All the events and incidents that have since unfolded before our very eyes eloquently affirm the Hitlerian nature of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP). And this makes the Philippine Republic a fascist state, bereft of any semblance of humane consideration and concern for the underprivileged masses of the population.
A stark illustration of this fascist function of the Philippine military is the deplorable scenario that now prevails in Mindanao countryside. In order to ensure the safety and the interests of foreign monopoly capitalists in exploring and exploiting the mineral resources of our country, the government deploys its massive military forces in areas where these foreign interests are operating in the mountain areas of the region.
But it so happens that the mining activities of these foreign interests are within the ancestral domain of the Lumads (indigenous peoples). And these are opposed by the tribal peoples who have seen the destructive effects of these extractive operations to their environment. And soon the vicious trampling of the people’s human rights has become a prominent phenomenon-nay, a deeply disheartening reality! Verily, nothing can surpass the unconscionable and merciless human rights abuses by the armed forces of the Noynoy government against the grassroots masses.
These condemnable acts and deeds of the military against the Lumad peoples certainly point to the Noynoy administration as the primarily blameworthy and criminally responsible. The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) — or the President himself!—seems to play deaf and blind to these disheartening realities. Because of the government’s licentious accommodation of the big foreign mining companies, in utter disregard of the deleterious consequences to the people and their environment, a veritable state of rebellion exists against the government
But this only gives credence to the truism that “wherever there is oppression there is always resistance by the oppressed”. The government is to blame for this deplorable state of affairs. Why, it has allowed the foreign capitalists to mine in the ancestral lands of the Lumad peoples and has trampled their precious human rights—displacing them from their home lands, subjecting them to all forms of injustices and abuses — from threats and intimidation, to dispossession of their ancestral lands, to abductions and kidnappings, to tortures and rapes and massacres, and heaven knows what other unimaginable harm to life and limb due to the unbridled bestial crimes perpetrated with impunity by the military. Foreigners are proffered comforts and bliss, the masses of native residents are crushed by tyranny and misery.
Indeed the tyrannical fascist nature of this Philippine state that calls itself a republic knows no bounds in denying its own citizens the benefit of social justice. The iron hands of the law are applied in its most harmful force against the masses — the most despicable brutish forms of which are applied against the poorest of the poor—the Lumads in the mountain areas. To think that they are the most deprived and neglected of this country’s citizenry! To think that they were the original inhabitants of the Mindanao lowlands who occupied the vast plains and rich lands near the coasts! Foreign colonizers did not drive them to the mountains. It is their own domestic colonizers who have consigned them to the forests!
We need to thank the ruling power—to Noynoy the honest man!—for consigning the poor, the deprived and the oppressed people to a paradise of suffering and agony and hunger and thirst for democratic rights. Yes, we need to thank the system of fascistic management of our lives under a regime of heavenly abundance of injustice and desperation and helplessness.
All praise to this republic which has existed through 70 years of perduring underdevelopment and massive poverty of its people! Hail to this government which has colonized its own native population, killing them softly with the rhetoric of its Constitutional preamble that mockingly grants the bounties of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to its underprivileged constituencies!
On this very hour, entire tribal communities from several places in Mindanao’s countryside have fled their homes and farms and sought refuge in urban centers. On this very hour, hundreds of Lumad evacuees from Talaingod and Compostela Valley are still in Davao City. They have evacuated from their far flung places and taken refuge here because of unspeakable fear and unbearable hardships brought about by intensifying militarization.
And at this time in Washington DC in the USA, spokespersons from the Lumad and other sectors who are victims human rights violations here in our country are there to address the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and to present the cases of human rights violations committed by the government of President Noynoy Aquino in collaboration with President Barrack Obama of the USA.
