THE Catholic Church on Tuesday welcomed the suspension of the government’s bloody war on illegal drugs, saying this would encourage addicts who feared for their lives to surface and undergo rehabilitation.
About 7,000 drug suspects have been killed since the Philippine National Police launched “Oplan Tokhang” in July 2016, earning local and international condemnation from human rights groups that denounced the growing number of summary executions.
The program was put on hold Monday, after a scandal erupted over the October 2016 kidnapping and killing of a South Korean businessman carried out by anti-drug policemen, who extorted P5 million from his wife, who did not know he was dead.
On Tuesday, Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo said it is the right thing for the PNP to stop the war on drugs as some police and law enforcers used the anti-drug campaign to cover their criminal activities.
He said he hoped the extrajudicial killings would also stop, now that the anti-drug campaign has been suspended.
“Many people didn’t want to come to the programs because of fear. Now, if the fear factor is out, we can work more on rehabilitating them,” Pabillo said.
Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines president Archbishop Socrates Villegas said violence cannot stop violence.
“When we condemn violence, we cannot ourselves be its perpetrators, and when we decry murder, we cannot ourselves participate in murder, no matter that it may be accompanied by the trappings of judicial and legal process,” he said.
The CBCP also reiterated the Church’s stand against the death penalty, saying it is no different from extrajudicial killings.
He said it is regrettable that there are “strident efforts” to restore capital punishment.
“Throughout the world, the trend against the death penalty is unmistakable, and international covenants, one of which the Philippines is party to, obligate us not to impose the death penalty,” Villegas said.
The Commission on Human Rights also welcomed the suspension of Oplan Tokhang.
“The PNP must rise to the challenge to remain faithful to their sworn duty to serve the people and protect their rights. It cannot and should not be an instrument of abuse lest it be the oppressor instead of the protector of the people,” said the chief of the Public Affairs and Strategic Communications Office, Jacqueline Ann de Guia.
“The PNP must enforce rather than mock the law. It must gain the trust rather than instill fear. It must inspire confidence and support for rather than disillusionment with the criminal justice system. Despite this, we urge the PNP to ensure accountability for its action, and justice for all the deaths perpetrated.”
The suspension of the bloody war against drug is a “recognition that the campaign is fraught with flaws and susceptible to abuse,” the CHR added.
Senator Panfilo Lacson said the strategy of having policemen knock on the doors of drug suspects to convince them to surrender and change their ways would never succeed on a national scale because it infringed on human rights and allowed the police to conduct illegal searches.
He added that even with the campaign in place, the government would never be able to eradicate illegal drugs.
“What you can do greatly is to minimize illegal drugs. But to completely eradicate, that will never happen. Not under any president. Not under any chief PNP. Not under any NBI director,” Lacson said.
Senator Leila De Lima, a staunch opponent of the President, agreed with Lacson and said Oplan Tokhang was being used by rogue policemen to commit abuses.
She also said the police operations under the program have resulted in more extrajudicial killings.
“The President is finally learning that short cuts are much more likely to worsen problems, rather than solve them,” De Lima said.
She said indiscriminately killing people to show the government’s hard stance was little more than “cosmetic machismo, lacking in substance.”
“Worse, it hurts our people more than it helps them. We started out with a drug problem, and here we are with mass serial killings and kidnap-for-ransom groups that shamelessly operate from even within the police ranks,” she said.
Akbayan party-list Rep. Tom Villarin said Oplan Tokhang was an ill-conceived program that was not comprehensive in its appreciation of the drug problem.
“From the start, it has to be a multi-disciplinary approach from evidence-based, due process and rule of law enforcement that takes into account a PNP that has to rid its ranks of scalawags, to that of looking at the drug menace as a health problem,” Villarin said. “You need empowered citizens that do not fear our law enforcers but rather help those doing the right things and reporting the bad cops.”
Similarly, Villarin said the cases filed in the Supreme Court over human rights abuses committed in the war against drugs ultimately will be decided on merits.
But Kabayan party-list Rep. Harry Roque and Tobias Tiangco of Navotas said the program was “a tremendous success.”
“The war against drugs has been a tremendous success since the cost of shabu is now sky high, proving that its supply has been decreased. The [Oplan] Tokhang for ransom though undermines its success and hence, its was correct to suspend it pending cleansing of ranks in the PNP,” Roque said.
Tiangco said while Oplan Tokhang was not perfect, it was “the best anti-drug campaign” he had seen since he became a public servant in 1998.
Isabela Rep. Rodolfo Albano III said President Duterte made the right decision to lift its war on drugs and focus first on cleansing the scalawags in the PNP.
“The feeling of being too powerful… must be tempered. They [police officials] went overboard and the President had to stop them lest he create another menace or monster,” Albano said.
Human Rights Watch said the UN should lead an independent international investigation into alleged unlawful killings by the police linked to President Duterte’s “war on drugs.”
Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said not a single police officer has been prosecuted for summary executions or related crimes.
“[PNP chief Ronald] Dela Rosa made clear that the suspension of police operations is temporary and that investigations are to purge police ranks…and not provide accountability for unlawful killings. Duterte stated in a Jan. 29 news conference that the ‘drug war’ will continue ‘to the last day of my term,’ indicating that the abuses will continue indefinitely,” said Kine.
“Suspending police anti-drug operations could reduce the killings, but they won’t stop without a meaningful investigation into the 7,000 deaths already reported,” Kine added.
“The Philippine police won’t seriously investigate themselves, so the UN should take the lead in conducting an investigation,” Kine said.
Amnesty International agreed, saying the suspension of Oplan Tokhang offered little hope that the wave of extrajudicial executions would end.
In a statement, AI’s crisis response director Tirana Hassan said the problem is not the corruption among the policemen but Duterte’s bloody anti-drug policy that has given them a way to plant evidence, rob victims’ homes and falsify reports.
“Even as the police have vowed to shut their operations down, President Duterte has pledged to continue his so-called ‘war on drugs’. These contradictory statements offer little hope that the wave of extrajudicial executions that has claimed more than a thousand lives a month will end,” Hassan said.
Hassan said the Amnesty International will release its new report “If you are poor, you are killed”, on Wednesday, detailing how the police have systematically targeted mostly poor and defenseless people across the country while planting evidence, recruiting death squads, stealing from the people they kill and fabricating official incident reports.
Responsibility for this, Hassan said, “lies at the very top of government.”
“The problem is not a few bad policemen but the government’s deadly anti-drug policy,” the AI official added. With Rio N. Araja, Sandy Araneta, Maricel V. Cruz and Sara Susanne D. Fabunan