Inquirer editorial on Special Rapporteur’s report on the Philippines

After its initial editorial on the Special Rapporteur’s report, the Inquirer has published another editorial on the government’s reaction - “Muchachos” (3 December 2007):

Apparently, Justice Secretary and resident Cabinet curmudgeon Raul Gonzalez is not the only one who thinks of Australian lawyer and New York law professor Philip Alston as a “mere muchacho,” a lowly errand boy of the United Nations. The chief of staff of the Armed Forces, Gen. Hermogenes Esperon, shares the same contempt for the UN special rapporteur.

After Alston submitted to the UN Human Rights Council his final report on “extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions” in the Philippines last week, Esperon belittled Alston’s mission, calling it “half-baked.”

“I wish Mr. Alston had better and more complete sources,” he said. “He was here for 10 days and suddenly he’s an expert in human rights in the Philippines, much more an expert in insurgency in the Philippines.”

Note the sly use of “suddenly,” as though the very idea behind the UN’s special missions—almost by definition short-term in nature and dependent on the quality of host-country sources—were somehow invalid. (If that were so, why didn’t Esperon object when the Philippine government invited the United Nations to send someone like Alston in the first place? And if that were so, why did Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita wax grateful “for the acknowledgment of the full cooperation we extended to the Special Rapporteur”? )

But we do agree with Esperon. We too wish Alston had “better and more complete sources.” But the AFP refused or failed to substantiate its more sensational allegations, including its “purge theory” as the explanation for the killing spree. As the UN Special Rapporteur pointed out, “they relentlessly pushed on me the theory that large numbers of leftist activists are turning up dead because they were victims of internal purges within the CPP and NPA. I repeatedly sought evidence from the Government to support this contention. But the evidence presented was strikingly unconvincing.” And then Alston proceeds to list four reasons why the AFP’s evidence failed to convince him.

Esperon took Alston to task for being biased against the military; he said the report “is blind on one side [as it] only sees the other side.”

But even on the matter of the many alleged victims of the communist New People’s Army, the government failed to substantiate its claims too. Alston again: “The Government provided a list of 1,335 individuals, two-thirds of them civilians, allegedly killed by the NPA. Despite numerous requests for any documentation substantiating any of these cases, virtually none was provided. While I have no reason to doubt that the list represents a good faith accounting, without further documentation it is impossible to confirm its reliability or to evaluate which killings violated the humanitarian law of armed conflict.”

That these and other paragraphs of the same tenor are integrated into the final report belie Esperon’s public relations spin that Alston did not consider the military’s side. Another paragraph castigates “the CPP/NPA/NDF’s system of ‘people’s courts’ [as] either deeply flawed or simply a sham”—and forcefully suggests that the “Failure to respect due process norms … may constitute a war crime for participating cadres.”

Contrary to what Esperon and other Arroyo administration officials may want the public to believe, the Alston report does not go easy on the communist insurgents. But after due deliberation, it assigns the burden of responsibility for the wave of killings where it finds it: “Two policy initiatives are of special importance to understanding why the killings continue. First, the military’s counterinsurgency strategy against the CPP/NPA/ NDF increasingly focuses on dismantling civil society organizations that are purported to be ‘CPP front groups’ … Second … the criminal justice system has failed to arrest, convict, and imprison those responsible for extrajudicial executions.”

These two policy initiatives are dealt with in detail, in the final report. Gonzalez, Esperon et al. will continue to spin its meaning; but a close and attentive reading will readily prove them wrong. In it we will find that lowly “muchachos” who do their work well will put “hacenderos” and their paid generals to shame.