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The Arroyo administration is perceived worldwide to
be astonishingly corrupt and unable or unwilling to apprehend
wrongdoers. It is seen also to be insensitive to the human rights
abuses committed by rogue law enforcers and military authorities
whose favorite victims are leftists and journalists who expose
abuses and corruption.
The global consensus is that a
culture of impunity prevails in this country. Corrupt officials go
unchecked. Human rights abusers and perpetrators of extrajudicial
killings rarely come to grief.
Mainly owing to media vigilance
and Chief Justice Reynato Puno’s effort to mobilize the nation
against enforced disappearances and EJKs, to introduce the writs of
amparo and habeas data and to remind judges and law enforcers of
their duty to serve with integrity, there has been a decline in
recorded EJKs and enforced disappearances in 2007. But wrongdoers
rarely get arrested or charged, and few are convicted.
That government torturers merrily
do their thing without interference from administration officials is
generally suspected. Aside from human-rights activists and the
families of torture victims—and occasionally the media—no one
talks about these acts of cruelty, inhumanity and barbarism by law
enforcers.
Tortures revealed
This silence was broken on
Wednesday, June 25, by the Philippine Human Rights Commission’s
director for the National Capital Region, Dr. Renato Basas. He spoke
during a forum attended by HR activists, media reporters and
columnists.
He confirmed that putting a
prisoner’s head inside a plastic bag to threaten him with
asphyxiation, probing a prisoner’s gonads with electrified wires,
wrapping a dripping-wet towel around the prisoner’s head to make
him feel the sensation of drowning, and other forms of torture used
during the Marcos regime are again being employed under the Arroyo
regime.
The torturers of the Marcos
regime used these techniques on captured communists as well as
people merely suspected of being communists. They also tortured
journalists who criticized the regime in their columns and news
reports.
Being the director of the PHRC in
Metro Manila, Dr. Basas has seen that the torturers are officers of
the Philippine National Police, the jail management bureau and
doctors connected to these offices.
He said torture cases were on the
increase—in 2003, there were 18, in 2004, 26 and in 2006,
37–until it dropped to 18 in 2007, the year when the Philippines
became markedly infamous–thanks to UN’s Philip Alston- for HR
abuses, EJKs and enforced disappearances. But torturers are still
active to this day.
Dr. Basas says no Philippine law
criminalizes torture done by a government officer. Torturers can
only be charged with causing physical injuries. Obviously, there
ought to be a law. The punishment for torturers must be severe.
U.N. Treaty Against Torture
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and
Cruel and Unusual Punishment (OPCAT) on April 22. And the Senate has
concurred.
The President spoke of the moral
obligation of the Philippine government “to strengthen the
country’s compliance with international human rights
instruments.”
With words like this, Philippine
observers abroad—including UN officials and the King of
Spain—have been led to believe that this administration champions
human rights and would totally move against officers of the state
who are torturers.
The unfortunate reality is that
absolutely prohibiting the police, the jail managers, the military
and others charged with the duty of ensuring that law and order
prevail is not among the top priorities of Malacañang.
That is why torturers remain in
this government. And that is also why Dr. Basas says, based on data
and reports he has received, the Arroyo administration has outdone
all other post-Marcos presidential regimes in the number of torture
cases. President Fidel Ramos’ administration had the least torture
cases, followed by the Aquino and Estrada administrations.
Descent to Zimbabwean hell
It is ominous that the NCR’s
Human Rights Director made his torture disclosure on Wednesday June
25. It was also on that day when South Africa’s former president
Nelson Mandela, a world icon of democracy and goodwill, spoke out to
criticize with sadness “the tragic failure of leadership” in
Zimbabwe.
President Robert Mugabe has ruled
his country for 28 years in unparalleled madness, incompetence and
cruelty. Torture, assasination and beatings of jailed opposition
figures are commonplace in that basket case (hyperinflation is more
than a million percent) which before Mugabe was southern Africa’s
prosperous food basket.
A criticism against President
Arroyo is that she is so preoccupied with political survival to the
point of coddling the police and the military—the forces that
ultimately hold real power because they have the guns.
Some oppositionists are grimly
saying elections may not be held in 2010. They say she and they
could make new constitutional arrangements to prolong her stay in
power as president or prime minister. The President’s allies
massively control Congress and the local governments.
If such a thing happens, the
Philippines–among different possible scenarios–could descend
into something like the hell that Zimbabwe is now.
But President Arroyo—has
managed marvelously to make the economy grow by 7.3 percent in 2007.
Perhaps, untrammeled by democratic imperatives, she would, instead
of running the Philippines to the ground as Mugabe has done to
Zimbabwe, make our economy soar—just as the undemocratic strongmen
of South Korea and Taiwan did to their countries. She should then
prove her critics wrong.
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