3 bishops, 6 militants testify in US on political killings

Three bishops and six leaders of justice-oriented organizations from the Philippines compose a delegation sent to the United States by the National Council of Churches of the Philippines to testify during Ecumenical Advocacy Days March 9-12 on "the deteriorating climate of fear in which friends and colleagues were being murdered in a campaign to eliminate activist leaders and silence their protests." In a report filed Wednesday for the Episcopal News Service, Nan Cobbey wrote that, "with their own lives very probably on the line," the nine human rights activists from the Philippines this week "told stories of government-sponsored terror at a series of public hearings in Washington, DC." Church organizations sponsored some of the forums. The group brought a detailed 99-page report documenting the killings of more than 800 civilians and the "disappearances" of another 196, some of them students, since 2001. "The victims, they said, are priests, pastors, human rights workers, labor leaders, journalists, those who spoke up for the poor and who criticized government policies," the report said. "We come out of an obscene climate of political repression," declared Sharon Rose Joy Ruiz-Duremdes, general secretary of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, a lay leader of the Philippine Baptist Church at the initial press briefing. "We come to North America appalled at the political intolerance of government authorities whose response to abject poverty, to unemployment and landlessness is military might and a vicious campaign to obliterate a burgeoning movement for social transformation," she added. The delegates, known as the Ecumenical Voice for Peace and Human Rights in the Philippines, were present to participate in the fifth annual Advocacy Days, an event sponsored by more than 50 churches that draws 1,000 people to Washington to lobby their senators and congressmen, Cobbey wrote. The Philippines group came also to address the International Ecumenical Conference on Human Rights in the Philippines on March 12-14 and to appear before a congressional hearing of Sen. Barbara Boxer's East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee and members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The church report, titled "Let the Stones Cry Out: An Ecumenical Report on Human Rights in the Philippines and a Call to Action," begins with this description of the situation: "The Philippine Government has launched relentless military campaigns against the 'enemies of the state' and in the name of the 'rule of law' and 'political stability.'" The report averred, however, that "the results of this strategy have been mounting reports of dead bodies sprawled on highways and bushes, of female students abducted by armed men in the dead of night, never to be seen again, of the cries of anguish of mothers as their sons; felled by assassins' bullets; die in their arms, of a well-loved bishop bathed in his own blood after being stabbed several times, and of children terrorized and traumatized by soldiers who have taken over their villages." - GMANews.TV