We, National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) peace consultants and other political prisoners detained in Camp Bagong Diwa, heartily greet, today, the International Day for Respect of Human Rights, as it underlines before the world and all mankind the primary importance of protecting and asserting the rights of the people, especially those suppressed and oppressed by the powers that be.
Quite unfortunately, however, in our country, these rights continue to be heartlessly trampled upon by reactionary state forces, including successive ruling regimes of late, even if outright martial law had supposedly ended with the ouster of the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986.
We, political prisoners — along with the mass of our people, especially the workers and other urban poor, peasants, women, youth, national minorities, and most especially those we fight alongside with, for their rights and those of the people — are among those whose rights continue to be kept suppressed and oppressed by the powers that be in our country.
Contrary to repeated claims by the present ruling regime that there are no political prisoners in the country, the fact is that there are presently more than 500 of us, political prisoners, in the country.
While many are scattered in various other jails throughout the country, some of us have been brought to “maximum risk” jails — jails euphemistically termed as “special intensive care areas”, where we are being concentrated in, quite distant from our work and native locations, our families and relations, and our sources of support, and where conditions of detention are overly restrictive and repressive.
We, our human rights advocates and our other supporters have also been apprehensive and have asked for investigations about reported plans by the jail authorities to manuever our transfer to an accordingly even more restrictive and more repressive “super jail”, where — if the information we are receiving are true — we would suffer violations of our human rights all the more.
To cover the arbitrariness, illegality and sheer injustice of our highly restrictive and repressive and practically indefinite detention, trumped-up criminal charges have been fabricated against us, or — as is often done — against our supposed “aliases”, or even other identities falsely attributed to us. Bounties, usually cooked up after arrests have been made, have only enriched by hundreds of millions the top uniformed officers behind the spurious arrests.
In the meantime, for years we have been continuing to suffer a snail’s pace of the system of “justice” — that is one of the slowest, if not actually the slowest, in the world. Numerous fabricated cases against many of us, political prisoners, have taken more than a decade already, and some have practically not been moving at all. More so, in the cases of those transferred from far-away provinces to “maximum risk” jails here in Camp Bagong Diwa.
Even worse, the rotten system of justice in the country and the handling of court cases against political prisoners in the country are often interfered with by fascist state forces. In a recent court decision to force the conviction of two political prisoners, who are also NDFP peace consultants — obviously and, in fact, according to information we have received — the decision was interfered with, and in fact actually ghost-written by state military intelligence forces. In an earlier court decision, where the judge has a notorious history of cooking up false cases against national democratic and social change advocates, another NDFP peace consultant was also foully convicted, with the acceptance by the court of planted evidence.
Peace talks between the NDFP and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP/GPH) have long been stalled, due to the ruling regime’s gross violations of long-standing agreements between the peace panels of the NDFP and the GRP/GPH. Such includes the Comprehensive Agreement for the Respect of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL) and the Joint Agreement for Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) for the protection of peace talks participants, consultants and staffs from surveillance, arrest, torture, filing of trumped cases and other acts of violence that would deter their effective participation and work in the peace process.
The NDFP peace panel has long been demanding the immediate release of jailed NDFP peace talks participants, consultants and staffs, and of all other political prisoners, as part of the GRP/GPH’s responsibility in the implementation of such long-standing peace agreements for the respect of human rights and the protection of those involved in the peace process. But the demands have only continued to fall on deaf ears.
In the meantime, we, unjustly arrested and detained NDFP peace consultants and other political prisoners, continue to suffer gross violations of our human rights and of our protection from other antagonistic acts of the ruling state and its minions.
We also continue to suffer all the more, as we follow developments outside of prison, where the human rights and other (political, socio-economic, cultural) rights of the people continue to be grossly violated.
We refer to the Lumad and other indigenous people whose rights to their ancestral lands and communities, their livelihoods, their education, their culture are being grossly violated by big-scale mining and monopoly plantation interests and by the state military and paramilitary forces protecting such rapacious interests. The Moro people, Cordillera people and other national minorities also continue to suffer the same violations of their rights and interests.
We refer to the workers whose struggles for higher wages, for the regularization of their jobs, against joblessness, for their right to unionize, and for their other labor rights have been meeting increased repressive measures and derogatory and heated opposition from giant multinational and local comprador businesses and their associations. The latter purportedly speak in the name of micro, small and medium enterprises, but are actually further promoting the neoliberal policy in the world, in this country and in the other semicolonies of imperialism.
We refer to the peasants whose struggles for genuine agrarian reform have continued to be frustrated, given the long-standing failures and anomalies of the sham land program of the pro-landlord establishment, including the present landlord president.
We refer to the urban poor, who are already victimized by joblessness, low wages and labor contractualization and who also continue to be victims of demolitions and ejection from where they have been living and making efforts to survive.
We refer to the majority of women in our society, who press on with their struggles against patriarchalism and for equal rights, simultaneously with their fight against class exploitation and oppression.
We refer to the youth and students, most of whose families cannot afford to send them to school and finish their studies, who need to wage many struggles, including struggles against oppressively high tuition due to deregulation and privatization of education and struggles for their rights as students, who see need of supporting the struggles of other exploited and oppressed sectors, while themselves being threatened by the K-12 Program that seeks to gear the whole education system to producing en masse young, skilled and cheap labor for foreign and local big businesses by increasing skills training, additional years of technical studies, and decreasing academic studies.
We refer to the migrants sector now numbering in millions, who have been driven to foreign lands away from their families, just to support their families, and who suffer various abuses and oppressions, and criminal government neglect to their problems abroad.
We refer to many other deprived and oppressed sectors of our society, whose human rights and their other rights are kept on being violated and deprived of them.
We have painfully been kept abreast of these — directly, through visits to us from their ranks, and through correspondences, publications, statements and the like, that we receive from them, and, indirectly, through what we get from newspapers and other media, and what are shared with us by others.
Just as we continue to press on with our fight for our human rights and other rights, we, imprisoned NDFP peace consultants and other political prisoners, continue in whatever way we can — even behind bars — to fight for the human rights and other rights of various sectors of our society.
We expect to more effectively be able to do so outside of prison, and wield our struggles together with those sectors of our oppressed and exploited people, for whose cause we have been arrested, jailed and subjected to fascist restrictions, repressions and various other gross violations of our human rights and other rights.
Detained NDFP peace consultants
Adelberto Silva
Alan Jazmines
Ernesto Lorenzo
Eduardo Serrano
Tirso Alcantara
Ruben Saluta
and other political prisoners
in Camp Bagong Diwa, Taguig City
http://www.philippinerevolution.net/statements/20151210_ndfp-peace-consultants-and-other-political-prisoners-detained-in-camp-bagong-diwa-greet-the-international-day-for-respect-of-human-rights
