So Whimsical! So Insecure!

When the breaking news came out on Sunday night that President Duterte has fired VP Leni as the drug czar, the first thoughts that raced to my mind was: How whimsical! How insecure!

 It was uncalled for when he challenged VP Leni to take over his flagship war on drugs when she bared it as a failure in an interview. Stung by the criticism, he challenged her to take over the program for six months and be the drug czar herself if she could do better. He even appointed her to the position as a co-chair of the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD) on October 28. To give her time to do the job, he said that she could stay on for the rest of his term as president. And now, barely three weeks from that appointment he fired her. Is he leading or is he being led by his whims? He claims that he does not trust her. Why did he appoint her in the first place? Maybe he misjudged her wisdom and her courage. She took on the challenge, and with energy! Now he backs off when she is already making strides.

Or is Duterte insecure? He claims that she had not done anything. But no, she was fast. In just two weeks VP Leni had talked to the police, and to various groups to get information. She is known to be a person who is in touch with the ground, going to those in the fringes of society. She is consultative, so she spoke to US and UN officials who are into this problem. Illegal drugs are not just a problem of the Philippines. It is a world-wide problem needing cooperation from all, which Duterte does not do. He is closed minded. He thinks his solution is the only one, even though he cannot show any success except the body counts of those he and his minions have killed. He has not eliminated the drug problem in his native Davao City in the 20 years that he had employed his technique of using Death Squads, nor does he succeed in his present ways in spite of thousands who have been liquidated, most of whom are the poor and the defenseless.

Yes, Duterte is insecure, especially of women of grit. This is shown by the way he keeps Sen. Leila de Lima in jail with trumped up charges, by the heavy-handed handling of Sr. Patricia Fox, by the unjust ouster of Chief Justice Lourdes Sereno. Now he could not stand VP Leni Robredo to be in his cabinet. So he back-pedalled by claiming that her appointment does not include a cabinet position. She is co-chairman and her co-chair would not share with her information which is vital to fight the drug menace. What are they afraid of? That the skeletons in their closet would be seen? People have long been suspecting that there is something fishy in Duterte’s version of War on Drugs. This suspicion is being confirmed by this secrecy. What they are keeping are not state secrets but secrets of Duterte!

I pity Duterte’s spokespersons. They are appearing ridiculous to make sense of the whimsical moves of their patron. And because they are whimsical, they are unpredictable and illogical. How can one put logic in what is illogical?  But we, can we trust a leader who is so whimsical and so insecure?

Protest Against Red-Tagging

EVERYONE has a right to his/her good name. If this is true for each individual person, it is more so for groups and institutions. To accuse a whole institution in public, and much more, in an official government hearing, and by no less than a government body which is supposed to be reputable, without irrefutable evidence, is the height of malice. One cannot just name-drop an institution because institutions have many supporters, self-less workers, and admirable activities. Red-tagging is one such practice, and it is being done by the military and police institutions to persons and institutions who do not toe the line of the government, and who expose their human rights abuses, or who empower people to speak out against projects that do not promote the good of the ordinary people and the environment.

On November 5, Major General Reuben S. Basiao, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the Department of National Defense (DND) gave a briefing on the security situation of the country to the Committee on National Defense in a committee hearing in Congress. Present in the hearing was no less than Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana. It is an official affair. There was a presentation of “front organizations” that provide fund generation to the CPP-NDF-NPA which is considered a Communist Terrorist Group (CTG) by the government.

  

The unfounded inclusion of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP) in the list of the alleged “communist front organizations” is a threat not only to particular Christian churches but to the role of religion in society in general.

NCCP is one of the leading faith-based and humanitarian organizations in the country that respond to the needs and concerns of people. Its social action arm is committed to delivering humanitarian aid and social services especially to the least and most abandoned. The NCCP is made up of mainline Protestant Churches which stand firm promoting peace and unity, the protection of the dignity of life, and the respect for human rights in their proclamation of Christ as Saviour and Lord.

