The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) on Monday reminded the Department of Education (DepEd) of its duty to protect its employees by standing in defense of an arrested school principal in Northern Samar.
“We urged the DepEd to once and for all uphold the objectives of education and stand for what is right and just,” said ACT Secretary General Raymond Basilio. “Your own employees are now being victimized by the Duterte administrations’ senseless war, can you take it in your conscience to remain silent and be auxiliary to this injustice?” he added.
ACT also strongly condemned the “worsening attacks” on the education sector following the arrest of Nestor Balando Ada on Jan. 28 in his sleeping quarters at Rosario National High School in Rosario, Northern Samar.
A day before the Supreme Court oral arguments on the Anti-Terror Law (ATL), ACT decried also the the recent “illegal arrest” of its members. “The Duterte government’s insane and overreaching war against counter-insurgency and the Anti-Terror Law has dangerously emboldened the state forces to circumvent the rule of law and wantonly attack human rights for their end of silencing dissent,” said Basilio said.
ACT shared that Ada, 55, was reportedly arrested by a composite team of provincial police and intelligence units based on a search warrant for alleged possession of firearms and explosives and is currently detained in the PNP provincial headquarters.
Ada, also a pastor of New Life Born Again Church, had reported to his ACT colleagues of active police surveillance against him last year. He also noticed “several times of police mobile patrol on standby outside the school.”
Basilio noted that Ada is a known education and religious leader, a unionist and champion of teachers’ rights and welfare. “Everyone who knows him cannot but think that the charges against him are fabricated,” he said. “This is clearly meant to harass our members and send teachers the chilling message of what can happen to them if they dare fight for their rights. It is the state forces who are guilty of terrorism,” he added.
The arrest of Ada, Basilio said, adds to the "many compelling reasons" why ACT and the education sector is calling for the immediate junking of the ATLLaw, President Duterte’s Executive Order No. 70, as well as the dismantling of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict.
To date, Basilio said that ACT has eight leaders, members and ordinary teachers who have been slapped with trumped-up charges for their union work or simply airing out their criticisms against the government. He added that about 50 cases of harassment and threats - not to “mention the thousands of our members” who have been subjected to police profiling.
“This madness has to stop, our teachers who already bear the brunt of government’s neglect of education amid the pandemic do not deserve these tyrannical attacks,” Basilio said.
Basilio also alleged that the ATL’s adverse impact on the education sector is now on full display, with the government’s "rabid and indiscriminate red-tagging" of universities, educators and students, and with education workers now falling victim to the “sick modus operandi of using search warrant to plant evidence and make arrests.”