Rights groups on Sunday condemned what they called a “massacre” of 14 farmers by police in Negros Oriental as authorities defended the incident as a legitimate operation against suspected communist rebels.
Police say the 14 men on Saturday shot at officers with search warrants for illegal firearms, prompting them to return fire. But rights groups insist the men were “farmers asserting their rights to land,” the latest victims caught up in a violent crackdown under President Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte’s administration has canceled peace talks with communist rebels—who are waging a 50-year-old insurgency that has killed thousands—and has ordered his troops to “destroy” them.
The latest violence occurred in three separate incidents in Negros island, the center of the nation’s sugar industry and home to some of the country’s wealthiest landowners as well as some of its poorest farm workers.
Authorities say the operation was a response to communist rebel attacks in Negros, adding one policeman was wounded.
“They fought back against our operating units. We were forced to fire back. Some of [the 14 men] are farmers but we cannot confirm how many,” provincial police spokesman Edilberto Euraoba said.
Police arrested another 12 men while they recovered various firearms from those killed, Euraoba added.
However rights and peasant groups said the 14 men killed on Saturday were farmers, some elderly, citing witness accounts contradicting the police’s statement.
“They were defenseless. It’s clear that it was a massacre. They are tagged as members and sympathizers [of communist rebels)]but they are farmers asserting their rights to land,” Maria Sol Taule, legal counsel for rights group Karapatan, said.
“President Duterte is attacking his critics including people fighting for their rights. It’s an all-out attack on all they suspect to be enemies, whether farmers or lawyers.”
Rows over land have become increasingly common as Manila faces criticism for its slow-moving program to redistribute farmland to millions of sharecroppers—tenant farmers who give a part of each crop as rent—who remain mired in poverty.
The Federation of Agricultural Workers condemned the latest deaths, saying it highlighted growing rights violations on Negros island.
The nation’s rights body said it would investigate Saturday’s incident, expressing “grave concern” over what it called a rising number of killings in the country.
Taule added that the incident was the latest in a series of attacks on farmers, following the killing of nine farmers by gunmen also in Negros in October.
Farm workers account for about 20-million people, a fifth of the population, who live on less than two dollars a day, the government says.
Leftist lawmakers denounced the latest killings.
Anakpawis Party-list Rep. Ariel Casilao blamed Duterte’s Memorandum Circular 32 that directed additional troops to provinces with areas of lawlessness, saying it was a death warrant to civilians in Negros Oriental.
“The state-sanctioned terror act should be condemned by all sectors as [President Rodrigo] Duterte and his warmonger minions are hell bent to impose martial rule in a nationwide scale,” he said.
ACT Teachers Party-list Rep. Antonio Tinio believed the police operation against the 14 slain victims should not be called a “legitimate anti-crime operation.”
“What they are doing is nothing but the vilification and targeting as criminals and ‘terrorists’ of progressive farmers and their organizations whose only crime is to demand reforms and to criticize the anti-people policies of the current administration,” Tinio said in a statement.
Another ACT Teachers Party-list lawmaker, France Castro, said “it follows the rulebook of targeting civilians and innocents under the so-called Oplan Kapayapaan as well as tokhang and other bloody operations which the Duterte administration is waging against the people.”
Col. Raul Tacaca, the province’s chief of police, said eight of the suspect criminals were killed in Canlaon City, four in Manjuyod town and two in Sta. Catalina town.
He said policemen were serving search warrants when the victims fired shots at them.
Bayan Muna Party-list Rep. Carlos Zarate vowed to seek justice for the victims.
“State forces are on a rampage and activists and critics are in their crosshairs. We will not take this sitting down and we will seek justice for the victims and file charges against the policemen and their superiors who perpetrated this massacre,” he said.
Commission on Human Rights spokesperson Jacqueline Ann de Guia said they have already ordered the regional sub-office of CHR-Region VII to investigate the case.
“At this point, our interest is finding out the truth behind a police operation, which authorities claim to be meant to serve warrants of arrest, but resulted in the deaths of 14 farmers and a cop said to be injured,” De Guia said.
The claim that authorities were serving search warrants when the shooting began needed to be investigated, De Guia said. need to be looked into.
“Even claims of resisting arrest to justify fatalities need to be tried before courts to ensure that there are no lapses and ascertain if the circumstances really warrant the offense from the police, resulting the curtailment of life,” she added. With AFP and PNA
READ: NPA blamed for massacre of 9 farmers
READ: Massacre in Negros: 9 workers killed; land dispute eyed”‹