Among the more than 50 organizations and institutions, both local and international, which the military claims “wittingly or unwittingly” aid the CTG are also reputable groups that work in the country to help the poor and the victims of natural calamities, especially Typhoon Yolanda. They named the Diocesan Social Action Center of Kalibo, Caritas Australia, Caritas Austria, Caritas Belgium, Caritas Switzerland, Save the Children Foundation, Bread for the World, Oxfam International, Swedish Red Cross, Mercy Relief, just to name a few of the more prominent ones.

It is inherent to the churches and the aid organizations to provide help to everyone who is in need especially in times of disaster, regardless of political or religious beliefs. We do not ask a victim of a calamity if he or she is a communist before giving assistance.

Faith-based institutions, and humanitarian and development organizations, should be encouraged and supported by the government. They are doing what the government cannot do, or they do better, faster and with less wastage than what the government is mandated to do.

Stop the practice of red-tagging! If their intelligence, if they have one, indicate that a person or a group is engaged in illegal activities, then bring them to court rather than flaunting their name as supporting communist terrorists. Everyone has a right to their good name!

Support Needed

(Photo courtesy of CHARLIE VILLEGAS/OVP)

President Duterte has formally offered Vice-President Leni Robredo the post to be the co-chairperson of the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD). This means that she would  share with Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) chief Aaron Aquino the task of the anti-drug czar. Many people doubt the sincerity of the administration in this offer. It may be Duterte’s way of washing his hands at the failure of his own version of anti-drug campaign. It may even be a way to show to the people how incapable VP Leni is, because to stop the drug problem is an impossible task in such a short time. The government may even block her efforts along the way to prevent her from making any headway. There is so much mistrust in this government that people cannot help make conjectures.

VP Leni is well aware of the problems, as she herself stated in her acceptance speech. She said she is ready for all these just to stop the killings of the current model of drug war. In this her purpose is laudable; each human life is important. Furthermore, it should be clear by now, after two and a half years of killings of lowly people, having victimized about 6,000 people (according to police accounts, but more than 20,000 people according to several studies), that this violent mode is not working. Drugs are still in our streets. Killing is not the solution!

The Vice President deserves the support of everyone if the drug problem is to be addressed in a holistic way. It is a health issue, a poverty issue, an education issue, an employment and livelihood issue, a corruption and good governance issue, and also a police issue. Now is the time for those who criticized the killings to come out to contribute to solve the drug problem. I think we all agree that there is a big drug problem in our country. Now let us put our acts together since we have a person in charge who is ready to listen and to enlist the contributions of all, and is not bent only on a narrow one-sided view that the drug problem is just a criminal issue.

Helping and supporting VP Leni in this urgent task, however, does not mean that we will go all along with this administration, and not even with all that she would do. We remain vigilant that human rights and human life are respected. We always demand accountability and those who do wrong should be made to answer for their misdeeds as the law provides. We support the program and we work for the common good, and are not to be blinded by loyalty to persons. As always, we are guided by the principle of critical collaboration. We work together and support what is for the good. This means that the aim is good and the means are good. But when something that is abusive and untruthful is done, we criticize and denounce. No loyalty to persons. We serve God alone, thus we serve what is good, what is just and what is true!

Prison Awareness Sunday

Every last Sunday of the month of October is Prison Awareness Sunday. This year, last October 27 is the 32^nd Prison Awareness Sunday. The purpose of this is to make us aware of the plight of our prisoners, who are now known as Persons Deprived of Liberty (PLD). Awareness can lead to care, to prayer and to charitable action. Even though they are in prison, rightly or not, the prisoners are still persons with rights that should be respected. For us Christians, there is a greater reason for caring for them; Jesus identified himself with them. He said: “I was in prison and you visited me.” (Mt 25:36)

We should be aware of what is happening in our jails and detention centers, and mostly especially, with our National Penitentiary, the New Bilibid Prison (NBP). If abuses and misconduct can happen in the NBP, how much more in the prisons and detention centers scattered all over the country!

