De Venecia: Give Melo Commission a chance to prove its worth

DAGUPAN CITY — Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr. called on the people yesterday to give the fact-finding body created by President Arroyo to look into the spate of extrajudicial killings a chance to prove its worth.

Speaking over Aksyon Radyo Pangasinan yesterday, De Venecia said those who claim that the Melo Commission has become a "whitewashing forum" should be fair with their statements.

"The commission has just started...," he said. "And it takes months and years to complete a report."

De Venecia said the Commission has been talking with the Armed Forces, the police, Human Rights Commission, National Democratic Front, New People’s Army, rightist organizations and the extreme left to get information on who are the masterminds and the perpetrators of the killings.

"These are very complex situations and it takes months, years to complete a report but you know we have to start somewhere and so President Gloria Arroyo did correctly by creating the Melo Commission," he said.

De Venecia said Mrs. Arroyo has invited representatives from Spain and Finland to come here to help get to the bottom of the killings following reports that some of the killers are policemen and soldiers.

He has contributed P2 million reward money for the arrest of those behind the killings of media personalities, to help children of slain journalists and to pay up for lawyers who will prosecute the killers, he added.

The latest victim, 69-year-old Bishop Alberto Ramento, Iglesia Filipina Independiente supreme council chairman, was killed last Tuesday in Tarlac.

Children as NPA fighters

Meanwhile, citing a study by the US Labor Department, lawyer Jose Malvar Villegas Jr. challenged human rights groups yesterday to condemn the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) for recruiting children into their ranks.

Villegas, founding chairman of the Citizen’s Crime Watch, said that if foreign institutions like Amnesty International (AI) and their local allied groups are genuinely concerned over the human rights condition in the Philippines, they should be alarmed over confirmed reports that over 10 percent of armed NPA fighters are children aged 18 and below.

"Groups like AI should rebuke the NPA for these shameful acts, which grossly violate local and international laws against child labor and child abuse," he said. 

"These groups should be appalled by reports that minors are being used by the NPA as armed fighters, and sometimes even as assassins."

Villegas said these groups have allowed themselves to be used, unwittingly or otherwise, by communist front organizations by coming out with so-called human rights reports unfairly prejudging the government for the rash of killings of leftist militants.

The NPA violated not only the law on the Special Protection of Children against Abuse, Exploitation and Discrimination, but international statutes as well against child labor and violence against non-combatants in war, he added.

Testifying before the Melo Commission, Armed Forces chief Gen. Hermogenes Esperon Jr. said the NPA has killed 843 civilians and 384 soldiers or police officers in 1,130 attacks between January 2000 and May 2006.

Among the victims are Sotero Llamas, former CPP central committee member and secretary of the Bicol regional party committee of the NPA, he added.

Villegas said the military has reported from Puerto Princesa City that the NPA has sent children on a test mission to kill a former rebel and his family.

Seized from the three children, aged 14-16 years old, were an M-16 rifle, a caliber .38 revolver, five long and eight short magazines and 306 rounds of ammunition for the rifle and 11 rounds of ammunition for the revolver, he added.

Villegas said the children told police that they were ordered to kill Rodrigo Crispin and his family on suspicion that he was a military informer.

The NPA’s use of children as combatants, in blatant disregard of local laws and international statutes, was nothing new as military records show that 169 NPA child fighters have surrendered to law enforcers since 1999, he added.

Human rights groups have been making sweeping accusations linking the government to the killings, while remaining silent on the murders committed by the CPP-NPA on innocent civilians and their erstwhile comrade, Villegas said.

In recent weeks, various mass graves have been dug up in Southern Leyte, Cebu, Davao and Bukidnon, where the CPP-NPA had buried hundreds, if not thousands, of their comrades who were brutally tortured and executed on suspicion of being deep penetration agents (DPAs) or infiltrators during a wave of purges within the communist rebel movement in the early 1980s. — Eva Visperas