The US State Department has been issuing its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices since the 1980s, with special emphasis on the recipient countries of US economic and military assistance. A series of laws passed by the United States Congress in the latter part of the 1970s, during the James Carter Presidency (1977-1981), makes respect for human rights a condition for such aid.
The Reports are issued annually in furtherance of US foreign policy, and were in response to criticism that the United States was fomenting military coups against democratically elected, “unfriendly” governments, while supporting brutal dictatorships such as those of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines (1972-1986) and Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1981).
US military and economic assistance did help keep those tyrannies and others in power because of their anti-communism and allegiance to the former’s economic and strategic interests.
Nevertheless, State Department analysts say the Reports are meant to “name and shame” violators and encourage respect for human rights in exchange for US assistance. But the US record has not been consistent with that supposed principle (it supported Marcos Senior up to the last minute in 1986).
US President Joseph Biden promised that he would make human rights “more central” in US foreign policy and would hold violator regimes to account. But in June, 2021, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that the Biden administration had notified the US Congress of the sale to the Duterte regime of some $2.5 billion worth of sophisticated weaponry. HRW demanded that the sale be stopped because it would reward and encourage the police and military minions of the “increasingly abusive” regime to continue committing the human rights violations that characterize its “drug war” and anti-insurgency program.
Neither the alleged centrality of human rights in its foreign policy nor the Reports’ criticism had prevented the US from selling weapons and providing military and economic assistance to a succession of Philippine regimes from that of Marcos Senior’s to Rodrigo Duterte’s. The Reports’ 2022 edition on the human rights situation in 2021, which again names security forces as the worst violators of human rights in the Philippines, would very likely have minimal impact on such military sales and assistance.
Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) head Martin Andanar described as “baseless,” “rehashed,” and “recycled” the allegations in the Reports that numerous human rights violations such as extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detention, and torture occurred in the Philippines in 2021, that conditions in its prisons were “life-threatening,” and that police and other security forces were responsible. Department of National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana for his part labeled them “innuendoes,” and the Philippine part of the Reports a “witch hunt,” and “black propaganda.”
Though once again named, the regime is apparently far from shamed. But Andanar is partly correct about the “recycled” part. The Reports have made the same allegations in its past editions.
However, their being “rehashed” suggests that they have not been sufficiently addressed and are continuing.
Lorenzana is also only partly correct. The propaganda part of the Reports is not so much against the subject country as for the US to appear to be committed to the protection of human rights despite its military aid and sale of weapons not only to the Philippines but also to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other countries that are hardly paragons of democracy.
Although it can eventually be established, the exact number of human rights violations in the Philippines is still in dispute. But the grief and outrage of the families, friends, and communities of the victims of the violations cited by the Reports cannot be denied.
The survivors of those victims lament and have been demanding justice for those killed during the “war on drugs” that President Rodrigo Duterte himself has admitted is a failure (his pledge to end the drug problem was merely “campaign hubris,” he recently said), and for the social and political activists who have been imprisoned on fabricated charges, abducted, or shot dead in the streets.
In a continuing demonstration of the persistence of the culture of impunity, only in a few instances have erring police and military personnel, including those guilty of the most heinous crimes, been penalized, in most cases by merely being suspended, re-assigned, or dismissed from active service. Indeed, despite the possibility of his being prosecuted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC), in a statement that in effect validated the claims of the State Department Reports, Mr. Duterte even proudly declared last March that while Russian President Vladimir Putin “kills civilians,” he himself “kills criminals.” But the so-called “criminals” killed, among them minors, were in fact civilians as well, and were alleged suspects whose guilt no court had established.
A report by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) equally validated the Reports’ findings that the perpetrators of the crimes it noted have mostly escaped punishment because of the inefficacy of police internal cleansing mechanisms.
PCIJ’s “The Desaparecidos of Duterte’s Drug War” is on a little known aspect of the “Tokhang” terror campaign. In addition to outright killings, the Duterte police also abducted and forcibly disappeared not only suspected drug pushers and addicts but anyone else who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
PCIJ reporter Aie Balagtas interviewed a mother whose son had gone out to buy a soft drink but who has since been missing, and a police asset who alleged that he and other mercenaries had abducted individuals including minors, and brought them to a police safe-house called “compac” where they were killed, without their families’ ever knowing where they were and whether they were alive or dead.
The uncertainty has made the life of the mother of the missing boy sheer agony. She has consulted fortune tellers in the vain hope that she would be told that her son is still alive, and, in the hope of running into him, has frequented the streets he used to walk through when coming home. But the police asset told PCIJ that her son was among those he and his companions had abducted and killed, supposedly on police instructions.
An anonymous source, said PCIJ, had later tipped off journalists on a dozen killings that were to take place in the same vicinity as the missing boy’s neighborhood, although no news account mentioned it. But the fact remains that most of those targeted for killing, abduction, or enforced disappearance were from the poorer sectors of society to whom security forces could do anything without fear of accountability.
What to make of the State Department Reports then, given their being in the service of US foreign policy, but in the context as well of the validity of their claim that the same human rights violations are still occurring in the country of our sorrows while the perpetrators are still free to harass, torture, abduct, and kill again?
The Reports do give a voice to the victims of human rights violations and adds to that of their families’ and communities’. They are also a reminder of the imperative of holding the guilty to account, and added pressure on the Philippine National Police — which does have procedures on, among others, the investigation of the cases of the many poor people who go missing — to observe those protocols.
Perhaps those named can eventually be shamed into observing their own rules? In the present lawless circumstances in these isles of fear, that is probably the most that anyone can hope for.
Luis V. Teodoro is on Facebook and Twitter (@luisteodoro).