Officers and members of COURAGE picket the DOJ. (photo by Jamin Verde, InterAksyon.com)
The Confederation for Unity, Recognition and Advancement of Government Employees or COURAGE has asked the Department of Justice to investigate more than 20 cases of harassment by alleged military agents against its offers and staff workers.
The public sector labor group said it also intends to seek the help of the United Nations and the International Labor Organization to stop what it calls an “obvious pattern” of intimidation by state security forces against it.
The National Council of Churches in the Philippines, which counts the major Christian churches in the country, has mounted its own international campaign saying the “spate of harassment has touched our own council and its staff.”
Leaders of COURAGE affiliated unions picketed the DOJ Thursday and handed the request for investigation to Secretary Leila de Lima.
Before this, it filed two batches of complaints before the Commission on Human Rights -- on June 8 and June 29 -- after union leaders and COURAGE office staff received poison letters, complained of being tailed and even visited at their offices or homes by men who introduced themselves as military agents who accused them of links to the communist revolutionary movement and warning them of dire consequences unless they “cooperated.”
Image from CCTV footage shows a man who introduced himself as a military agent leaving the home of a COURAGE organizer to whom he gave a number to contact and the warning to 'call me or blame yourself if something bad happens to you.' (image from Hand Off Our Unionists and Activists Facebook page)
“The poison letters and unwelcome visits all follow the same lines; we were tagged as Red leaders, given numbers to call them and threatened if we fail to do so,” COURAGE president Ferdinand Gaite said in a statement.
“We want the DOJ to investigate these harassment, press the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) and PNP (Philippine National Police) to reveal their OPLAN (operations plan) against progressive unionists and activists,” he added.
Explaining their decision to also seek UN and ILO intervention, Gaite said, “We don’t want to leave any stones unturned. We will bring our cause to various agencies and institutions advocating human rights and trade union rights.”
“We are afraid for our own and our families’ lives, liberty and security. Unionists and activists are vulnerable and defenseless against armed state agents. We have only the hope that our country will never allow intimidation and threats to curtail our right to organize and speak up,” he said.
“We are afraid but we cannot just cower in fear,” he added.
NCCP general secretary Fr. Rex Reyes, in a separate statement, called the campaign of intimidation against COURAGE “totally unacceptable in a democratic society” as he disclosed that one of the latest incidents had involved the unwanted intrusion by military agents into the family compound of a Council officer and his father, a retired Methodist bishop.
On June 28, said Reyes, “two men claiming to be members of the military” showed up at the home of Mervin Toquero, acting program secretary of the NCCP’s Program Unit on Faith, Witness and Service, and his wife Raquel, COURAGE national organizer, as the couple were having breakfast with their children.
The men, Reyes said, did not show any identification or any authority to justify the visit.
“The incident left the family agitated and threatened as it happened inside their family compound where Mervin’s father, Bishop Solito K. Toquero, a retired bishop of the United Methodist Church and former vice chairperson of the NCCP, also resides,” he said.
“They now feel unsafe, following the intrusion by these agents. They have reason to be afraid as the climate of impunity in the Philippines is such that human rights defenders are killed by state agents even inside their homes,” he added.
“We deplore this brazen act of harassment that involved intrusion in the homes of people as an abuse and misuse of power,” Reyes said as he called on the Aquino government “to rein in its state security forces.”
http://www.interaksyon.com/article/113533/govt-workers-take-harassment-complaints-to-doj-to-seek-un-ilo-help
The Confederation for Unity, Recognition and Advancement of Government (COURAGE) is a public sector labor front of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The group has carried out extensive anti-military propaganda campaigns in the past.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that in the past Philippine security agencies have used some of the ham-fisted intimidation tactics alleged by COURAGE against CPP front organizations. As a result, there is some difficulty in discerning truth from commie propaganda in the allegations made by leaders of the public sector labor front.