Comelec, police, AFP to keep close watch over ARMM's hotspots

The Commission on Elections will keep 768 barangays in the violence-prone Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) under a close watch on Monday as Filipinos there troop to the polls for grassroots elections that some fear may turn out to be more violent than national elections. The ARMM has the most number of barangays being watched for potential violence in Monday's barangay and youth elections, which a local expert says are more hotly contested polls than the national elections. The Comelec has placed 2,301 of the country's total 42,025 barangays on a watchlist, and a third of these barangays — 768 villages or 33 percent — are in the ARMM. The poll body placed a total of 224 barangays under Category 1 and 2,077 barangays under Category 2, classified according to the level of violence expected tomorrow: Category 1 are those areas with intense political rivalries and previous incidents of poll-related violence in the May 2010 elections, while Category 2 are those with threats coming from separatist groups. The ARMM has 34 villages being watched because political rivalries or long-standing feuds or rido between clans may cause violence to erupt, while 734 villages have been identified as hotspots due to the presence of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front there. The investigative group Newsbreak reported on Tuesday that a professor of the Mindanao State University said he expects grassroots elections to be more prone to violence since ordinary people take these more seriously than national elections. The ARMM has a long history of election violence. On November last year, 57 people were killed by men led by a rival candidate as they were accompanying a gubernatorial bet to file his candidacy in Maguindanao. The bloody incident, later known as the Maguindanao Massacre, was condemned worldwide as a symptom of the failure of democracy in the country and a glaring indicator of the sorry state of human rights in the country. PNP to watch all of ARMM Last week, the Philippine National Police (PNP) put all villages in the ARMM under its watch. Senior Superintendent Federico Castro, chief of the directorial staff of the PNP-ARMM, said on Oct. 24 that police had opted to classify all the region’s 2,490 barangays as “areas of concern." All police personnel in the region were placed on alert to thwart any possible violence and that there will be a smooth conduct of the coming electoral exercises in the region. ARMM is composed of the provinces of Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao, Tawi-Tawi, Sulu, Basilan , and Marawi City. The Army’s 6th Infantry Division, which covers the ARMM mainland provinces, said it has reactivated its Task Force HOPE (Honest, Orderly and Peaceful Elections) jointly with the local media and other concerned sectors to safeguard tomorrow’s polls from possible violence or frauds. - DM/KBK, GMANews.TV