By Cecilia Diocson
Eastern Canada Coordinator
Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights (PCTFHR)

Background:

After the Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights (PCTFHR) was officially formed last October 2006, it organized a nine-person fact finding mission to look into the deteriorating human rights situation in the Philippines. PCTFHR is a network of community groups and individuals that addresses human rights issues in the Philippines and raises awareness about this through public education, research and advocacy. In particular, it seeks to engage the Canadian government and encourage it to actively work for the promotion of and respect for human rights in the Philippines.

At the time of the mission, there had been over 835 cases of extra-judicial killings attributed to the Philippine military and other state agents. There had also been an alarming increase in enforced disappearances and political repression, particularly against progressive people’s organizations and political parties and their members.

Delegates to the mission came from four cities in Canada (Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto) and included lawyers, trade unionists, human rights advocates and community organizers. As part of our preparation, we studied the current human rights situation in the Philippines and Canada’s general foreign policy position on human rights, and Canada’s role and programs in the Philippines.

Our Philippine host, was KARAPATAN or Organization for People’s Rights, the largest human rights organizations in the Philippines today. We were divided into three teams and KARAPATAN assigned our team to Quezon and Laguna, provinces in the south of Manila. There were three Canadians in our team made up of a trade unionist, lawyer and nurse and thirty one Filipinos made up trade union and peasant activists, human rights advocates and medical and dental volunteers. There were also members of families who were displaced as a result of militarization in the areas where we would be conducting our mission.

The objectives of our mission are to conduct interviews and gather all forms of evidence to help document cases of harassment, killings, disappearances and assassination attempts; produce a report on the findings to present to Philippine and Canadian government authorities, the media, church institutions, human rights organizations, etc. during the course of the mission; and conduct public education, media and lobbying activities at various government and organizational levels upon our return to Canada. We informed the Canadian embassy of our mission before our departure for the Philippines and registered with them upon our arrival.

In other words, we had everything covered and we were prepared for our mission.

Our experience

We arrived in Manila On November 14th and after several days of meetings with people and their community organizations around and close to Manila, we were finally briefed on our mission. It was supposed to be a three-day mission in at least two major areas – one in the remote area in province of Quezon and the other one in a town in the province of Laguna. The medical and dental people are supposed to conduct health and dental services in these areas that were clearly underserved or never been given these services by government agencies.

What was supposedly a relatively incident-free mission of meeting with people and documenting their experiences, amounted to very challenging and in many ways, hair-raising experience for us and the rest of the team. We endured at least thirteen hours (in two days) of interrogation, harassments and threats by military and police officials at seven different military and police checkpoints. In one incident at a military camp, the soldiers without name tags, took into their custody a member of our team. We had to call the Canadian embassy who spoke to the camp commander in our behalf. Without this intercession from the embassy, we were not sure if they would have released our companion who came out shaking and terrified.

During the whole mission, we noted the presence of more than 1,000 military personnel fully armed many of whom we not wearing any name tags to identify themselves. Because of their presence, the residents were hesitant to speak to us. This caused a serious and negative impact in our team’s ability to document cases of human rights violations. In the target areas town of San Narciso in Quezon province and in the city of San Pablo in Laguna province, our team was unable to make any documentation because of extreme harassment. People are afraid or unwilling to talk.

Still, we were able to document cases of harassment of peasants and their leaders including ourselves who also became victims of this harassment and intimidation. In the end, fact point to military agents as perpetrators of human rights violations, yet impunity exists for these people.

From our experience it is very obvious that civilian authority has been degraded and military authority is the one that prevails in the areas that we visited. This is a refutation of the Philippine government’s claim to primacy of civil society and democratic processes. Local organizations suffer the impacts in their efforts to support community-based development because of climate of fear created by pattern of human rights violations

This also negates Canada’s claim to support democratic local governance in the Philippines. In fact, one gets the impression that Canada is being used as a fig-leaf to deodorize what is largely a highly militarized society particularly in rural areas where Canadian aid is supposed to be making an impact in the lives of the people.

