CHR to probe mass grave of suspected communist purge victims

CHR Chairperson Loretta Ann Rosales INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) said Monday it would investigate a report by the military that it had exhumed a mass grave containing some 40 suspected victims of a communist rebel purge in the 1980s.

CHR Chairperson Loretta Ann Rosales said her office would look into the mass grave, but it was too early to tell if the remains found in Quezon province were victims of a rebel purge.

Soldiers and policemen on Sunday unearthed the skeletal remains of people believed slain by the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), as suspected military spies in the 1980s, Army spokesperson Major Harold Cabunoc said.

Colonel Generoso Bolina, spokesperson of the Southern Luzon Command, said farmers found the grave while plowing a cornfield on a hilly portion of Sitio (sub-village) Irrigation, Barangay (village) Pagsangahan, in San Francisco town on Saturday.

Policemen, soldiers and villagers have dug up 40 skulls, Bolina said.

Police investigator Joel Razo Sanao said Rommel Malinao and another farmer gave the information to the barangay captain who relayed it to the police and soldiers in the area, Sanao said.

Samples of the skeletal remains were collected for physical examination at the Quezon police provincial crime laboratory at Camp Nakar in Lucena City, said Bolina.

Colonel Eduardo Año, commander of the Army’s 201st Infantry Brigade operating in Quezon, said information gathered from a former rebel revealed that the NPA then operating in San Francisco had killed about 50 communist guerillas and civilians during “Operation Missing Link,” which the CPP initiated in Southern Tagalog.

Quoting the rebel returnee, Año said the victims included seven NPA rebels—one pregnant, three teenagers and three regular guerrillas. The rest were civilians.

Año called on residents of San Francisco and neighboring towns with missing relatives to coordinate with local police to identify the skeletal remains.

Rosales urged caution before drawing any conclusions. “We will investigate, but let’s not make any conclusions yet on who did it,” she said in a telephone interview.

CPP and NPA leaders have acknowledged that some rebel commanders killed 600 to 900 suspected spies and government informers in Mindanao more than two decades ago.

More than 60 other suspected spies were killed in Quezon and outlying areas southeast of Manila, according to people who survived the purge.

The guerrillas later acknowledged the killings as among the most horrible blunders of the insurgency, which has raged on for 43 years.

Cristina Palabay, spokesperson for the human rights group Karapatan, challenged the military to prove its allegation that the mass grave held victims of the NPA.

She said similar discoveries in the past had been used by the military as reasons to arrest activists allegedly linked to the mass killings. AP and Delfin T. Mallari Jr., Inquirer Southern Luzon