Human Rights

Mindanao group slams recruitment of lumads to fight the NPAs

By GERMELINA A. LACORTE | Davao Today

Lumads belonging to the Mindanao-wide indigenous peoples? group Kalumaran claim they?re being recruited to fight the NPAs against their will. (davaotoday.com photo by Barry Ohaylan)

Lumads are made to fight against each other so that big mining companies and plantations can come in and take control of the ancestral domain, said Norma Capuyan, Kalumaran vice chairperson. Dulphing Ogan, secretary-general of the indigenous peoples? group Kalumaran, said that militarization remains to be the greatest problem facing the lumads, who are also fast losing their ancestral lands to big mining and plantation companies without their consent. ?In other places, a mining firm operates but there are no plantations,? he said, ?But in all places, the military presence brings about widespread fear.?Read on.

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My father was tortured, says Ka Emong?s daughter

By GRACE S. UDDIN and GERMELINA LACORTE | Davao Today The daughter of the captive New People?s Army leader Regenaldo Alicaba, Sr. alias Ka Emong said her father could have been tortured during the early part of their ordeal in the hands of the armed men who took them away from their house in Panabo at half past midnight of January 18. His ears, his knees and feet were swollen, recalled Rizalyn Manguilimotan, 28, when he saw his father for the first time at the Eastern Mindanao Command?s headquarters on Camp Panacan.Read on.

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Captured soldier Cammayo assures family in NPA video

DAVAO CITY?Captured soldier Vicente Cammayo assured his wife and family he is ?treated well? in a video sent by Communist New People?s Army (NPA) guerrillas to media on Sunday, almost a month after the soldier?s capture in an ambush in a Monkayo village. Cammayo, the commander of the 11th Company of the 3rd Special Forces Battalion, also said in the video he was not wounded and that he surrendered to the NPA in an encounter in sitio Amagase of Monkayo town?s barangay Casoon in Compostela Valley province.

Continue ReadingCaptured soldier Cammayo assures family in NPA video