First they came for the 'left-leaning personalities'
Using a discredited 'drug war' tactic against leftists. What could go wrong?
Troubling news, as news often is now, from the Cordillera region, where regionals heads of government agencies have approved a proposal to apply Oplan Tokhang (knock and plead) to the counterinsurgency by, essentially, going to the homes of "left-leaning personalities" to persuade them to stop being leftists.
Tokhang refers to a government campaign to visit "drug personalities" to ask them to stop dealing or doing drugs, regardless of whether any drugs are actually being done or dealt.
READ: After leaving thousands dead, “Tokhang” to target Leftist personalities, media in the Cordillera (Northern Dispatch)
Because the government's "drug war" has seen deaths in the thousands — 6,011 acknowledged by the government and who supposedly died resisting arrest — Tokhang has also come to mean being killed for suspected drug links.
According to Resolution No. 4, s. 2021, police officers will use a similar strategy against leftists "in the government, media and other entities" to "dissuade them from further supporting, or being active members of the [Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army-National democratic Fronts], or any of its Front Organizations."
One problem there, aside from being leftist not actually being a crime, is the insistence that activist groups are "Front Organizations" for communist rebels.
The police, in the Cordillera region and elsewhere, have had no problems conflating activism with taking up arms against the government, and this resolution will no doubt make it even easier for them to do so.
RELATED: Dura 'Likes': PNP social media rules and what police actually post (Philstar.com)
As with the "drug war" — where, according to a Justice department review, law enforcers made no effort to even prove that people killed were actually resisting arrest — these operations might see more "left-leaning personalities", as police reports put it, "forcing" law enforcers to shoot them dead.
READ: DOJ dents drug war: PNP did not follow rules in nanlaban cases (Rappler)
Not that leftists have not been ending up dead recent years, often after being accused of being in league with the rebels.
"And from whose discretion will the definition of 'left-leaning' or 'leftists' be derived? Who are the people that will fall under their category or branding of 'left-leaning' or 'leftists'?" the Baguio Correspondents & Broadcasters Club asks in a statement opposing the proposal.
The ruling PDP-Laban party, the president's party, identifies as center-left, which would fall under "left-leaning", one supposes. The president has described himself as the "first president from the left", although he does not say it anymore despite being very much a personality otherwise.
Where would this put groups like Akbayan, which identifies as left but of a different sort, and in January said it "condemns the act of maliciously, sweepingly and without basis labelling, branding and accusing citizens and/or organizations as 'communists' to harass the public and muzzle the voice of dissent and freedom of expression"?
Would activists and journalists need to take online tests like Political Compass to prove that they're really "not that left"?
The AlterMidya network, which was labeled a propaganda arm of the CPP-NPA at a presentation during a Senate hearing, points out that the "resolution comes amid non-stop attacks against alternative media practitioners in the Cordillera."
"In fact, our colleagues in community news outfit Northern Dispatch are facing all forms of attacks and persecution: from red-tagging and filing of cyberlibel charges to attempted murder."
Also recently in the Cordillera, a “shoot-to-kill” order against an IP activist leader and the removal of a marker in Kalinga province commemorating heroes of the 1970s resistance against the Chico Dam.
Against this backdrop, AlterMidya warns that the Cordillera Tokhang against leftists will be "a test case that government officials will use for future plans of employing Tokhang tactics to stifle dissent in other parts of the country."
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From the site this week, a two-part feature on “quarantine violators” who were arrested in the nearly year-long quarantine against the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first looks at a pattern of the police arresting activists and protesters over violations that, in the end, are thrown out by the prosecutor. Their eventual release is hardly a consolation, especially since some were arrested over a law that, as it turns out, does not apply to them.
The second focuses on 21 residents of Sitio San Roque in Quezon City who were arrested in April 2020 for calling for food aid that was rumored to come and that came later that afternoon. They have yet to be arraigned and have worried for months about the prospect of going to jail for essentially being hungry and being noisy about it.