1. When the civilian killed military automatically government will charge the suspect as terrorist. When military killed the innocent civilian justice denied?
A villager paddles his boat to fish in the marshlands of Datu Piang town in southern Philippines' Maguindanao province July 3, 2009. REUTERS/Erik de Castro
By Thin Lei Win
BANGKOK (AlertNet) – More than two years after members of government security forces and private armies helped a clan massacred nearly 60 people on Mindanao island, the Philippines has failed to disable abusive paramilitary forces, Human Rights Watch said in its annual report.
Paramilitaries, the police and the Filipino military have all committed human rights violations in the Philippines, the rights group said.
“(President) Aquino campaigned on promises to dismantle the “private armies” of politicians and wealthy landowners, which have long been responsible for serious abuses,” the report said of the Southeast Asian country’s president.
Yet paramilitary forces are still operating on the island. And in 2011 Aquino announced the deployment of additional paramilitary personnel to provide mining companies with security against insurgents, according to the report.
The rights group’s World Report 2012 also criticised the Aquino administration for making little progress in ending impunity for the police and the military, adding that insurgents – the communist New People’s Army and Islamist Moro groups – also commit abuses against civilians.
“Extrajudicial killings of leftist activists and petty criminals continue, with the government failing to acknowledge and address involvement by the security forces and local officials,” the group said.
HRW said it has documented at least seven extrajudicial killings and three enforced disappearances, for which there is strong evidence of military involvement, since Aquino took office in June 2010.
In one instance in July 2011, soldiers allegedly stripped naked, sexually assaulted, and set on fire a 39-year-old baker, Abdul-Khan Balinting Ajid, in Basilan, but no criminal charges have been filed, the group said.
The report – which assessed progress on human rights during 2011 in more than 90 countries worldwide – went to print before the “unprecedented development” of a Philippines court issuing an arrest warrant in December against a retired army general, HRW said.
The warrant for Jovito Palparan, the highest-ranking military officer to be charged for human rights abuses since former dictator Ferdinand Marcos was ousted in 1986, concerns the enforced disappearance of two student activists in 2006.
Currently in hiding, Palparan is implicated in the abduction, torture, and killing of dozens of leftist activists in the Philippines.
The country’s justice department has put up a 1-million-peso (US$23,000) bounty for his capture, “but Aquino should order the police and military to do more to arrest him,” HRW said in a statement.
(Editing by Rebekah Curtis and Maria Caspani)
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