Military documents, validated by the experience of human rights activists since the Marcos dictatorship, will reveal that enforced disappearances are part of the state’s counterinsurgency plan, and appears to be an undeclared policy against its critics.

Military documents, validated by the experience of human rights activists since the Marcos dictatorship, will reveal that enforced disappearances are part of the state’s counterinsurgency plan, and appears to be an undeclared policy against its critics.

Adding to the disquieting phenomenon of extrajudicial killings is the rising occurrence of abductions and enforced disappearances of political activists in the Philippines.

Every year since 2001, the number of enforced or involuntary disappearances is growing, and has in fact more than doubled in the last six years of the Arroyo administration. Human rights group Karapatan as of July 2007 has recorded 183 cases of missing persons, all of these pointing to state forces as the perpetrators.

The increasing pattern of enforced disappearances surged after 2001, when the Arroyo administration implemented its counterinsurgency program, Oplan Bantay Laya or OBL (Operation Freedom Watch). From 7 victims in 2001, the number of missing persons increased from 27 in 2004 to 76 in 2006. Today cases of involuntary disappearances have increased more than a hundredfold, and there seems to be no sign of respite from its systematic occurrence.

Military documents reveal that enforced disappearances, together with political killings and other forms of attacks against political activists, are part of the Oplan Bantay Laya. Like the counterinsurgency programs of past administrations, Arroyo’s OBL aims to defeat the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and other revolutionary movements in the Philippines, and targets not only armed rebel groups but also members of legitimate people’s organizations.

Oplan Bantay Laya

Previous counterinsurgency programs in the Philippines were all funded and directed by the US and have been based on US military strategies to quell resistance movements. The OBL is no exception.

The OBL, designed after the US’s global war on terror and patterned after counterinsurgency tactics that the US used in Vietnam in the 1960s and in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s, combines intensive military operations with intelligence and civic work in a winning-hearts-and minds-approach. Similar to US strategy on the war on terror, the OBL also demonizes political groups and identifies them as terrorists, while holding preemptive strikes and rendition of abduction, torture, and killings.

An essential part of the OBL is the use of terror and death squads. These are revealed in US military manuals and employed in US-directed counterinsurgency programs in Vietnam, El Salvador and the rest of Latin America, and currently in Afghanistan and Iraq.

OBL directs military units to conduct target research on so-called sectoral and front organizations of the Communist Party of the Philippines. From this research, they will draft an Order of Battle and define specific targets for “neutralization” every three months.

These sectoral and front organizations were identified by the military in Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) documents. Political killings and abductions are a crucial part of the OBL, targeting activists, militant laborers and peasants, lawyers, students, and members and supporters of these “front” organizations. By going after these groups, the military hopes that the so-called political infrastructure of the armed revolutionary movement will be wiped out in three years.

The OBL gives emphasis to advancing the military’s capacity for surveillance and intelligence operations. In fact, Malacañang has earmarked P1.2B for intelligence funds in the 2008 proposed budget — one of the biggest allocation items. Under the OBL and with the supervision of the Cabinet Oversight Committee on Internal Security (COCIS), intelligence and surveillance units are strengthened and provided with funds and modern equipment for electronic communication and surveillance.

The objective of surveillance is not just to cripple the leadership of guerrilla units but also to spy on perceived enemies of the state. Following the hunter-killer strategy used in the Vietnam War and by the Bush administration, military intelligence units are tasked to engage in a surveillance of their subject, establish their profile and fixed points before executing their mission, either to abduct or to assassinate their target.

True enough, majority of the victims of enforced disappearances and killings have come from groups identified in the military documents as front or sectoral organizations, such as party list Bayan Muna, peasant group Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas, broad alliance Bayan, and others.

Moreover, most of the cases of enforced disappearances, as reported by Karapatan, were recorded in Central Luzon (62 cases), Southern Tagalog (27) and Bicol (13). These regions are among the top 7 priority insurgency areas that the AFP identified, along with Ilocos-Cordillera, Bohol, Caraga region and Compostela Valley. The number of extrajudicial killings are also highest in these areas.