Just within this month of October the following are in the headlines:

·        Since October 9 and two weeks hence, there was a continuing demolition of “illegal” shanties in the NBP maximum prison section. Around 185 “illegal” shanties have been demolished. How can these shanties be “illegal” within the prison compound itself? They would not be built in the first place if they had not been allowed by the authorities! Yes, some of these shanties belong to the rich inmates but many of them were stores, shops and livelihood centers of striving PLDs who try to eke out a living even in detention. The demolition was so sudden that they lost everything – supplies, money, personal belongings – and plus contrabands and dangerous weapons of the less scrupulous. The prisoners are made to suffer for these demolitions but the BuCor officials who allowed them in the first place are scot free – with their bribe money of course!

·        The Bureau of Corrections (BuCor), which is under the Department of Justice (DOJ), had to call in the police to back up the demolition work. On October 22 the news came out that 16 of these cops were relieved by the National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) because they themselves brought in, or allowed to be brought in, contraband materials like cell phones, liquor, tobacco and probably, also drugs. What irony! Those who do the work to do away with the contrabands are the ones allowing them. Why blame the PDL when those guarding them are the ones allowing and promoting them, and of course at a price!

·        In 17 days of October, since the start of the demotion and the suspension of visitation rights and even the work of the religious volunteer groups who help the PDL, 29 inmates have died because of sickness – pneumonia, cardiac arrest, tuberculosis, dehydration and the lack of medicine and medical attention. There is a hospital within the maximum prison but, some say, people go there to die and not to be cured.

These are just the items that have been brought to our attention. What about the other abuses of neglect that are rife in facilities which are meant to correct and rehabilitate people? What rehabilitation activities are being undertaken there by the government? Not because they are in prison or have committed crime,  the prisoners cease to be persons. They are still people with rights. They need to be respected and cared for.

I laud the people who have taken the care of prisoners as their special ministry. This is no easy service. Some church people do not even understand them. But they do this thankless job with generosity and as an expression of their faith. Someday they will hear these affirming words of Jesus: “Come, you that are blessed by my Father! Come and possess the kingdom which has been prepared for you ever since the creation of the world.” (Mt 25:34)

Urgent Call

When something is urgent, we drop anything that we do and attend to it. We not only attend to it but put in all our effort and our resources to it because it is urgent. So much more when this urgent call is an emergency. It should jolt us to action. All our adrenalin rushes in. This should be our attitude to the climate situation we are in. It is not only a climate crisis; it is a climate emergency! We do not look to the climate crisis as one of the many problems that we have to attend to. We are in an emergency. It is THE problem that we all have to attend to. We have a very limited window of time to act. If we fail to act now, our world, the earth that we know now, will no longer be the same for thousands or millions of years. The situation will be irreversible once we reach the tipping point, which the vast majority of scientists say is 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer since pre-industrial revolution time (more or less around the 1700s). We will reach that tipping point in 2030 if we act like business as usual in the world.  Already more than a million of animal and plant species have been brought to extinction since 1970. Our planet has become a lonelier place.

We people of faith have more compelling reasons to act now. This planet is the masterpiece created by our loving Father. He was pleased with it when he made it. It reflects His glory, His power, and His love. The Holy Book proclaims: “All your works give you thanks, LORD and your faithful bless you. They speak of the glory of your reign and tell of your mighty works.” (Ps. 145:10-11)And still more: “As the shining sun is clear to all, so the glory of the LORD fills all his works” (Sir. 42:16)We can know our Father because of His masterpiece. “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.”  (Rom. 1:20)

In destroying this earth, we are defacing our Loving Father. So we need to rouse the love for God of our people to care enough to prevent the further destruction of this world.

During the season of Advent and Christmas we have a singular opportunity for this. During the Simbang Gabi and the Christmas holidays, many people come to church. They have a special openness to the message of God. Let us use this season to bring out the urgency to take action now to prevent the further deterioration of our common home. Let us also use these liturgical seasons to summon all our faithful to pray together that this sense of urgency may be felt by all, especially by our political and business leaders. It should not be business as usual! We should drop everything that we do now and put our heads and hands together to save the only planet we have! We cannot gamble our future for the sake money and power. These will be of no use when the end is upon us.

