PRESS STATEMENT April 9, 2007
Satur back on campaign trail; Palace, AFP finally admit roles in anti-Bayan Muna drive
Fresh on from a Holy Week break, Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo returns to the campaign trail in a progressive partylist assembly in San Fernando, Pampanga today.
Bayan Muna also issued a statement on the continued vilification campaign against Rep. Ocampo:
Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita has finally admitted Malacaang’s leading role in the fabricated charges leveled against Rep. Ocampo and the campaign to crush Bayan Muna.
Ermita’s statements on Wednesday about the purported certainty that Ocampo will soon return to jail and other fulminations in clear contempt of the Supreme Court demolishes once and for all the unbelievable script that Malacaang has no role whatsoever in the attempts to discredit Ocampo and Bayan Muna.
As to Esperon’s claim that Bayan Muna’s certain win in the May 14 elections is like having communist rebels in Congress: This confirms the military’s targeting of a duly-accredited partylist group whose membership is 100 percent civilian and 100 percent non-combatant. No wonder the military death squads continue to kill Bayan Muna members. Esperon hideously considers us no different from the New People’s Army.
Esperon’s statement violates international humanitarian law. The laws of war prohibit the AFP from targeting, harming and executing civilians and non-combatants in the counter-insurgency war.
Rep. Ocampo will prevail over this plot to demonize him. A recycled fake mass grave, which was the subject of a multiple murder case already dismissed in 2005, cannot pin Ocampo down. Neither can the administration rely on perjured statements of professional witnesses.
Rep. Ocampo had been jailed for nine years under Marcos, three years under Aquino and 19 days under Arroyo. Never had he been convicted of any crime in a court of law not even under martial law when he was subjected to a seven-year trial in a special military commission which was a kangaroo court.
We challenge Rep. Ocampo’s detractors and tormentors to examine their conscience and put a stop to the grave-hunting, manufacturing of witnesses and capitalizing on the grief of the alleged victims.
With full support from the people and without military terror and massive cheating, Bayan Muna will also prevail in the May 14 elections. #
2007 Elections
