Lawyers and lumad advocates slammed the Philippine National Police for keeping a Bakwit School teacher away from family and lawyers in the past days.
Posts by tag: Mindanao
Why? They had no weapons nor drugs or anything illegal. They were only holding class peacefully. The police called the raid a rescue, but the videos convict the attackers as criminals. That was a scandal of terrifying violence against children.
A group of Manobo evacuees seeking refuge inside the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) Haran compound decried on the repeated accusations of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) that ‘’bakwit schools’ train child warriors and earn profit from taking shelter in the cities to expose their plight in the communities they temporarily left behind.
Datu Benito Bay-ao was one of the Lumad leaders who were taken into custody after that disgraceful raid at the Bakwit School in Cebu City. Just six years ago, Dats Bens (as we call him) spoke with pride and optimism in this documentary about their Lumad school in their village of Dulyan, and across the other upland villages in the Pantaron under the Salugpongan Ta Tanu Igkanugon organization. Schooling in the cities made them ashamed of, and forget about, being a Lumad, he said. But with their schools built right in their domain, young Lumad could learn while keeping their tradition alive.
A Lumad student in a Bakwit School in UP Diliman had this response to the recent pronouncement of the Philippine National Police Region 7 that their schools are “training grounds for child warriors.”
Police and social workers in Cebu on Monday took custody of 21 Lumad students and arrested tribal elders and school teachers from their “Bakwit School” in the University of San Carlos Talamban campus, claiming this was a “rescue” from a rebel training school.
Councilors raised concern over the rising costs of pork and other meat products in the market amid the COVID-19 pandemic and are seeking subsidy for hog raisers.
What was remembered as a place of death and tragedy in a mountainous area in Misamis Oriental will now become a thriving tourist destination after the provincial government converted a parcel of land near the Cebu Pacific Flight 5J387 crash site into a tourism complex and botanical garden.
Student groups in Mindanao urged the government to recalibrate its strategies to end the armed conflict through resolving the root causes of armed rebellion: poverty, inequality, corruption, and atrocious governance, instead of sowing fear against dissent.
A parish priest killed last Sunday and a lawyer who was also gunned down two weeks ago in the same city of Malaybalay both faced similar circumstances of court charges.
