Issue Analysis No.04
March 16, 2007

Crossing the Bridge

The U.S. government has been criticized for its inconsistent human rights policy and for using it as part of its proverbial "carrots and stick" strategy chiefly to gain concessions from governments. It supports tyrannical governments and deals with states that have gained notoriety for committing atrocities against their own nationals.

The breakthrough in bringing the issue of the human rights crisis in the Philippines to the U.S. Congress this week has sent some mixed signals: That it would increase pressures on the Arroyo government to take a decisive action in stopping the political killings, or that nothing will come out of it. This development is expected to generate new questions on what other steps need to be done such as making the Arroyo government accountable upon show of evidence that these cases are part of a state policy or that the chief executive has done nothing to arrest the deterioration of the critical human rights situation.

Initiated by the National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP), the ecumenical and human rights delegation first visited Canada second week of March where bishops and human rights defenders met Canadian MPs (members of Parliament). There second leg was the trip to Washington, DC where they presented the human rights crisis situation at a three-day Ecumenical Advocacy Days conference. Thereafter, delegation members testified before the U.S. Senate's subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs of the committee on foreign relations and before the House of Representatives' committee on foreign relations. They also held briefings with the State Department. The deputy director of the Philippine National Police (PNP), Avelino Razon, and three other armed forces and police senior officers were refused entry into the Senate and were told not to "conduct surveillance on the witnesses." The U.S. Congress hearings were to be followed by meetings with the UN Human Rights Council, both in New York and later in Geneva.

It was apparent that key committees of the U.S. Congress were keen on pursuing the church delegation's proposal to review U.S.-Philippine security cooperation and military aid especially because these were being used to support a brutal counter-insurgency program leading to violations of human rights. Some officials of the state department have also suggested that economic and military aid to the Arroyo government extended by the U.S. and other countries be tied to the Philippine president's human rights record.

The decision to bring the human rights crisis in the Philippines before the international community notably major ecumenical bodies, the UNHRC, Canada, the U.S. Congress and other foreign governments and institutions was actually a foregone conclusion, achieved at several forums and conferences in the Philippines over the last few years.

The organizations represented by the delegation looked beyond the limited findings of the Melo Commission and the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, involuntary or summary executions, with their assertion that the mounting cases of political assassinations, forced disappearances, torture and other violations of human rights were the result of a state-authored counter-insurgency doctrine. To them, there was also no question that the state's criminal justice system aside from Congress and even the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) were either dysfunctional, uncooperative and/or had institutional weaknesses making justice being denied to the victims and their kin.

No legal remedies

With no legal remedies to exhaust because these are non-existent anyway, the NCCP, together with other church and faith organizations and human rights watchdogs, had to raise the issue before the international community. Indeed, families of victims, eyewitnesses, lawyers and human rights organizations found themselves receiving death threats from the same perpetrators of political crimes; some of them eventually went missing. They "have agonized over the inability to cross the bridge toward justice precisely because there is no bridge at all," thus said the 90-page ecumenical report, "Let the Stones Cry Out" which the delegation submitted to the Canadian Parliament, UNHRC, U.S. Congress and international ecumenical bodies.

In their meetings with Canadian and American legislators, the ecumenical delegation asked their respective legislatures to review economic and security arrangements with the Arroyo government including military aid to ensure that these do not result in the gross and systematic violations of human rights. However, the American legislators should have known all along that the military aid that they allocate for the Philippines was being used to kill and maim innocent civilians in a counter-insurgency that was tailored to fit Bush's "war on terrorism." They should know that U.S. laws prohibit the extension of military aid to governments known to have violated human rights – a fact which has been consistently cited about the Philippines in the state department's yearly human rights reports. A recent report by the U.S. General Auditing Office (GAO) concluded that elements of the Philippine military were involved in extra-judicial killings and other violations of human rights. The investigation on the catastrophic results of U.S. military aid had earlier been asked by various lawyers groups and church congregations in the U.S. For instance, in June last year, the National Lawyers Guild, Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, called for a probe into "the use of U.S. funding for Philippine military operations against the legal Left that are being conducted under the guise of the war on terror."

