Karapatan-CV raps military of cover-up

CEBU - Karapatan-Central Visayas and the Central Command of the Armed Forces of the Philippines have continued to trade accusations.

Yesterday, the militant group, after being branded by CentCom commander Lt. Gen. Pedro Inserto as a terrorist group that has been “lawyering for the New People’s Army”, countered by accusing the military of covering up its own sins.

Vimarie Arcilla, spokesperson of Karapatan-CV, issued a press release alleging that the AFP has been “desperately trying to escape responsibility” for its widespread extrajudicial killings and human rights violations.

Last Friday Inserto described Karapatan as a terrorist group that also defends the actions of the communist rebels. He defended the group’s accusations against the military as the ones responsible for the massacre of the Anugot family and their relatives in the 1980s.

The remains of the victims, which were found in a mountain barangay in Balamban town, have been exhumed and given a decent burial only recently, but it started the trading of accusations between the military and the militant group.

The military official has cited a town mayor’s statement that the gruesome killings were done by NPA rebels, but Karapatan-CV immediately countered that the military did it and not the insurgents.

This prompted Inserto to say: “Ano ba itong Karapatan? How come they are lawyering for the CPP/NPA? Better that they lawyering for the relatives of the victims.”

Arcilla countered that the military’s declaration of Karapatan as a terrorist group “is only a futile attempt on demonizing the organization and thus just a testimony of one of the pre-requisites leading to extrajudicial killings and human rights violation.”

He even claimed that Karapatan is now alarmed after some of its staff allegedly received text threats, which they reportedly traced to be from military agents.

The Oplan Bantay Laya, a counter-insurgency campaign of the AFP, is an “operational plan declaring that unarmed progressive militant organizations including Karapatan as considerably enemies of the state,” Arcilla alleged.

Arcilla also said in his press release that even Prof. Philip Alston, the special rapporteur of United Nations Human Rights Council, believes that the AFP was behind the killings.

Arcilla quoted Alston’s as saying that the “AFP remains in a state of almost total denial of its need to respond effectively and authentically to the significant number of killings which have been convincingly attributed to them.”

The Anugot case, or the Balamban massacre, is a deliberate example of the AFP’s lousy cover-up, Arcilla said. —Cressida Paula G. Delmo/RAE (THE FREEMAN)