Always “NPAs”

Less than three years ago, Grecil Buya, nine, was killed by the military in Compostela Valley province, in Mindanao. The military issued a statement admitting they killed her in a military operation but added that Grecil was a child warrior for the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. At the time that she was shot, the military said Grecil was holding and firing an M16 rifle with one hand while the other held a mirror. An investigation that followed belied the military claims.

Grecil was reportedly about to take a bath in the nearby river when the military opened fire at their house. She was instantly killed. It turned out, too, that she could not have carried an M16 rifle with just one hand, as the rifle was taller than her.

From 2001 to 2007, the CRC noted that children victims like Grecil have often been referred to as “collateral damages” in “legitimate military operations.” After Grecil, the military increasingly tried to “excuse” their violations of human rights and of children’s rights by branding their victims as “child warriors.”

In the process, the CRC lamented the multi-layered victimization of children who not only get their rights trampled upon but are also branded and treated like criminals. All the documented children victims of rights violations, including the supposed “child warriors,” were innocent civilians who only happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, the CRC pointed out.

Aside from Grecil, three teenage cousins plus two of their friends from Agusan del Sur suddenly became NPA warriors in a report by the Philippine Army. Actually child workers, these five youths were on their way to a rubber plantation when they heard bursts of gunfire. They took cover and came out only when the firing stopped. But they were apprehended by soldiers from the 29th IB who accused them of being members of NPA. The parents of these youths were not notified about their “arrest.” When word eventually got to their parents, three of the children were barred from seeing them.

Actually child workers, the military presented these children to the media as child combatants. (Photo courtesy of CRC)

Five days later, after the parents were made to sign documents allowing their children’s detention at the 29th IBPA headquarters until the provincial DSWD approved their “release,” the five detained youths were presented to the media in their region and in Manila as “arrested child soldiers of the NPA.” They were returned to their parents two weeks later, without charges nor further investigation, the CRC said.

False intelligence “reports” have led to massacres, indiscriminate strafing and various harassments that did not distinguish between adults and children. According to a CRC report, a family with two toddlers and a pregnant mother was massacred in 2003 because a resident who was named Roger had been mistaken for Roger Rosal, the spokesman of the NPA.

Last year, a Lumad family lost a father when armed men wearing military uniforms indiscriminately fired at their house. The victims were sleeping at the time. Two girls, one aged four and eight, were wounded. The family was accused of previously hosting some NPA members in their home.

In Negros Occidental, a family with four children was harassed in their own home last year because their house was “big” and could accommodate a meeting of NPAs. A youth wearing an orange shirt in Mindanao was arrested and tortured early this year, simply because his shirt matched the color supposedly worn by the person who had detonated a bomb earlier, the CRC said.

CRC also pointed to other abuses that have been happening as a result of the military holding camps in civilian communities. A 14-year-old girl was allegedly raped by a member of the Philippine Army’s 30th IB in Butuan City. This soldier reportedly threatened her life and that of her family.

Children were among those affected by the displacement in Surigao and Agusan last year as a result of military operations. (File photo)

Soldiers have also taken to courting local girls, even marrying local women, so they could extract information from them, CRC reported.

Stopping Attacks on Children

“Counter-insurgency operations provide the backdrop for and justification of every government’s attack on people’s human rights,” noted the CRC. Oplan Bantay Laya aims to decimate, if not wipe out, the revolutionary groups and secessionist groups in the country by 2010. The deadline has been extended for another three years by the Aquino government.

Far from successfully ending the insurgency, as Karapatan and CRC reported, OBL has only given rise to terror and impunity victimizing even the children and youth.

“A strategic or long-term policy and program to protect children and their rights is one that should address the root causes of internal conflict in the Philippines by addressing poverty, landlessness, scarce social services and inequality,” said Ma. Esmeralda Macaspac of the CRC. The group asks the government and the newly installed president to put a stop to the practice of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and other human rights violations victimizing children as well as adults. CRC also urges the government to rescind Oplan Bantay Laya, and to address the root causes of the insurgency by engaging in peace negotiations instead of its current militarist approach. (Bulatlat.com)

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