The Senate panels looking into the spate of killings on Negros Island in 2018 and 2019 asked officials of the police and military to conduct an internal probe to check possible abuses committed by their personnel in conducting the government’s anti-insurgency operations in the Negros provinces.
In its joint report released last week, the committees on public order and dangerous drugs and on justice and human rights also called on authorities to identify and charge members of anticommunist vigilante groups in the area.
The committee sought the deployment of more policemen and soldiers to secure the provinces of Negros Oriental and Negros Occidental. They also asked the Philippine National Police and Armed Forces of the Philippines to review, evaluate and submit to President Duterte the effectiveness of the anti-insurgency plan, “Oplan Sauron,” in suppressing and ending lawless violence on Negros Island.
AtrocitiesThey urged the Commission on Human Rights to send more investigators to Negros Island.The recommendations were in connection with the Senate hearings on the killings of farmers, activists, a human rights lawyer, police personnel, local officials, and several others between October 2018 and July 2019.
Among those slain were farmers in Sagay City in Negros Occidental who were shot while resting in a makeshift tent.
The committees’ report, signed by 11 senators, did not identify a group behind the killings, which it said were “continuing.”
“Amid the string of atrocities [on Negros Island], it must be noted that the military and the police, on one end, and the members of the communist group, on the other end, accuse each other of violating … human rights,” it said.
It wondered if these had been carried out by private armies or local communities against members of the New People’s Army (NPA) and its sympathizers, or by NPA rebels waging war against their own comrades.
“These questions, albeit polarizing, must be asked. Their answers must be pursued. Despite the fact that asking them evokes discomfort, it is necessary to raise them—the goal, after all, is the truth, and not simply convenient assumptions,” it added.
It also did not discount the possibility that government forces could be behind the bloodbath.
“One important angle that must not be ignored, but should likewise be pursued in the ongoing investigations, is the possible abuses that might have been committed by the members of the military and the police in implementing ‘all necessary measures to suppress any and all forms of lawless violence’ in the affected provinces,” it said. INQ