Gender Issues

Dumped Fetuses in Davao Worries Angging

DAVAO CITY — City Councilor Angela ?Angging? Librado-Trinidad has underscored the need in Davao City for an institution and a piece of legislation that will address reproductive health care for women.

Librado was reacting to the series of discoveries of aborted fetuses dumped in the city?s trash bins. She has been pushing to enact an ordinance that will comprehensively address women?s health because abortion, she said, has become one of the options many women resort to especially for those belonging to low-income groups who have unwanted pregnancies.

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Abducted, Blindfolded, Tortured, Molested

One day in November, two NGO workers were abducted by soldiers in a village in North Cotabato. They were forcibly brought to a military detachment where they were blindfolded, interrogated, tortured and sexually molested. The soldiers tried to force them to admit that they were communist guerillas.

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2006: A Year of Horror for Southern Mindanao?s Women Activists


SUFFERING WOMEN. This political art, seen at the Davao offices of the women’s group Gabriela, depicts the abuses women, particularly their activist sisters, go through under a repressive regime. (davaotoday.com photo by Cheryll D. Fiel)

According to the human-rights group Karapatan, 15 women from Southern Mindanao alone were killed in the past five years due to their political involvements. Nationwide, 86 of the more than 700 victims of political killings from 2001 to August 2, 2006, were women.

By Cheryll D. Fiel
davaotoday.com

DAVAO CITY — A young village teacher killed in a strafing incident. An elderly woman hacked to death while sleeping in her home. Two volunteers of a nongovernment organization abducted and tortured by the military. Another NGO worker disappeared without a trace.

Several women in Southern Mindanao went through these, and more, in 2006. It was a year that, overall, saw the deterioration of the state of human rights and civil liberties in the Philippines.

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Smith Transfer ‘Another Meiring’?

The move by the Arroyo administration to turn over US Marine Lance Corporal Daniel Smith, who has been convicted of raping “Nicole,” to the custody of the US embassy has the makings of another Meiring, according to the human-rights group Karapatan, referring to Michael Terrence Meiring, an alleged CIA agent who blew himself up inside a Davao City hotel in May 2003. Meiring was accused of hoarding explosives in his hotel room, which were to be used, allegedly, for terrorist attacks in Mindanao. But agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation spirited Meiring from the hospital, prompting outcries from leftist groups and local officials, among them Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, who called the move an affront to Filipino sovereignty.

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