AFP, Janus-faced?

It’s a little-known fact, so the public may be surprised to know that every Aug. 11, the Armed Forces of the Philippines officially celebrates the passage of the International Humanitarian Law by having its soldiers renew their commitment to human rights and the rule of law at all times in the discharge of their duties. Or as Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin put it, “We should execute our duties and responsibilities to protect our citizens caught in the midst of armed conflicts in the country, and guarantee total respect for their human rights as prescribed by International Humanitarian Law.”

“Total respect for human rights.” One is hard-pressed to take the defense chief’s words seriously, however, when the Armed Forces’ recent history is flecked with well-documented cases of continuing abductions, harassment and torture of ordinary citizens it conveniently labels as “enemies of the state,” in operations that clearly contravene laws guaranteeing due process.

Two days before Aug. 11, in fact, the AFP was once again in hot water for the arrest of two University of the Philippines graduates—Gerald Salonga, 24, and Guiller Cadano, 22—in Carranglan town, Nueva Ecija, purportedly because they were communist rebels and found to be in possession of unlicensed firearms and “subversive materials.”

Salonga and Cadano are reportedly graduates of the UP Diliman Extension Program in Pampanga at Clark Freeport. Salonga has a degree in psychology and is a member of Anakbayan-Central Luzon; while Cadano, who has a business management degree, is the Kabataan party-list regional chair. Both are now detained at the headquarters of the Provincial Public Safety Company in Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija.

The thing is, they weren’t even the targets of the raid conducted by a team of policemen and soldiers on the home of a certain Ely Taray, whom the military says is a local communist leader with murder and frustrated murder charges on his head. The search and arrest warrants the law enforcement authorities carried covered only Taray; but Taray was nowhere to be found, and the arresting party said they instead found Salonga and Cadano in Taray’s residence, along with “9-mm pistols, two hand grenades and antigovernment papers,” this according to a report by the Army’s 7th Infantry Division based in Nueva Ecija. The two didn’t even qualify as suspected rebels; the military immediately pronounced them as “platoon guides of the New People’s Army.”

How did the AFP know that right off the bat, when the two were apparently not even within its sights when it drew up its operational plan? Chief Insp. Elizabeth Jasmin, spokesperson for the PNP Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, has admitted that there were no standing warrants of arrest against Salonga and Cadano. The human rights group Karapatan’s version of the story says the youth organizers “were watching a movie as part of their integration activities in the barangay when they were kidnapped by soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Battalion who arrived in two pickup vehicles…. The two were charged with illegal possession of firearms and explosives. The explosives charge was added in order to disqualify them from posting bail because it’s a nonbailable offense.”

The AFP calls this a legitimate arrest, not a kidnapping. Perhaps. But it hews uncomfortably close to other stories of the abduction of young activists, most notably that of Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño, who disappeared in Bulacan in 2006; and Jonas Burgos, who went missing after being kidnapped in Quezon City in 2007. In each of these cases, witnesses and corroborating evidence have implicated military personnel.

While it is a welcome development that retired Army general Jovito Palparan Jr. is finally on the dock after having gone on the lam to evade the charges against him relating to Cadapan and Empeño’s disappearance, his co-generals in the AFP belie their so-called adherence to the International Humanitarian Law with their forceful defense of Palparan (who has earned the tag of the “Butcher” for human rights violations he allegedly committed as a military commander) as merely “doing his job.” That is an admission, implicit but clear, that Palparan did resort to shortcuts to achieve his objectives. Soldiers, however, are not only sworn to fulfill their missions, but more importantly, to fulfill them in accordance with the law, the defense of which is their entire reason for being.

The AFP has a serious credibility problem when it mouths respect for human rights on one hand, and harasses and abducts citizens on the other.