By planting their photos and names at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani grounds, families of the victims of extrajudicial killings (EJKs) on Tuesday, Dec. 1, appealed for justice for their slain kin.
Members of Hustisya and Rise Up for Life and for Rights offered flowers to their loved ones as they symbolically protested against political and drug-related killings under the Duterte administration. Joining them was human rights group Karapatan.
They also called on the government to end the drug war and the counterinsurgency operations of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ECLAC).
“The families with us here today have lost children, husbands, wives, mothers, and fathers simply for being poor, or simply because they were resolute in their defense of people’s rights,” Karapatan deputy secretary general Jigs Clamor said.
“How many dead bodies does the government want before it says ‘enough?’” he asked.
As of November this year, Karapatan said it has so far documented 353 cases of EJKs, the latest of which involved the death of couple Agaton Topacio and Eugenia Magpantay.
The couple was killed in an alleged gun battle with elements of the Philippine National Police-Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (PNP-CIDG) last week. Both of them were National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) peace consultants.
In a statement, the families denounced the claim of the police that the “elderly and sickly” couple resisted arrest.
“There is simple no way that the elderly couple was even able to put up a resistance, let alone an armed one, against dozens of policemen armed with high-power guns and artillery,” said lawyer VJ Topacio, the couple’s son.
In March, NDFP peace consultant Julius Giron was also gunned down. He was 70, and was undergoing medical treatment at the time.
Clamor said the peace consultants should not have been targets of killings because their rights should have been protected under the Comprehensive Agreement Joint on the Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law and Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees.
The JASIG even prohibits the filing of criminal charges against these peace consultants.
Clamor said that this is not the way to address the grievances of their militant groups.
“The root causes of the armed conflict—poverty, landlessness, joblessness, issues on national sovereignty, among others—will never be solved and thoroughly addressed by these increasing violations,” he said.