A human rights group said that 28 of the 304 victims of extrajudicial killing (EJK) since President Aquino took power in 2010 were children, 12 of whom are members of indigenous peoples (IP).
Cristina Palabay, secretary-general of human rights group Karapatan, expects EJK victims to increase in the remainder of Aquino’s term.
Palabay warned that military troops are bent to intensify their operations as Malacañang’s vaunted “Oplan Bayanihan” or OPB counter-insurgency campaign winds down.
Taking a swipe on the Aquino administration’s “Daang Matuwid” or “righteous path” policy, Palabay said: “The path is awash with the blood of 304 victims of extrajudicial killing, 28 of them children.
Of the 28 children killed, 12 are indigenous people. There is nothing more harrowing than seeing a child suffer and die.
The militant group leader spoke ahead of the worldwide observance of International Human Rights Day on December 10.
“To witness a seven-year-old girl shot by a drunken soldier taking her last breath before reaching the hospital is unbearable,” Palabay said, referring to what happened to Sunshine Jabinez.
In 2011, Jabinez, who lived in Pantukan, Compostela Valley, was sleeping when a bullet struck her buttock and slashed her spine. Soaked in her own blood, she could only mutter “Ma, Pa, sakit” (Ma, Dad, it hurts) as her parents saw her.
The bullet came from the automatic rifle of a soldier from the 71st Infantry Battalion (71IB) of the Philippine Army (PA), who fired his weapon while drinking with his fellow soldiers.
http://www.mb.com.ph/rights-group-decries-12-ip-kids-deaths-in-afp-ops-under-pnoy/
In anticipation of International Human Rights Day on Dec 10, KARAPATAN (Alliance for the Advancement of People's Rights), the main Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) umbrella human rights front organization once again conjures up statistics and tales of Philippine military human rights abuses as part of an ongoing effort to discredit the Aquino administration and the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, Ka Andrea Guerrero a spokesperson for the New People's Army (NPA), the military wing of the CPP, issues a statement in which he openly admits that the NPA engaged in the extrajudicial killing of at least four people in Cauayan and Ilog towns in Negros Occidental. Do we hear statements of moral outrage and condemnation from KARAPATAN? Nope total silence.
The repeated unwillingness of KARAPATAN to call the NPA to account for its publicly admitted human rights abuses completely undermines any assertions made by the group that it is genuinely concerned about the human rights of all Filipinos and is not just a propaganda tool of the communist insurgents. As a result, all statistics and apocryphal tales of military human rights abuses must be called into question, given the group's obvious anti-government/anti-military bias.