The political war against education

A FEW days have passed since the abrupt unilateral termination of the 1989 accord between the University of the Philippines (UP) and the Department of National Defense (DND) on a fallible premise against the alleged recruitment activities on campus of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People's Army. The UP-DND accord is a historic agreement that prevented state forces such as the army and police from entering and intervening in the affairs of the country’s premier state university and its 21 campuses across the nation.

For many, this bold and unprecedented move by the Duterte administration may seem insignificant to the daily life of the Filipino caught between bewilderment and ignorance, but it will nevertheless have profound implications for the degrading of the democracy and institutions we have long been fighting for. Students, youth, faculty, activists and advocates, who have called the university a shelter of freedom, growth and change, are now practically vulnerable from the same brutality the police and uniformed men have perpetrated in the streets and alleys past midnight in Manila. Who gets to say that the policeman who recently murdered an innocent mother and child in Tarlac in broad daylight will not use the same bullets and oppressive power on rallyists and activists fighting for social justice and human rights in a country bequeathed by unjust systems and policies? Who gets to say that the piled-up corpses of the unaccounted victims from the drug war will not be the same stacking bodies of students that were kidnapped and tortured during Marcos’ Martial Law? How many more stories of Kian Loyd de los Santos, Liliosa Hilao, Archimedes Trajano and Edgar Jopson, before we fully realize that a government that suppresses the collective power and voice of our educational institutions is a government that is afraid of its people.