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Charge of Multiple Murder in Leyte is a Patent Lie
By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chief Political Consultant
National Democratic Front of the Philippines
9 March 2007
Time and again I have denied the repeated false charge by the military that I am
responsible for murders in Leyte from 1984 to 1986.
The charge is a patent lie, for the following reasons:
1. I was in the maximum security detention center of the Armed Forces of the
Philippines in Fort Bonifacio from 1977 onwards. I was in solitary confinement up
to 1985. I was never in any position from 1984 to 1986 or at any other time to
sign any kind of order to kill people in Leyte or anywhere else in the Philippines .
After my release from military detention in March 1986, I concentrated on writing
and speaking on national issues, organizing the People's Party (Partido ng Bayan)
and teaching in the University of the Philippines . I left for abroad in August 1986
to make a lecture tour in the Asia-Pacific region and then Europe .
2. My position as Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines ended upon
my capture by the military in 1977. The military is lying by claiming that I exercised
authority and signed an order to kill people while I was in solitary confinement. It
is also a big lie the claim of the military that Satur Ocampo and Luis Jalandoni co-signed
the aforesaid order and that the false witness of the military was able to read it in a
few seconds. Like me, Satur Ocampo was in maximum security detention. Louie
Jalandoni was abroad as a political refugee.
3. Through Fr. Santiago Salas as spokesperson, the NDFP-Eastern Visayas has exposed
the fact it was the Philippines Army that controlled the area in question as a killing field
and committed extrajudicial killings here from 1984 onwards. The people in the same
area also aver that the Philippine Army dug up and desecrated the graves in an old
cemetery in order to produce many skeletal remains for propaganda use. The Alston
mission criticized as a hoax the claim of the military that these remains had come from
"mass graves" of the New People's Army (NPA).
The military, the prosecution and the judge are shameless in misrepresenting a killing
field of the Philippine Army as that of the New People's Army and are culpable for
serving as the Arroyo regime's tools of persecution. The regional trial court judge
is irresponsible for dignifying the patent lie of the military and the prosecutor and
issuing the warrants for the arrest of Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo, NDFP
Negotiating Panel chairperson Luis Jalandoni, myself and other people.
The judge proves himself either as a helpless tool of the Arroyo regime and the
military or practically an ignoramus in Philippine law by conveniently forgetting
that the prescription period for cases of murder is twenty years and by disregarding
the Hernandez doctrine that the charge of rebellion absorbs all other charges. The
repeated false charge of multiple murder in Leyte was already specified in a previous
charge of rebellion last year.
The false charge of multiple murder is now wrenched out of the previous rebellion
charge and is being drummed up in order to deflect attention from the findings
and conclusions of the Alston mission and the Melo commission that military special
teams or death squads are responsible for the extrajudicial killing of more than 820
unarmed legal activists and critics of the regime, including the leaders of progressive
party list groups and mass organizations, journalists, religious people, human rights
lawyers and others.
The false charge is also being used to derail and destroy the electoral campaign
of the progressive party list groups. Thus, Rep. Satur Ocampo of Bayan Muna is
one of the principal accused. The Arroyo regime is trying to arrest him and detain
him indefinitely like Anakpawis Congressman Crispin Beltran on a nonbailable charge.
The false charge is a harbinger of worse times to come when the Anti-Terror
Law is implemented by the Arroyo regime and state terrorism is further escalated
through the proscription of organizations and the consequent punitive sanctions.
It shall become so much easier for the Anti-Terrorism Council to proscribe and
punish organizations and individuals on the basis of intelligence dossiers and through
ex parte rulings from judges of regional trial courts.
As during the Marcos fascist regime, the victims of extrajudicial killings, abductions
and torture by the military will not obtain justice against any of the culpable military
and police officers. The 99 special courts created by the Supreme Court are useless
for the victims and their families because the de facto president Arroyo encourages
her military and police minions to commit extrajudicial killings and protects them from
investigation, prosecution and trial.
Before any victim of extrajudicial killing can obtain justice, progressive parties and
individuals will be proscribed and punished just by being listed as "terrorist". At
the same time, the military, police and their assets will continue to commit with
impunity extrajudicial killings and other human rights violations.
The dirty tactics of the Arroyo regime and the military, which involve accusing
unarmed legal activists as "communists" and "enemies of the state", murdering
them with the use of death squads and then falsely claiming that the killers are
communists, is now a deeply entrenched state policy. The Arroyo regime itself
is relentlessly pushing the revolutionary forces to defend their integrity by
concentrating their fire at the oppressors and bloody intriguers in power.
The dirty tactics of the Arroyo regime and its military are patterned after the
Phoenix Program during the US war of aggression in Vietnam in the 1960s.
Such crimes of bloody intrigue are currently inspired by the Bush global war
of terror. The US and Arroyo regime are unwittingly driving the Filipino people
and the revolutionary forces to take advantage of the crisis and contradictions
within the ruling system and to intensify the people's war against the entire
ruling system. ###
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