Inhuman treatment of detainees

The 260 or so detainees arrested in connection with the Zamboanga City standoff last year were brought late in December to a renovated jail at the Camp Bagong Diwa Complex in Taguig City for “high risk” detainees.

Euphemistically named Special Intensive Care Area-2 or Sica-2,  it is located perpendicularly right beside Sica-1 where we, about 200 political detainees, are with some 200 other “high risk” detainees.

The Sica-2 detainees have since been made to suffer more overly cruel and repressive conditions and treatment—even much more than the already quite restrictive conditions and treatment that we, Sica-1 detainees, have been going through.  At least, here at Sica-1, we are allowed about an hour or so daily (or for a couple of days per week) access to the rooftop for sunning and to a somewhat more spacious area for jogging and other exercises. And for most of the day we are able to mingle with others, at least with those in the same wing of each floor, as our cells are kept open for about 16 hours a day. But the Sica-2 cells are kept padlocked practically the whole day, and opened for only about an hour a day to allow the detainees to exercise along the corridor of their wing, though with some difficulty because the corridor then becomes very crowded. This also means that their food rations have to be given to them in scoops and shoved through the gaps between the iron bars.

And unlike here in Sica-1, where practically all Muslim detainees in both wings of their two floors are able to mingle with each other the whole day, and can pray together five times a day (including at dawn), at Sica-2 the detainees are allowed to pray together for only about an hour on Fridays.

To add more pain to injury, in the last week of January, jail authorities started putting up fixed iron-sheet jalousies over the iron bars of all corridors along the prison cells, thus even more gravely depriving the Sica-2 detainees of fresh air and sunlight, or whatever little they used to get of these. (Before the installation of the fixed iron-sheet jalousies, the detainees had to extend their arms and open palms through the iron bars, as if pleading for the rays of sunlight to reach them.)

Since the installation of the jalousies was completed in the first week of February, the Sica-2 detainees can no longer see anything outside their jail, and those outside can no longer see them. What remains of the very thin, hot, dry and rancid air inside their cells is now beginning to fry and suffocate them.

Now we’re getting information from jail authorities that Sica-1 will also be covered by fixed iron-sheet jalousies, including the windows of our cells and the front and rear ends of our corridors. If true, like the Sica-2 detainees, we will be fried and suffocated by what will remain of the very thin, hot, dry and rancid air in Sica-1,

especially this summer.

—ALAN JAZMINES,

NDF peace consultant

detained at the Sica-1,

Camp Bagong Diwa, Taguig City