By DOMINIC GUTOMAN
Bulatlat.com
MANILA — During the administration of Rodrigo Duterte, the extrajudicial killings were not just confined to the drug war. They also extended to the government’s counterinsurgency program, according to a human rights group.
“They must follow the murderous trail they have already uncovered and seriously look into the gaping reality that they have so far not acknowledged — an equally dirty war waged by Duterte that saw the extrajudicial killings of hundreds of activists and hors de combat,” Karapatan said in a statement.
In their term-ender report, Karapatan said that there were 422 victims of extrajudicial killings and 574 frustrated extrajudicial killings in the name of counterinsurgency during the Duterte administration. A large number of the victims came from the peasant sector (336), followed by indigenous peoples (75) and Moro (47). These are separate numbers from the more than 30,000 drug-related extrajudicial killings.
Karapatan said that the quadcomm hearings revealed the involvement of Duterte’s people in perpetrating human rights violations against activists and human rights defenders.
“The link is far from tenuous. For instance, Oplan Sauron, a bloody counter-insurgency operation jointly conducted by the military and police that was centered on Negros island was actually framed as an operational plan not just against rebel groups but criminals and individuals involved in the illegal drug trade,” Karapatan said.
Oplan Sauron stemmed from Memorandum Order No. 32, enforced on November 2018, to suppress “lawless violence in the provinces of Samar, Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, and the Bicol Region.
Section 2 of the memorandum stated that “The AFP, PNP and the Department of Justice, in close coordination with each other and other law-enforcement agencies and with the assistance of the intelligence community, shall intensify their local and transnational intelligence operations against individuals or groups suspected of, or responsible for, committing or conspiring to commit acts of lawless violence in the Philippines, as well as the prompt investigation and prosecution of all individuals or groups apprehended for committing, or conspiring to commit, acts of lawless violence.”
Debold Sinas, who was then the Central Visayas police chief Brigadier General at the height of the civilian killings under Oplan Sauron, was appointed as the National Capital Region police chief and later promoted to PNP Chief during the Duterte administration. Meanwhile, Lieutenant General Noel Clement, who was the military commander in Central Visayas, was appointed as the AFP Chief of Staff.
Read: Rights group slams appointment of ‘butchers, rights violators’
“Oplan Sauron, however, did not target criminality and illegal drugs. It was a tightly coordinated military and police operation that brutalized unarmed civilians belonging to legitimate peasant groups. To justify the atrocities, the victims were falsely tagged by the military as members of the NPA,” Karapatan said.
Former Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares who represented the families of drug war victims and is a counsel of complainants before the International Criminal Court (ICC) said that the human rights defenders and opposition are among the other faces of drug war casualties.
“The second set of victims are opposition leaders and human rights defenders who have no knowledge about the drug war trade. They were killed for criticizing the human rights violations of the government,” Colmenare said. He also mentioned the victims of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Southern Tagalog and Oplan Sauron in the Negros region.
“It is high time that the quadcomm takes a serious look at Duterte’s accountability for other state-sponsored killings that were very likely perpetrated by the same death squads funded by government monies,” Karapatan said.
Duterte did not attend the 10th hearing of quadcomm and asked the investigating committee to refer to the transcript of the Senate hearing. His testimony was filled with confessions on how he instructed police officers to manufacture the narrative of “nanlaban.”
“What I said was this, let’s be straightforward: encourage the criminals to fight, encourage them to draw their guns. That’s my instruction—encourage them to resist; if they resist, kill them to put an end to the problems in my city,” Duterte said in Filipino. (RTS, DAA)
