| 4 September 2010 |
| Surveying dissent and sowing fear in the Philippines |
Bruce Van Voorhis
While the eyes of the Philippines are rightly focused on the corruption tainting the core of the country's political leadership and their family members, there is another insidious disease that is also quietly infecting the nation: the militarization of society
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A prime illustration of this syndrome can be found in the province of Laguna south of Manila. In January this year, the mayor of the city of Santa Rosa in the province informed the head of the barangay, or neighborhood, of Pulong Santa Cruz that soldiers from the 202nd Infantry Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division of the Philippine army would be undertaking community organizing and development activities in his area and requested the barangay chairman's assistance and cooperation. Leaders of the barangay later learned during a meeting with soldiers from the brigade that they would work in the area for three months to carry out livelihood and medical projects.
Improving the lives of the people of the community is naturally a noble calling, and the efforts of the troops should be acknowledged and applauded. However, more than two months later there is nothing to acknowledge or to applaud as the promises of community organizing and development have failed to materialize thus far.
The soldiers though have not been idle. Guided by local residents, they have been conducting a door-to-door survey of selected houses in the barangay. Their survey questions have been quite unusual, however. For instance, the soldiers ask the residents whether they belong to a trade union or people's organization (PO) for the urban poor, if they join rallies, do they make banners for demonstrations and other questions related to people's participation and the exercise of their rights of expression, association and assembly.
To grasp the significance of the soldiers' survey, one must understand that the barangay of Pulong Santa Cruz in Santa Rosa is near the Laguna Industrial Park, an area that contains the factories of Japanese automobile manufacturers Toyota, Nissan and Honda where there has been labor unrest for a number of years.
This geographical proximity and the labor tensions also explain why the soldiers went to the local union offices of the Toyota and Nissan workers and asked for the names of all the people who worked there as well as who belonged to the national labor organization Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) and who used ka--the shortened form of the word kasama (comrade)--when addressing others.
In addition to the survey by the soldiers, troops in both uniforms and civilian clothes carrying automatic rifles are wandering through the barangay, and armed soldiers are in the factories of the industrial zone as well. A curfew has also been imposed by the military from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. without any reason announced to justify it. Moreover, when the ID card of a "worker" at the Toyota factory fell on the ground, it was discovered that the "worker," who had been an employee at the factory since 2000, was, in fact, a member of military intelligence. While the true identify of this person has been exposed, one wonders how many more soldiers are perhaps "workers" in this and other factories.
These "community organizing and development" activities of the military are occurring, of course, in a national context in which hundreds of people have been killed extrajudicially and disappeared since Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo became president in 2001, such as the recent killing of labor activist Gerardo Cristobal on March 10 in nearby Cavite Province--the third attempt on his life since April 2006. As determined last year by the Melo Commission appointed by the president and the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, the military is the prime perpetrator of these human rights violations. Thus, house-to-house surveys by soldiers inquiring about people's involvement in trade unions and POs and the presence of armed troops on the streets of the barangay and inside the factories are even more threatening to local residents and trade unionists and activists than they would be in other environments.
In Pulong Santa Cruz, the objective of the military's "community organizing and development" operation appears to be not only the intimidation of workers but also of local residents who are being pressured to move so that a new airport can be built. This "hearts and minds" policy is not confined to this barangay though. The military has engaged in similar measures in the past few years in nearby areas south of Manila. A deployment of troops like that in Pulong Santa Cruz took place, for example, in barangays in San Pablo City and Cabuyao where they conducted a survey to identify the leaders of residents who opposed the demolition of their homes and their forced eviction to make way for the construction of the government's Northrail-Southrail Linkage Project. It is ironic that in the name of "community organizing and development" the military is assisting the government and large-scale developers to deny people their basic right to housing and thus to undermine their development instead of to enhance it.
What is most worrisome, however, is the presence of armed troops in the barangays and their house-to-house surveys targeting trade unionists and other activists, particularly in a country where so many of them have been killed over the course of the past several years. This militarization of Philippine communities has no place in a democracy whose Constitution guarantees freedom of expression, association and assembly and is a misuse of the military whose role is to defend the country, not intimidate its people from exercising their rights and participating in the political process. If the government truly wants to win the hearts and minds of its people and contribute to their development, it should remove its troops from the country's barangays.
Bruce Van Voorhis is a staff member of the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong whose work often focuses on the Philippines. In addition to working at the commission since 2000, he is also a co-convener of the Hong Kong Campaign for the Advancement of Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines, a coalition formed in April 2005 to respond to the upsurge of extrajudicial killings in the country.
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