MANILA, Philippines -- Several days after making himself scarce following the issuance of a warrant of arrest against him, Bayan Muna (People First) Representative Satur Ocampo emerged to rail against extrajudicial killings and the persecution of dissenters -- on a video posted on YouTube.

The video of Ocampo was posted on the newly created Bayan Muna YouTube channel, http://youtube.com/bayanmunadotnet, at around 2:30 a.m. Thursday, roughly the same time a subcommittee of the US Senate foreign relations committee began hearings in Washington DC on the killings that human rights groups say have claimed more than 830 lives since 2001, when President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo came to power.

However, only the second part of the video has been posted. Bayan Muna spokesman Tonyo Cruz said the first part of the video was apparently "rejected" by YouTube because it was "too big a file. We will try to shrink the file and upload it again."

He said the videos were taken around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday in an undisclosed place "using an N80 mobile phone lent to Bayan Muna by an administration ally."

Bayan Muna said Ocampo, who disappeared soon after the warrant was issued against him, would participate in the US congressional inquiry into the killings. Aside from the US Senate, the US House foreign relations committee was also scheduled to hold its own hearing into the bloodshed.

A Bayan Muna statement announcing the video's posting said this was to fulfill Ocampo's promise to participate in the US congressional inquiry. However, Cruz acknowledged that they were uncertain whether the video was played during the US Senate hearing.

Ocampo, a former spokesman of the rebel National Democratic Front, has been charged with multiple murder, along with Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Ma. Sison and some 50 others for allegedly participating in the execution of at least 15 suspected government spies during a supposed rebel purge in the mid-1980s.

Cruz said that a delegation of Filipino human rights activists that included Marie Hilao-Enriquez of the human rights group Karapatan and Bishop Eliezer Pascua, general secretary of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, "submitted their depositions" to the US Senate subcommittee.

"We are still waiting for their report on what transpired at the hearing," he said.

The government, which is under increasing pressure both here and abroad for the killings but has denied responsibility, also sent a delegation of military and police officers who will attempt to present its side at the hearings.

However, it is uncertain whether the government delegation had succeeded in participating in the hearings since Malacañang had acknowledged that it was not invited.

In the posted video, Ocampo was wearing a white Barong Tagalog in front of a blank wall except for a Bayan Muna sticker on one side.

In the video, Ocampo appeals to "friends in different countries who have expressed their alarm over the extrajudicial killings to exert your pressure, if possibly to send more fact-finding missions since the killings are continuing, and to put pressure through their governments on the Philippine government to make the final decisive action" to end the killings.

Ocampo says that "the current efforts of the Macapagal-Arroyo government to pin me down and throw me in prison on the charge of murder and the attempt to disqualify our party Bayan Muna and two other progressive parties, Anakpawis party and Gabriela Women's party, cannot be treated in isolation or [are they] different from the general trend of political repression and the spate of extrajudicial killings."

He also says "it is very disconcerting" that after the initial findings of Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, that most of the killings could be traced to the military and "after news that the United States Senate and the House of Representatives committees would be conducting an investigation of the extrajudicial killings, the killings have continued."

Ocampo cited the successive murders during the weekend of two Bayan Muna members in Mindanao, including Siche Ballesteros-Gandinao of Misamis Oriental province, who testified before Alston on the February murder of her father-in-law, provincial Bayan Muna chairman Dalmacio Gandinao.

"It looks like Macapagal-Arroyo says something, that she has always condemned and wants to stop the killings, but has never taken a decisive action to order her security forces to stop the killings," Ocampo said.

He also said that the Supreme Court's creation of 99 special courts to handle extrajudicial killings might be in vain because "there were no cases available" to try due to the inaction by the justice department and law enforcement agencies.

Claiming that the government's counterinsurgency strategy has given the signal to state security forces to target "both the armed revolutionary forces and the unarmed activists of progressive political parties and people's organizations which it maliciously charge[s] to be front organizations of the Communist Party of the Philippines and therefore witting collaborators of the New People's Army," Ocampo worried that the enactment of the anti-terrorism law would intensify the attacks on activists.