Listen to the Kids

“COMING up here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election, or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come . . . We hear of animals and plants going extinct every day, vanishing forever . . . Did you have to worry of these things when you were my age? All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realize, neither do you. If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it . . . At school . . . you teach us how to behave in the world. You teach us to not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others and to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures; to share, not be greedy. Then, why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying: ‘Everything is going to be all right, it’s not the end of the world, and we are doing the best we can.’ But I don’t think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities?”

Reading the above lines would make you think that this comes from Greta Thunberg or one of the present-day young climate strikers. Yes, it came from a young person but spoken more than 27 years ago, by then 12-year-old Canadian Severn Cullis-Suzuki at the plenary session of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and was attended by 109 heads of state. Severn Cullis-Suzuki became known as “the girl who silenced the world for five minutes”. People were stung by her sincere and brave words. Imagine if the world had listened then. Climate disasters would have been averted, hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species would not have gone extinct. Thousands of lives would not have been snuffed out. But the world did not listen. They simply ignored her and the calls of Rio Earth Summit. In fact, more carbon dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere in the years since the Rio Summit than in all the years prior to it.

Now Greta and the thousands of young climate strikers could not be so easily sidelined. They are making headlines and many adults have joined them. In the September 20 Global Climate Strike more than 4 million people in 4,500 sites all over the earth have heeded the calls of the kids and have joined the Climate strike. More climate actions are being planned.

Since the kids can no longer be ignored, they discredit them. They call them puppets of those who want to wreak havoc in the world. These climate change deniers want things to run as it is now. Precisely this is the call of all concerned people. It cannot be business as usual! The world as it is running now is heading to a precipice. The business as usual is wreaking havoc to our one common home!  Don’t they see this? The kids are more perceptive. They are wiser, and they are acting. Let us listen to them. To paraphrase Psalm 8: “With the mouths of babes and infants you shame the wicked and the rebels.”

  

Go After the Ninja Cops

THE existence of the so-called ninja cops is the issue. This has been side tracked by the investigation whether PNP chief Oscar Albayalde Jr. had been involved in them or not. Yes, that is an important issue which should be pursued. If he had really intervened in the apprehension of the ninja cops before is important because he now holds a most important position in the police hierarchy and he has made many hard hitting pronouncements against those involved in drugs. This would really be the height of hypocrisy if he himself had been protecting his people and his friends in their involvement in the drug trade in the past. That should be investigated!

But there is a more serious issue that should not be side stepped, that is, the presence of the ninja cops in the police force itself. The ninja cops are those involved in the recycling of drugs apprehended and the trade offs being done by the police itself on those involved in the drug trade. Benjamin Magalong’s bold revelation of the ninja cops confirms what has long been the belief of many people – that the police itself is part of the drug problem. The PNP is the main agency used by Duterte in his so-called drug war. They are the ones used in the many tokhang operations and in the killings of the dubbed nanlaban victims. What a sham that those who fight against drugs are the ones tolerating and even profiting from it! Pinaglalaruan lang tayo! And what causes my blood to boil is that this is not just a mere game. Thousands of lives are snuffed out in this charade and so many thousands more – those orphaned – are made to suffer all their lives.

If the ninja cops existed in Pampanga at that time in 2013, it is reasonable to believe that they still exist now and in so many other places all over the country. It may even be a cancer in the whole police force. What is being done to investigate this and eventually to eradicate this practice? It is not just a matter of some generals doing it. Again, the usual tune of Duterte in cases involving high ranking people is to threaten and to say that several people will be sacked. But who are they? He does not even bring out the names of the generals he threatened, and gradually, in a short time, the issue will be laid to rest - forgotten! Or if his own people are accused, then the usual disclaimer that there is no proof and that they are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But what about the thousands who have been simply shot without any investigation at all and even in hundreds of cases, shot due to mistaken identity because there was even not enough “due diligence” to know if they are the persons being looked for? Is the presumption of innocence true only for certain people and not for all?

The politicians and leaders of the country should demand that the existence of the ninja cops be investigated and the people should know what is being done to cleanse the police force from them. Mere pronouncements are not enough. The drug problem is not being solved because the cops themselves are involved in them, even up to now! This is a very strong suspicion among the people.