VIEWPOINTS
Pilgrim team amplifies calls of communities in Philippines C
onvened by the World Council of Churches in partnership with the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, Council for World Mission (CWM) was part of a Pilgrim Team Visit (PTV) to the Philippines from 9 to 13 August 2019. The 14 church leaders and activists, made up of women, men and youth coming from Canada, India, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States had embarked on this journey to listen, learn and bear witness to the escalating human rights crisis in the country. Traveling by plane, jeep, boat and on foot, the pilgrims visited an urban poor settlement in Metro Manila and a key site for the “war on drugs”, peasants struggling for land rights in Cavite and Negros, Indigenous Dumagat communities resisting a hydroelectric dam project and Lumad communities displaced from their resource-rich ancestral domain. In Navotas City, home to the third largest fishing port in Southeast Asia, a team of pilgrims heard from mothers and families of victims of extra-judicial killings in President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody drug war. A mother recalled her son, affectionate and generous with his hugs. He had just returned from the port when 10 policemen came and shot him dead in his own house. A daughter spoke of her father, proud of all the tattoos he was covered in, yet scared of hospital needles. He was abducted along with his wife in front of their children and later found murdered in a cemetery; his wife turned up dead beneath a bridge. A father shared about his son who always came back from the port with fish to cook for breakfast and who would lovingly clean his father’s motorbike. One evening the police came and took him away and a few hours later, he was found in the street, bound in electric wire and shot in front of neighbours.
32 | INSiGHT
The “war on drugs” has illegally claimed thousands of lives since President Duterte came to power in 2016 and has gained considerable international attention, culminating in the recently released United Nations Human Rights Resolution No. 41/2 which calls for an investigation in the spate of murders. But the killings and other human rights violations have expanded and have gone beyond so-called drug addicts and dealers in the cities. The most recent Global Witness Report points out that the Philippines is now the most dangerous place to be an environmental defender and land rights activist; and church workers and priests serving impoverished, rural and Indigenous communities have also become victims of violence and impunity. As one pilgrim put it, ‘How can these people be treated as enemies of the state? These are precisely the future of the state, they are farmers, young people, activists and indigenous people, they are the ones who offer the Philippines hope, not the violent outbursts and outrages of the Duterte government’. A group of pilgrims traveled to Negros, the fourth largest island in the Philippines and home to sprawling haciendas or plantations that turn out around 54% of the sugar produced throughout the country. The island has seen a rash of killings in the past year, the majority of them farmers, but also human rights lawyers, a former major, a city councilor, a village chief, and a school principal. In sharing with the pilgrims, one of the survivors recalled the fateful day of the Sagay massacre last 20 October 2018. “That day we had just started to plant corn, monggo and bananas on three hectares of leased land so that our families would have something to eat in the dead season (for sugarcane planting), and that very night they shot nine of us. Two of us escaped because we were charging our cellphones in a hut close by. We heard the gunshots and hid in the fields. We reported the incident to the police as soon as we thought it was safe, but later we found out we had been charged with the murders.
