Ifugao NPA warn vs ‘overdone’ war on drugs

From InterAksyon (Aug 17): Ifugao NPA warn vs ‘overdone’ war on drugs

Communist rebels in Ifugao warned local government units and law enforcers in the province against replicating the “overdone” campaign that has led to hundreds of deaths around the country, either in police operations or vigilante-style executions.

“Clearly, these deaths did not undergo the due process of the reactionary law. This fact, by itself, leads us to the very familiar tragedy of EJKs (extrajudicial killings). These are executions. This is Purge Anarchy, Philippines-style,” Ka Wigan Moncontad, spokesman of the New People’s Army’s Nona del Rosario Command in the province, said in a statement Wednesday.

He said the failure of President Rodrigo Duterte to recognize “that drug abuse is not the disease” but “a symptom of severe poverty” that has led to “this misguided program (that has) resulted in equally rampant extrajudicial killings,” with the “general population” targeted this time.

In Ifugao, the rebel spokesman said, local governments have been implementing “even in the laidback terrains of Ifugao” Oplan Kulkughummangan, their version of Oplan Tokhang (Toktok-Hangyo or “knock and appeal”), in which police go house to house to convince drug suspects to give themselves up, which has “resulted in the surrender of around 250 individuals as of July.”

Moncontad pointed out that most of the poor who have been drawn into drug use, particularly the youth, “see it as a way to forget their dire conditions,” while small-time peddlers see an “easy, but very dangerous” source of income.

Even in Ifugao, he said, the “majority are impoverished farmers and gardeners who are forced to try their luck outside their ili (community)” and, “away from the guidance of custom and their traditional leaders and structures, they are exposed to bad influences such as drug abuse.”

The class origins of the victims of drug-related killings, Moncontad said, prove the campaign to be “very anti-poor and anti-people.”

“For the police, the poor are dispensable,” he said. “These are small-time users and pushers but they are the ones being hunted. The drug lords, most certainly among the ruling elite of landlord-bourgeois comprador class, make billions of pesos from victimizing the poor but get away from their crimes.”

To decisively solve the problem, Moncontad said, “the Duterte regime to go beyond chasing drug users and pushers and to not limit itself to a mere anti-drug campaign. Instead, it should address poverty and its root causes.”

http://interaksyon.com/article/131502/ifugao-npa-warn-vs-overdone-war-on-drugs