The truth on the ground

Last Sunday, July 7, was “Bloody Sunday,” according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), following three separate killings in different places that once again highlighted the breakdown of law and order in the country. The modus: assassination, by “riding-tandem” gunmen who, as usual, managed to escape afterward.

In Cagayan province, businessman Arnel Agustin was shot dead with a bullet to the chest as he and his wife were riding in their pickup truck. His wife was left wounded.

In Surigao City, 52-year-old Wenefredo Olofernes, the top member of the Dinagat provincial legislature, had just finished his morning exercises and was riding his motorcycle when gunmen shot him in the head at Barangay Luna. His companion survived unscathed.

In Negros Oriental, 42-year-old Salvador “Bador” Romano was also on a motorcycle and had just left the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI, or the Philippine Independent Church) in the town of Majuyod when he was gunned down. An advisor for the Youth of IFI, Romano was also a volunteer for the human rights group Karapatan.

Three different individuals — a businessman, a political leader and an activist — all felled on the same day through the same means.

The Duterte administration has time and again said it is serious about investigating and prosecuting extrajudicial killings on its own, without the pesky prodding of international observers, such as the HRW, the United Nations and the European Union.

But what has become harrowingly undeniable is that the bloodbath, whether arising from police operations or from brazen assassinations by hired killers, continues unabated across the land.

Bulacan, in particular, has become the new epicenter of the killings. In a damning report, “‘They Just Kill’: Ongoing Extrajudicial Executions and Other Violations in the Philippines’ ‘War on Drugs,’” Amnesty International called Bulacan “the country’s bloodiest killing field.”

The Philippines’ deterioration into a country of Bloody Sundays and bloody killing fields has led the international community, spearheaded by Iceland, to put forward a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) calling for a “comprehensive” international report on human rights in the Philippines, and asking the Duterte administration to cooperate with UN investigators.

The recent vote on the resolution had 18 countries backing it, 14 countries opposing, including the Philippines and China, and 15 countries abstaining.

The UNHRC wants to study the drug war more closely, and how it has led to thousands of deaths of Filipino citizens in the last three years. An incensed Duterte administration counters that this would be a violation of the country’s sovereign rights, and that the program is sound anyway, completely aboveboard and doesn’t require independent review by anyone.

However, even the Supreme Court has strongly begged to disagree with the Duterte administration’s obstinate position. In its April 2018 directive requiring the solicitor general to yield police records relating to the drug deaths, the high court noted that the administration had cited “a total of 20,322 deaths from July 1, 2016, to Nov. 27, 2017, or an average of 39.46 deaths every day … This court wants to know why so many deaths happened as expressly reported under the section ‘Fighting Illegal Drugs’ of the Duterte administration’s 2017 year-end report.” Also, more ominously: “The government’s inclusion of these deaths among its other accomplishments may lead to the inference that these are state-sponsored killings.”

How different is that call for greater transparency and accountability from the UNHRC’s? Still, Malacañang’s response to the prospect of setting the record straight before the international community is the usual head-in-the-sand obstreperousness: “We cannot accept a politically partisan and one-sided resolution so detached from the truth on the ground,” huffed Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr.

Locsin should be told that on Monday, just a day after Bloody Sunday, Mario Agsab, a “lumad” councilor from Bukidnon, was killed while on his way home. Two days later, radio commentator Eduardo Dizon was shot several times by unidentified assailants in Kidapawan, making him the 13th journalist to be killed under the Duterte administration. According to the International Federation of Journalists, the Philippines has become one of Southeast Asia’s most dangerous places for journalists.

That is the truth on the ground — the blood of Filipinos being spilled by the day, even as the government remains seemingly dead set on looking away.