Tuesday, February 27, 2007 Maxey: An omnipotent 10-day wonder By Ram Maxey Bar None
UNITED Nations special envoy Philip Alston was in the country recently on a mission: To investigate allegations of extra-judicial killings of militants and journalists that had human rights advocates here and across the seas apparently in a state of shock.
Alston met with government officials, members of the military and the police, militants, relatives of victims, etc. He asked them questions and listened to their answers.
After what must have been a hectic 10 days of snooping and sniffing around for clues that would presumably help him arrive at a conclusion that would serve as the basis of his report to the UN, Mr. Alston left the country, but not without a parting observation.
He said that the military's explanation for the killings was "unconvincing" bordering on "almost total denial." He likewise noted that the Melo Commission formed by President Arroyo to look into the allegations had put the blame on a small group within the military, but falling short of saying Malacañang had a hand in them.
I suspect that if the Melo Commission report had laid the blame for the killings squarely on the government, it would have made Mr. Alston's day.
It may be pertinent to ask if 10 days were enough for Mr. Alston to come up with a credible conclusion to his investigation into unsolved killings, which date as far back as when President Arroyo assumed the presidency? And even before that.
Local rights groups claim that there were 830 political killings since Arroyo assumed the presidency. Investigating ONE killing alone can take more than ten days to solve, if at all -- and they talk of 830 killings?
Has Mr. Alston heard of The Garden? It is a lonely place in the Sapang Dako mountain range in the remote fastnesses of Baybay town, Leyte, some 200 kilometers from the capital, Tacloban City. It is a garden neither planted to vegetables nor flowers. What were "planted" there in the years 1985 to 1987 were people who had run afoul of the communist insurgency.
At last count, 67 sets of skeletons of the victims of revolutionary justice (the Reds had alleged they were government spies) were dug up by the military last year while an estimated 300 more bodies, as per accounts of the victims' relatives, remain in shallow graves overgrown with weeds in The Garden.
And how about the many other killing fields elsewhere in the country, including Davao City, from which had been exhumed more bodies of victims of communist fury? Has Mr. Alston ever heard of them? Extrajudicial killings in this country may correctly be laid at the doorsteps of rightists, leftists, guns for hire of politicians, etc. The military and police establishments are not populated by saints, but neither are such armed groups as the CPP-NDF-NPA, MNLF, MILF, Abu Sayyaf, and the countless private armies, which are capable of extra-judicial killings.
Either Mr. Philip Alston is an omnipotent 10-day wonder, or he is something else.
