Last week, two former police generals suggested that the administration should do something to stop leftist organizations from recruiting and indoctrinating children and young students to overthrow the government.
Senator Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa, former director general of the Philippine National Police and lead executor of President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly drug war, is now focusing his sights on student activists and militant organizations and is suggesting that the military and the police be allowed entry into state universities and colleges to compete with leftist groups in “recruiting” students.
During a hearing of the Senate committee on public order and dangerous drugs, which he heads as chairman, De la Rosa cited intelligence reports that some 500 to 1,000 students are regularly indoctrinated by the Communist Party of the Philippines to become either members of the New People’s Army or to lead militant organizations in schools. He presented some mothers who claimed their children were kidnapped by communists for indoctrination, a claim just as soon denied by at least two supposedly kidnapped students who said they voluntary left home for family reasons.
De La Rosa also suggested that teachers who cancel their classes and encourage their students to join protest rallies should be fired, adding that these mentors actually tell their students attendance would be checked during these demonstrations. He singled out the University of the Philippines and the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, both state-owned schools.
Having studied at the UP during the First Quarter Storm in the early 1970s, I witnessed student leaders coming into classrooms to encourage students to join protests and to explain why they were protesting, but while many teachers allowed them to speak, the teachers never told their students to join the rally and that their attendance would be checked there.
The teachers understood and respected the activists’ right to express their dissent just as they respected the students’ decision to join rallies or not. Of course, students who joined missed the lessons and, sometimes, even exams for the day, but these brilliant students knew that they had to get involved to help bring back the country’s state of affairs that had been mishandled by the nation’s leaders and that no amount of education would correct the inequities of society unless the educated did something about them.
The other former PNP chief, Secretary Eduardo Año of the Department of the Interior and Local Government, went even further by proposing that the purged Anti-Subversion Law of 1957 be restored to prevent the CPP from actively recruiting prospective NPA fighters to overthrow the government.
“We wish to emphasize that our proposal to revive the Anti-Subversion Law is only for members of the CPP-NPA-NDF and all groups directly supporting it. It only covers the communists who are actively working to overthrow the government through armed struggle and does not, in any way, cover legitimate dissent, political opposition, or similar groups,” he said.
But we all know, as Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon warned, that the law was prone to abuse by the authorities and was used mostly to harass the opposition and activists and to suppress legitimate dissent. We should remember that the same law was used by the late President Marcos to harass, threaten and jail opposition politicians and student leaders prior to the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and eventual declaration of martial law.
Are De la Rosa and Año, two known Duterte die-hards, paving the way for an eventual declaration of martial law as feared by many and threatened to be imposed several times by Duterte to intimidate the opposition?
In 1992, the Anti-Subversion Law was repealed as part of the peace negotiations between the communist rebels and former President Fidel V. Ramos. If I remember right, the six years of the Ramos administration did not experience massive protests nor did the NPA increased its numbers despite the scrapping of the law.
Restoring the law would only open the doors to witch-hunt and labelling of opposition politicians, legitimate dissenters and rights activists as “subversives.” Now, instead of labelling oppositionists as narco-politicians or drug lord coddlers, as they wrongfully and unfairly did to Sen. Leila de Lima and other politicians, the administration can just call them “subversives” to either imprison or silence them.
Instead of moving to restore the Anti-Subversion Law, Congress should enact an Anti-Freedom Subversion Law” that would ensure the protection of the people’s constitutionally-mandated freedoms of speech and the press, to express legitimate grievances, to peaceably assemble, and to join legitimate associations. Under such a law, those who would aggressively stifle dissent and subvert freedom should be jailed, instead of the other way around.
Instead of suppressing rights and subverting democracy, the administration should instead address the legitimate grievances of protesters, as suggested by the Commission on Human Rights.
The Chinese government tried to suppress the rights of the Hong Kong population by enacting a law that would allow extradition of people accused of certain crimes to China, where they faced possible torture by the military or unfair trial by authoritarian courts. While the proposed law aimed to suppress dissent, it only united the Hong Kong people to fight for their rights and to protect the democratic space that they enjoyed under an agreement between China and Great Britain until 2047.
De la Rosa and Año should not forget that when people are pressured into a corner with no democratic space, they eventually fight back with an even greater force as what happened on EDSA in 1987 and what is now happening in Hong Kong.
Cracking down on dissent and shutting down democratic space would only build the pressure that could lead to their worst fears—a repeat of EDSA.
Mr. Abelgas is a former editor of the Manila Standard. He now lives in the United States.