.”
She recounted, “Autopsy reports show that my husband Arnold Jaramillo was taken alive. He was killed at close range and his body had been desecrated. He was riddled with multiple gunshot wounds on his back and lower extremities. His internal organs appeared macerated and his body was porous like a sponge. He had multiple fractures in his upper and lower extremities. There was massive laceration of his upper lip, fractures in his upper and lower jaws and a shattering of both jaws inward into his throat so that the embalmer had to insert cement into his mouth to remedy the disfigurement.”
First day of hearings of the International Peoples’ Tribunal
Jaramillo stated of the perpetrators, “They openly identified themselves in newspaper articles, they were part of the 41st infantry battalion of the Philippine army of the AFP who belong to the Northern Luzon command.”
US supported crimes of war
The apparent torture and murder of Jaramillo’s husband by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, not in an armed encounter, but rather after he had been captured and disarmed, is a gross violation of international humanitarian law with respect to rules of combat in times of war.
Jaramillo noted, “The Philippine govt. had been signatories to international instruments on engagement on the rules of war. One of which is the Geneva Convention and protocols 1 and 2 on the ‘hors de combat’ on those that have been incapacitated to fight. There is also the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law that the National Democratic Front and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines had agreed upon to protect the rights of civilians as well as combatants, but all these were violated by the military.” She continued, “This is the conduct of the Philippine government in the civil war that is going on in our country. It is patterned after the US counter-insurgency strategy and it is heavily funded by the US government.”
Targets of war crimes include unarmed civilians and US citizens
Also killed in the same attack as Jaramillo’s husband was unarmed civil engineer Fidela Salvador who had been in the area monitoring projects being implemented by her office. Jaramillo stated that Salvador was “a member of a Non-Governmental Organization, which has been politically vilified by the military” and subsequently “subjected to surveillance, harassment, threat, and other forms of human rights violations.”
She continued: “She was captured by the military in circumstances that we still have to establish, but the evidence of her wounds say that she was heavily tortured, that they repeatedly hit the back of her head with a blunt object before nine shots were fired upon her body blowing her heart and macerating her lungs.”
Melissa Roxas testifies during hearings of the International Peoples’ Tribunal
Melissa Roxas, a US citizen from Los Angeles, also shared testimony of her own abduction and torture while participating in a medical mission in 2009: “When I was in Tarlac preparing for a mission, fifteen men in civilian clothing with high powered rifles, bonnets, and ski masks forced me and my two other companions, which were health workers into a van and took us to what I believed to be a military camp. In there, I was handcuffed and blindfolded and for the six days that I was there, I was repeatedly beaten, suffocated, and underwent other forms of torture.”
Roxas stated, “anytime that you work with the poor community, they automatically label you as the NPA and they try to vilify your work and justify the abduction and torture.”
Culture of impunity breeds a growing Peoples’ War
Though Melissa Roxas has testified in Philippine courts, her case has not been resolved. For her
husband’s case, Cynthia Jaramillo filed complaints with numerous government agencies including the Commission on Human Rights and Department of Justice, but has yet to receive the results of their investigation. Jaramillo asserted: “For Aquino, instead of ordering an investigation on these brutal killings he instead awarded all of those involved in the military operation, especially the officials, with medals of honor. Some of them were even promoted.”
“I urge this tribunal to hold President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III, as the commander in chief of the AFP, directly accountable for the war crimes committed against my husband, the other members of the NPA, as well as the other civilians,” Jaramillo implored.
She closed with stating that joining the New Peoples’ Army “was one of the most difficult decisions my husband had ever made in his entire life because it meant leaving us his loved ones, his family, especially our two children. But he said, it is only through revolutionary armed struggle that we can dismantle the oppressive and exploitative system that has been causing great suffering among our people.”
The International Peoples’ Tribunal will continue through July 18, at which time the panel of jurors will issue their verdict. For more information and a live stream of the proceedings, visit: www.internationalpeoplestribunal.org. Interviews available upon request.
