Especially if there's someone like Professor Philip Alston, the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions in the Philippines.
Anyways I'd spare you the rhetoric and polemics that goes hand-in-hand with the general issue of human rights and counter insurgency, and dwell on one of his observations pertaining to the Police investigators who must be forensically trained, Alston says, and have the right to name suspects so that the current practice of denying atrocities is weakened.
Well I'm no CSI fan but definitely this is an angle worth focusing because it's already there and those who are supposed to be bringing the victims to justice primarily rely on scarred witnesses who easily back-out of their testimonies. Forensic evidence don't simply back-out nor are they infallible, but nevertheless is an effective means of deriving a clear story as to what actually occurred, and pursuance of such on the part of the police does gives them credibility when they say that they are after justice for the victims of the killings.
Enough has been said about the military I've long been convinced that the armed forces whether it is from the government or on the revolutionary left are blood-stained and will never be able to bring peace.
Call me a hippy radical but I would agree with Michael Franti & Spearhead when they say: "We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb the world to peace."
Bottom line is the military is in denial of the truth of the killings.
Palparan is a rabid, McCarthyist out on a witch hunt.
The left is torn apart and is in need of a shift to peaceful struggle.
And there is indeed a war for change in the Philippines. A war that has spilled into the legal activist sphere that's shared by various grassroots and sectoral organizations along with several unions, collectives, people's organizations, NGOs and civil society.
Some would argue that those legal activists that have been murdered are members of communist front organizations, true enough they're still engaged in legal struggle and even if they are membership in an ideological faction that does not agree with the established state does not make one an enemy of the state unless one is engaged in actual combat.
But the opposite is happening with the counter-insurgency polemics of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
So one would indeed ask why there is even a need for an armed revolution if the present state of things is fine, and the government addresses the needs of the majority of our population.
Extra-judicial, killings and militarization would always be the fan that would flame a revolution.
posted by m35b @ Thursday, February 22, 2007
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