The AFP, non-partisan?!
National security adviser Norberto Gonzales and other
red-baiters in the Macapagal-Arroyo administration should be held responsible
for every single member, leader and sympathizer of progressive party-lists such
as Bayan Muna, Anakpawis and Gabriela Women’s Party killed.
Gonzales continues to exhort the Armed Forces of the
Philippines (AFP) into escalating attacks against the progressive party-lists,
especially this coming election season. The AFP leadership, for its part,
expose themselves as liars every time they declare themselves non-partisan.
It’s crystal clear that the AFP is actively campaigning against our party-lists
and terrorizing Filipinos who support us and our advocacies. Gonzales is a
dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite much like the administration he defends and
represents. He tries to justify his attacks against our party-lists and allied
people’s organizations by saying that
it’s all in the defense in democracy; but the truth is that it’s a campaign of
brutality and violence where civilians are killed in cold-blood.
Gonzales is a political nobody who
sold his services to Macapagal-Arroyo who, in turn, saw the usefulness of
Gonzales’ anti-communist obsession. Gonzales is nothing and no one in the
country’s general political workings, he is a handyman whose main tasks are to
exaggerate national security threats and demonize our party-lists and allied
people’s organizations. He gets his bed and butter from the death of political
activists and human rights advocates.
The public should be warned against
the AFP and their tactics of terrorism. Where the AFP deploys its troops,
human rights violations abound, and not a few civilians fall victim to
extrajudicial killings. This coming elections, we can see the Macapagal-Arroyo
administration further goading members of the AFP into launching more localized
campaigns to attack progressive party-lists and our members and campaign
officials. It is not messages of progress that the AFP is spreading in the name of the Macapagal-Arroyo
administration, but death and injustice.
This early, we’re receiving reports from Anakpawis regional and provincial formations that
detachments of the AFP are going into communities defaming Anakpawis and its
sister party-list groups and their standard-bearers and representatives in
congress.
Members of the AFP and its paramilitary groups are
terrorizing community residents and threatening them on pain of death not to
support much less vote for our party-list groups. The AFP completely sheds all
pretenses of being non-partisan in the rural areas, and defame and libel our
party-lists while at the same time campaigning for the Arroyo administration
and the candidates it’s supporting in the region.
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The thing is, everytime I think of Norberto Gonzales, I am reminded of one of my favorite cartoon characters Norbert one of two kooky beavers from ‘Angry Beavers’ that used to show in the Nickolodeon channel. Aaaargh.
