Freedoms under siege

BY THE ALLIANCE OF CONCERNED TEACHERS

THE GOVERNMENT has been launching sustained and intensifying attacks against the people’s rights and liberties through the shrinking of various spaces and institutions crucial in the democratization of Philippine society.

Currently, it is working on shutting down a major media outfit — the ABS-CBN, against whom the President holds a personal grudge, by threatening the rejection of its franchise renewal in the House of Representatives largely composed of and led by known Duterte allies, and through Solicitor General Jose Calida’s filing of a quo warranto in the Supreme Court.

It must be remembered that in 2017, President Duterte threatened to go after the network should it fail to support and promote the administration’s federalism campaign. This thereby constitutes an attack not only against one network but against the freedom of the press as this follow through to the 2017 threat sends a message to the media, straight out of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ playbook: you either support the government or you will be crushed. 

The supposed independence and responsibility of the media, considered to be the fourth branch of the government, to report the truth and help its audiences critically make sense of key social, political, and economic matters in Philippine society are pushed into the backseat as the government wield its power to establish control over information. 

The government tries to do the same in education institutions where millions of youth get crucial information and their minds honed for critical discernment. The same authoritarian objectives of the government drive its incessant attempts to intrude and intervene in education, such as the push to bring back mandatory Reserve Officers Training Corps in high school despite its long and horrible history of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse against young cadets.

Ronald Dela Rosa, Duterte’s fascist dog and lead implementor of the “drug war” who now holds office in the Senate, recently sponsored Senate Committee Report No. 10 which alleges teachers and schools to be involved in the “radicalization” of students and therefore merits investigation and possible administrative and legal charges.

Even Muslim students were discriminately target by the PNP in their ‘anti-violent extremism’ campaign. The report also recommended increasing police presence in schools and stronger inter-agency collaborations between the Armed Forces, police, Department of Educaion and Commission on Higher Education to curtail further youth recruitment of “communist terror groups,” which is already taking place through PNP’s Kabataan Kontra Droga at Terorismo. These are direct attacks against the academic freedom of our education institutions as the performance of their mandates will be put under the rule of the government’s fascist machineries—the police and the military. Students’ and teachers’ democratic rights to organization and free expression are being unfairly tagged as ‘terroristic’ despite the lack of concrete evidence to back up their allegations.

No less than the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) with registered and accredited unions in 15 out of the 17 regions in the country had been victimized by the state’s McCarthyist tactic of tagging legitimate organizations critical of his policies and governance as communist-terrorists. From profiling to vilification, and the most recent, the fabricated charges against ACT leaders — these attacks are tantamount to union-busting, hence these too constitute attacks against our just struggle for decent pay, better working conditions, and the overall improvement in the quality of education. Our unions are our weapons in the fight for livable wages which President Duterte promised and failed to deliver. Therefore, our fight for a meaningful pay hike is inseparable from our fight against Duterte’s growing tyranny.

 More repressive measures are expected to be put in place in the coming days as the amendments to the Human Security Act is being railroaded in the House of Representatives and the Anti-Terror Act in the Senate. Both of the proposed bills aim to institute the expansion of Duterte’s authoritarian rule and the police and military’s power, while curtailing people’s democratic rights and liberties. One of its blatantly anti-people and prone to abuse provisions is the anti-terrorism institution’s power to arrest and detain anyone without warrant and based on mere suspicion of his/her engagement in terrorism, which are vaguely defined in the proposed bills, and can easily be used to target dissenters and supposedly protected rights of the people.

Our freedoms are therefore under siege. Much like the time of Marcos’ Martial Law, Duterte attempts to consolidate power over all the branches of the government as he restricts and penalizes supposedly independent civilian institutions that breed critical thinking and rightful dissent against the rotting system prevailing all over Philippine society.

Consequently, as the government fails to address the societal ills that keep the people impoverished and in perpetual suffering, and democratic spaces to air out people’s grievances shrink unabated, restlessness will intensify. The Filipino people will once again find that power resides in their collective unity and resolve to push back against an increasingly repressive, tyrannical government — much like what millions of our fellow countrymen did during the first people power known as EDSA 1./PN

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