Just the same, the Philippine church delegation's mission to bring this demand to the U.S. Congress is the first step toward a legislative review of the Bush policy of support to the Arroyo government under the purview of "war against terrorism" and "counter-insurgency" program. Moreover, this is timely considering the fact that Congress, now dominated by the Democrats, is in the middle of intense debates calling for the withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces from Iraq. Necessarily, the debates will also touch on Bush's national security strategy which includes its "counter-terrorism" operations in the Philippines and military aid to the Arroyo government.

Congressional review

However, the congressional review of the Philippine-U.S. security cooperation, military aid and the human rights issue will go through the rigors of legislative mill to process the reactions and positions of key policy makers from the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and various intelligence agencies, the U.S. Pacific Command, the U.S. Embassy and the USAID in Manila and other agencies dealing with the Philippines. To push the agenda, it will become necessary for the Philippine ecumenical delegation to sustain vigorous lobbying in collaboration with other sympathetic ecumenical bodies, human rights, advocacy and even academic groups in the U.S. This is expected since the Arroyo government will tap its influential lobby groups in the U.S. Congress to question the credibility and credentials of the Philippine delegation and to market the line that giving military support to Arroyo in the context of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency is the best thing that ever happened to the Manila-Washington special ties.

Already, the Pentagon, through the commander of its anti-drug task force in Southeast Asia, Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft, has begun a publicity blitz in support of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) – the alleged perpetrator of rights violations – with allegations that the New People's Army (NPA) maintains shabu laboratories in its areas of operation. Zukunft's story is an oblique support to the AFP's fabricated lies that the NPA is to blame for the political killings as part of an "internal purge" – a theory which however has been debunked by both the Melo Commission and the UN Special Rapporteur, Philip Alston.

There is a dynamics of policy making in Washington, D.C. with regard to the Philippine government not necessarily between the Democrats and Republicans but between those who believe in multilateralism and the advocates of unilateralism. In connection with U.S. foreign policy and global security strategy, those who push for a revival of multilateralism, i.e., using diplomacy and cooperation with international institutions such as the United Nations, can be found in some liberal members of Congress and the state department, which administers its diplomatic mission in the Philippines. Officially though, the state department has backed Arroyo's hardline anti-communist stance by including the CPP-NPA in its "foreign terrorist organizations" (FTO) list.

On the other hand, the advocates of unilateralism, i.e. the "realists" and "neo-conservatives," remain in the upperhand and are in control of the Bush government including the Pentagon, and they include many Republicans in Congress and conservative think tanks that are key players in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the global war against terrorism. From this clique of war hawks and neo-conservatives come those who promote Bush's current close security cooperation with the Arroyo government. Of course, one can argue that multilateralism and unilateralism are two sides of the same coin: The U.S. government adheres to multilateralism but reserves its right to use unilateralism as a way of maintaining an independent foreign policy (Read: aggressive global hegemony).

Inconsistent rights policy

In fact, the U.S. government has been criticized for its inconsistent human rights policy and for using it as part of its proverbial "carrots and stick" strategy chiefly to gain concessions from governments. For instance, it has accused China of having a poor human rights record as a means of pressuring the Beijing government to yield to major economic concessions demanded by Washington. Yet, it supports tyrannical governments and other states notorious for committing atrocities against their own nationals – reminiscent of its previous support to various dictatorships from the 1950s to 1980s including the military regimes of Marcos, Park Chung-Hee of South Korea, General Soeharto of Indonesia, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, and the Shah of Iran.

Today's case in point is of course the Arroyo government. The state department may report about the knotty human rights performance of Mrs. Arroyo but Washington continues to extend huge amounts of military aid and pours more and more of its intervention forces in the Philippines. It has opposed peace talks with the communists and is extending military aid to the AFP - even if this results in the gross and systematic violations of human rights - with the objective of forcing the "enemies of the state" to surrender.

Still, unlike in the aftermath of 9/11, the upsurge of the anti-war movement in the U.S. and the Philippine progressive church's renewed linkages with human rights, ecumenical, academic and immigrant groups in America are new grounds which the struggle for the defense of human rights in the Philippines can tap to help bring into fruition efforts to render justice to the victims of human rights violations in the country. The complaints with the UNHRC will likely open more quasi-legal investigations and the possible non-renewal of the Philippine government's membership in the Council when it faces a universal periodic review (UPR) in May this year. The struggle for human rights will continue in the Philippines but its solidarity support appears to be boundless and is gaining sympathies not only in America but throughout the world as well.

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