The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) on Friday urged members of the military to stop tagging journalists as communist rebel supporters.
This was after the pronouncement of Army 8th Infantry Division assistant commander Lt. Gen. Remy Tejeras stopping the branding of journalists as rebel sympathizers.
“While we appreciate Lt. Gen. Tejeras’ gesture and thank him for understanding the role of journalism, we also worry that the military will continue to target the journalists it has accused of being rebel propagandists for covert operations and build damaging dossiers on them that others with more nefarious intentions might use to justify their actions,” NUJP said in a statement.
“We therefore once again demand that the military as a whole end the practice of tagging media practitioners, whether openly or covertly, and targeting them for surveillance and other operations that can only endanger them as they practice their profession,” it added.
NUJP said the branding was not a new phenomenon, as its former chairperson Inday Espina-Verona was also once accused of “being in cahoots” with communist rebels, whom the army reportedly claimed were responsible for burning the teachers’ cottage of a tribal school in Agusan del Sur.
The media group also recalled how they, together with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, were previously tagged as “enemies of the state” by military intelligence.
“Some colleagues from Eastern Visayas have confirmed that they have been warned in the past against interviewing rebels and been placed under surveillance on suspicion of being rebel sympathizers,” NUJP said.
“These tactics and more do not have a place under the sun in our country that is supposedly the freest press in Asia,” it added.
NUJP said such red-tagging of journalists in the country put the profession at risk, along with the continuous killings of media practitioners.
The massacre, the continuing killings as well as these acts of open or covert targeting of media practitioners have since put journalists practicing their profession in the country at great risk.
It is no wonder that the Philippines has yet to shake off its tag as the world’s 4th dangerous country for journalists by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2015 Global Impunity Index, a shameful distinction for the only democracy in a list topped by Somalia, Syria, and Iraq and followed by Afghanistan, which are countries in states of war,” it said.
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