The pattern of abductions explains why the spate of political killings and abductions continue to be practiced with impunity. Because they appear to be sanctioned by the state, it also explains why the Arroyo administration is not serious in investigating these cases and putting a stop on the killings and abductions.

And with the Human Security Act (HSA) in place, military units are given more freedom to attack leaders and members of the legal social movement. The HSA dangerously gives legal basis for the on-going state terrorism, including surveillance, abductions, arbitrary arrests, and detention of activists and government critics.

 A crime against humanity

 “Disappearances” have been used by abusive governments as a counterinsurgency tactic to weaken people’s resistance, gather information on activist organizations, and send an intimidating effect on perceived insurgents and their supporters. Years after Adolf Hitler implemented his Night and Fog decree — where civilians were transported to Germany and were never seen again — this tactic continued to spread to other countries.

The United Nations calls the phenomenon of enforced disappearances a grave and flagrant violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms. But while international laws consider it as one of the worst forms of human rights violations, the practice of enforced disappearance persists in many countries, especially those led by US-supported regimes.

Enforced disappearance was practiced on a large scale by tyrannical regimes in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, secretly arresting, torturing, and killing activists as part of their counter-insurgency campaigns. Most of the victims were youth activists critical of the US-backed dictatorships. Between 1980 and 2003, thousands of persons disappeared in countries like Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Algeria. They remain unaccounted for up to this day.

After the 9/11 attacks, disappearances and other human rights violations intensified against opponents of the US invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan. Under the rhetoric of the war on terror, the US justified the abductions of hundreds of civilians, the atrocities later exposed in the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004.

In the Philippines, the practice of enforced disappearance remains unrestrained since Pres. Marcos implemented it in an amplified scale against the anti-dictatorship movement. Succeeding administrations after Marcos implemented their own counterinsurgency plans, all of them using abductions and killings as tactic to suppress the opposition.

Under Marcos’s counter-insurgency plan Oplan Kalatagan, more than 770 activists were abducted and disappeared without trace. The number of missing persons rose to more than 1,500 during the Aquino regime, which implemented the low-intensity conflict Oplan Lambat Bitag. The Ramos administration resumed Aquino’s campaign and recorded 19 cases of disappearance during its regime, while Pres. Estrada’s Oplan Makabayan listed a total of 38.

The Philippines is thus one of the countries with the highest number of unresolved cases of enforced disappearances in Asia. And, as in the past, the perpetrators remain unpunished and free of any accountability. The Arroyo administration has neither taken any decisive action to seriously investigate the cases nor to put a stop into the horrendous pattern of involuntary disappearance. In fact, the government has the sole accountability for the unchecked practice of disappearances and other forms of human rights abuses against activists and government critics.

Finding justice for the missing

The House of Representatives, led by progressive party lists, recently filed House Bill 2263, which defines and penalizes the crime of enforced disappearance. If approved, the bill spells a significant victory and gives a ray of hope for human rights victims and the families of missing persons.

But the bill, however important, is only a step towards putting a stop to the enforced disappearances. Then and now, Philippine governments have showed no respect for international law and allowed the persistent pattern of disappearances to continue. The Arroyo government, despite calls from international human rights groups, has yet to even ratify the UN Convention for the Protection of All Persons against Enforced Disappearance.

Amid the constant denials of the military, government’s inaction, and threats to victims’ families, the campaign to find missing persons and hold the government accountable for the disappearances is as urgent as ever. Local and international pressure on the US and the Arroyo administrations has so far demonstrated how people have had it with state repression and rising fascism.

In the end, finding justice for the disappeared and other victims of state terrorism does not only mean bringing strength to the principles that they stood and made to unjustly suffer for; it also means persevering in the struggle for our rights to humanity and justice.