Below is a statement released on Feb. 1 by the National Democratic Front in Southern Mindanao. It was signed by its spokesperson, Rubi del Mundo.
Retired Gen. Jovito Palparan’s boss, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, has played the modern-day Pontius Pilate in the recently released report of the Melo Commission on political killings.
In indicting Palparan, the Melo Commission has in effect exonerated Gloria Arroyo for the killings of close to a thousand ordinary civilians, members of progressive organizations, journalists, priests, bishops, lawyers and other sectors in the country.
The Melo Commission report, or what it has publicly released so far, wanted to soften the international and homefront blow of the political killings. It has relegated the numerous human rights violations to the discretion and command responsibility of Gen. Palparan. It has turned its pointing finger away from Mrs. Arroyo and her fascist executioners in Malacaang’s Cabinet Oversight Committee on Internal Security and the Central Intelligence Agency assets Eduardo Ermita and Norberto Gonzales.
The widespread national and international condemnation against the political killings pressured the Melo Commission to indict Gen. Palparan and wanted to spare the mastermind, Mrs. Arroyo. This is a futile attempt to conceal Gloria Arroyo’s blood debts against the people. For claiming that only a few of AFP members are involved in the extra-judicial killings, the Melo Commission and the Arroyo regime conspired to hide the regime’s terrorism through Oplan Bantay Laya which systematically targets ordinary civilians and Mrs. Arroyo’s vocal critics.
During Arroyo’s state policy pronouncements in her last year’s state of the nation address, Arroyo audaciously commended the butcher Palparan for a job well done. Every time Mrs. Arroyo dishes out brazen encouragement to Palparan and other rabid generals, Arroyo is culpable of the crimes against humanity in every case of torture, abduction and killing over the last six years.
Gen. Palparan’s counterpart in Davao City, the former Task Force Davao Commander Eduardo del Rosario had admitted in an international media that “individual commanders” have a hand in the extra-judicial killings of civilians. Elsewhere in the country, political killings continue unabated and have risen to genocidal proportion.
The National Democratic Front warns of even greater political repression in the next months, now that butchers like Palparan are being bred on a nationwide scale. The Filipino people see through the lies and manipulation of the Arroyo regime. Mrs. Arroyo and her war hawks cannot escape the people’s wrath. These war criminals must pay for their blood debts against all the victims of the Arroyo regime’s state terrorism. Justice can only be attained when revolutionary punishment is meted out on war criminal Palparan and the fascist criminal regime. #
[tags]davao today, jovito palparan, human rights, philippines, mindanao, melo commission, political killings, national democratic front of the philippines, communism[/tags]
Extrajudicial Killings
