The Senate on Wednesday adopted a committee report recommending the removal of South Luzon Command chief Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade as spokesperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, saying it s illegal for an active military officer to hold another office.
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Parlade and the Southern Luzon Command: Killings, humanitarian law violations, arrests and displacement
MANILA – Last Sunday’s bloodbath in the four provinces of the Southern Tagalog that resulted in the killing of nine activists and arrests of three has brought to fore how this region has been one of the targets of the government’s counterinsurgency program.
Under the Duterte administration, the Southern Tagalog was among the regions placed under intensified military operations, per Memorandum Order No. 32. The Communist Party of the Philippines, in its statement in December, said the Armed Forces of the Philippines, along with the Philippine police, created 27 new maneuvers battalions and concentrated its forces in eight regions, including Southern Tagalog.
Senator Richard Gordon (ALI VICOY / MANILA BULLETIN FILE PHOTO)
Gordon said an independent probe questioning the “culture of elimination” and “climate of kill, kill, kill” perpetrated by the country’s law enforcement authorities is warranted in light of the President’s pronouncements against communist rebels. The senator earlier expressed his disgruntlement at the joint operations conducted by the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), where the former reported they were merely serving search warrants.
PNP maintained the operation was legitimate and claimed that the activists fought back against authorities or “nanlaban.”
“When they have surrounded the house and they have a search warrant, the search warrant is not a license to come in and go in with guns ablazing,” Gordon said in a statement.
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Asia Sentinel
Police gun down at least nine in assault against activists
Photo Credit: Mark Baltazar Saludes
Philippine police today (March 7) staged gory raids on leftists in the southern part of Luzon, the country’s main island, killing nine persons and arresting six more believed to belong to activist groups. It was one of the biggest one-day offensives of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency against activists, many of whom have been “red-tagged” by his administration.
The killings come two days after Duterte delivered a bloodthirsty speech to the “National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict,” which he created to end a pesky but hardly threatening insurgency.