We returned to Manila on the third day after this grueling mission and had serious discussions with the fact finding mission organizers about our experience. We also met with other community leaders and prominent politicians who continuously voice concerns about the deteriorating human rights situation in the Philippines.

After these discussions, meetings and our own study and research, we were left with the impression that the Philippines is a country in the midst of a severe political and economic crisis where a civil war is being played out in its countryside between the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the guerrillas of New People’s Army.

Meeting with Congressman Crispin Beltran

Congressman Crispin Beltran is the 73-year old chair emeritus of the largest trade union centre in the Philippines, the KMU or the May First Movement. He was happy to meet with us and recalled his links to Canada which he had visited a couple of times in the 1990s to meet with the various trade unions and the Filipino community soliciting their support for the struggle of the Filipino workers for human rights and their right to organize.

Currently, he is under arrest by the Macapagal Arroyo government and could not therefore sit as parliamentarian in the Philippine congress. Because of his militant organizing and mobilizing work among the workers he was charged for treason along with the four other congresspeople. At the moment he is again running for Congress under the partylist Anakpawis (Toiling Masses). Polls indicate that together with another trade unionist, Joel Maglungsod, he would be victorious again though there is no guarantee because of rampant cheating, vote buying and intimidation. Cong. Beltran is currently staying in the hospital for his heart condition under heavy guard since the government thinks that he might escape detention even at his current age of 73 years. (Since this article was written, the party list Anakpawis has already won one seat in Congress – hence, guaranteeing Congressman Beltran’s re-election.)

Prospects for democracy and continuous migration.

What happens to democracy and its institutions in the Philippines will be further impacted by the results of the coming mid-term elections. If there is perception of massive cheating and electoral fraud, the Filipino people might simply go out in droves into the streets and wage their third People Power resistance. The Filipino workers are in the forefront of the struggle for democracy and human rights – hence, they are also among the most victimized together with the peasants and farmers. The country has not become the second most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists after Colombia. Just recently, Vincent Borja, a member of the KMU national council has been arrested and accused of being NPA member.

But other than internal factors, the political and economic crisis in the Philippines is also greatly determined by external factors. Structural adjustment programs and neo-liberal policies imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have resulted big outflow of financial and natural resources including the outmigration of millions of Filipinos of working age. Almost 10% of its 84 million populations are working abroad remitting last year the amount of 19 billion US dollars. While this props up what is largely a bankrupt economy, this causes a hemorrhage in its human resources because of the brain drain that resulting from this outmigration.

Canada is one of the beneficiaries of this outward flow of Filipinos many of whom end up as sources of cheap and temporary labour working as domestic workers. Our presence in Canada is hugely caused by the crisis in Philippines society and the need by Canadian capital for cheap labour and to further divide the Canadian working class.

Getting support from the working class of Canada

Part of the work that we at Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights (PCTFHR) are doing is to call on trade unions and their individual members to support the struggle of the Filipino workers for democracy and human rights in the Philippines.

The following are some of our calls for support:

• Sign support letters and petitions for the release of Cong. Crispin Beltran. Circulate these petitions and letters amongst the network – through the unions and personally.
• Sponsor a national “urgent action” site on the Philippines on the union’s web page.
• Continue to hold educational awareness-raising events. Invite local groups that are doing work on the Philippines before local union meetings.
• Give donations to the Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights (PCTHFR) to help support its work.
• Encourage a workers’ tour in the Philippines through the union’s Social Justice Fund. For instance, participation at the annual KMU International Solidarity Affairs (ISA) and GABRIELA’s Women International Solidarity Affairs in the Philippines (WISAP) should be encouraged and supported.
• Support the demand for Parliamentary hearing on the Philippines. Write letters to Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter McKay and other members of parliament. **
• Draft a resolution to show support for the Filipino people and make a statement against the killings in the Philippines.

May 24, 2007

**Thanks to our site in BC

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