Karapatan has described Arroyo’s Oplan Bantay Laya as the “bloodiest, the most brutal and most barbaric counter-insurgency campaign unleashed on the Filipino people by any President.”
Since the 10th ID’s deployment in August 2006 here, Karapatan noted the surge of extrajudicial and political killings. “The statistics rose fast with the creation of the 10th ID in 2006,” Delgado said. “The 10th ID’s death squads carried out the killing of about half of that figure,” he said.
Pitao, the wife of elusive New People’s Army commander Parago, lost her daughter Rebelyn, 20, on March 4 this year. Rebelyn, a private school teacher, was tortured and raped before she was killed. Pitao accused the AFP’s intelligence agents and operatives as behind Rebelyn’s brutal death.
(davaotoday.com photo by Jose Hernani)
“My daughter only carries a ballpen, pencil and a class record. She’s a civilian. But they killed her because she is the daughter of Parago. Is it justifiable? They are berdugos,” said Pitao, now the spokesperson of Hustisya-Southern Mindanao, an organization of relatives of the victims of extrajudicial and political killings under the Arroyo administration.
Authorities failed to present any substantial gain to solve the extrajudicial and political killings in the country. Critics said the Task Forces set up by the regional Philippine National Police to look into the cases of Rebelyn and, that of another Davao peasant leader, Celso Pojas were just a ploy to assuage the snowballing local and international outrage over the killings.
With Rebelyn’s death, the recent killing of Conrado Canete, 57, a farmer and father of another NPA commander in Southern Mindanao, and other less reported cases of abduction and torture of civilian family members of NPAs and activists, Arroyo critics here pointed out that “she has become more desperate due to her failure to end the progressive people’s movement against state oppression.”
In the human rights day rally here, progressive and militant groups said that justice could only be served “if President Arroyo and her advisers would be jailed for their crimes against the Filipino people.”
Cristony, who lost a father during Arroyo’s watch, said, “My father may have been silenced by their bullets but the principles that he stood for will continue to stay with us.” (davaotoday.com)
