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Philippine military accused of `dirty war' against leftists

The Philippine military is waging a "dirty war" against left-wing activists, including extrajudicial killings and disappearances, and not a single soldier has been prosecuted, Human Rights Watch said yesterday.

A Philippine military spokesman dismissed the group's report as one-sided and said the number of alleged victims was exaggerated.

In its new report highlighting years of abuse in the Philippines, the US-based watchdog said it conducted more than 50 interviews with witnesses and relatives of victims of political killings, who pointed their fingers at security forces.

Two preliminary reports from a government commission that investigated the killings last year and a UN human rights expert in January also implicated soldiers.

"There is strong evidence of a `dirty war' by the armed forces against left-leaning activists and journalists," said Sophie Richardson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

She said the failure to prosecute soldiers or police suspected in these killings "shifts the spotlight of responsibility to the highest levels of the government."

The local human rights group Karapatan has reported more than 800 people killed and another 200 abducted since Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo came to power in 2001.

Most of the victims belonged to leftist groups linked by the military to a low-level, rural communist insurgency that has dragged on for 39 years.

Military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Bartolome Bacarro dismissed the report as one-sided, saying: "There is a possibility that some individuals belonging to the Armed Forces of the Philippines could be involved, but it is not [our] policy to commit extrajudicial activities."

He said the number of victims was exaggerated, quoting a police figure of 112 people killed in politically motivated attacks, "and out of these, only a very, very small percentage is attributed" to soldiers.

Arroyo and the military have repeatedly denied the killings are part of a state policy to defeat insurgents and have blamed them on an internal purge within the underground communist movement.

In one attack last year, police said masked gunmen dragged a Methodist pastor, Isaias Santa Rosa, a member of the left-wing National Peasant Movement, from his home in central Albay Province and fatally shot him.

The body of a soldier with military IDs was found near the pastor, apparently accidentally shot by other gunmen. Last month, police filed a murder complaint naming two army majors and 10 other men, but the case has not moved forward.

Human Rights Watch said it was "unable to uncover a single case of apparent extrajudicial killing in recent years for which a member of the armed forces was successfully prosecuted."

The killings "appeared to shift into a higher gear" after Arroyo accused left-wing political parties of plotting her ouster last year. Months later, Arroyo declared an all-out war against the rebel New People's Army (NPA).

"None of the incidents investigated by Human Rights Watch involved anyone who was participating in an armed encounter with the military or was otherwise involved in NPA military operations. Each victim appears to have been individually targeted for killing," it said.
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