Critics on Wednesday roundly denounced President Rodrigo Duterte’s announcement that he would form a “death squad” to hunt down communist rebels and their sympathizers as alarm, skepticism and legal questions met his plan.
Speaking at the groundbreaking of the Panguil Bay Bridge in Tubod town, Lanao del Norte, on Wednesday, the President for the second time said he would deploy “assassination teams to kill” alleged hit men of the communist New People’s Army (NPA).
His critics said the plan could trigger a killing spree similar to his bloody war on drugs and worsen an existing climate of fear and impunity.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson, however, doubted the President was serious because, as a lawyer, he knew it would be “illegal and criminal” to organize any group of assassins.
Among the senators who reacted to the plan, only Sen. Gregorio Honasan II, the incoming information and communications technology secretary, seemed to indicate support for Mr. Duterte’s plan.
“Extreme measures [were needed for] extreme situations,” Honasan said, but pointed out that such measures must be done according to law.
On Tuesday, Mr. Duterte announced that he would create his own “sparrow” group, the popular name for the NPA special partisan unit that was responsible for assassinating local officials, police and soldiers in the 1970s and 1980s.
“They will do nothing but look for idlers who are prospective New People’s Army members and take them out,” he said hours after declaring a “full-scale war” on communist rebels.
Commission on Human Rights Chair Chito Gascon reminded the President that international humanitarian law required states to use only regular armed forces under strict military discipline to carry out security operations.
Extrajudicial killings
“Thus, this strictly prohibits death squads under all circumstances,” Gascon said.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Mr. Duterte’s pronouncement affirmed the existence of the state policy of extrajudicial killings against both suspected drug offenders and government critics.
“This new policy will only worsen the ongoing drug war-fueled human rights calamity in the Philippines,” said Carlos Conde, HRW Philippines researcher.
According to the militant indigenous group Pasaka, the President’s plan was an admission that his administration was involved in state-sponsored killings that targeted activists and critics.
Kerlan Fanagel, chair of Pasaka-Southern Mindanao, said Mr. Duterte’s statements would “encourage government forces to kill political enemies” but the move could also be seen as “a sign of desperation” of the administration.
The left-wing Bagong Alyansang Makabayan said in a statement that Duterte was “inciting a killing spree against government critics, human rights defenders and just about everyone else tagged by the government as ‘Red.’”
Striking fear
Opposition Sen. Antonio Trillanes said Mr. Duterte wanted “to strike fear again into the hearts and minds of the Filipinos by forewarning that there would be another round of killings.”
“Fear is his only way to keep people in check,” he said.
The Liberal Party president, Sen. Francis Pangilinan, said creating death squads and daily killings were not the solution to the nation’s ills—unemployment, high prices and low wages.
“It will only turn our country into a howling, lawless wilderness,” Pangilinan said.
Due process
“The President says things like that at times, but we all know that we have rule of law to follow, so that is what should prevail because we know there is due process in any situation,” Sen. Grace Poe told reporters.
Mr. Duterte has been dogged by accusations that he ran a death squad when he was mayor of Davao City and oversaw a fierce crackdown on crime.
He has denied the allegations but with his own statement, the creation and “continuing existence of the ‘Duterte death squad’ is no longer a mystery,” according to Anakpawis Rep. Ariel Casilao.
This group of assassins operates “within and outside the formal organization of state security forces,” Casilao added.
State policy
Gabriela Rep. Emmi de Jesus said the President’s order would only promote “state gangsterism and vigilantism” that would add more ordinary people loosely tagged as rebels to the list of victims of extrajudicial killings
“If anything, this affirms the horrible fact that mass murder is the official state policy of the Duterte regime,” she said.
Mr. Duterte only cited the “sparrows” to justify actions by his own death squad for the “mass murder of mere suspects who are not even the target of any court warrant of arrest,” said exiled Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria Sison.
Sison denied there were still sparrow units in the country’s urban centers.
The Visayas and Negros human rights group Katungod-Sinirangan Bisayas said death squad killings could result in “mountain-like pile of bodies.”
“This program is yet another scheme to suppress the people and maintain his political control despite the people’s obvious rejection of his leadership,” the group said.
Massacre
By doing what it plans to do, the Duterte administration will not be different from the rebels, said San Carlos Bishop Gerardo Alminasa in Negros Occidental.
“Eliminating one’s perceived enemies by killing them will not necessarily solve our problem and secure the peace we long for as long as social inequality exists among us,” he added.
Rights advocates seeking justice for eight T’boli-Manobo tribe members who were massacred last year warned that the military’s expanding role in government was getting a boost from Mr. Duterte’s open support for violence through death squads.
Task Force Tamasco, a coalition of human rights groups, blamed the massacre on the unresolved dispute between the ancestral domain claims of the T’boli-Manubo Sdaf Claimants Organization (Tamasco) and an allegedly irregular grant of an integrated forest management agreement in favor of a coffee plantation.
Instead of dealing with the problems of the T’boli-Manobo tribe, the government deployed soldiers and paramilitary groups and tagged the tribe members as communist rebels, the group said.
“We may have a President who is a civilian, but he has the mind of a war freak,” said Judy Pasimio of the human rights group Lilak (of the Purple Action for Indigenous Women’s Rights). —WITH REPORTS FROM DJ YAP, CHRISTINE O. AVENDANO, MELVIN GASCON, MARLON RAMOS, MART SAMBALUD, DELFIN T. MALLARI JR., CARLA P. GOMEZ, AND JOEY A. GABIETA