Ours, too, is a country with a police force that would rather defend the insignia of a foreign country than uphold its vow to serve and protect the Filipino people.
Let me make my stand clear on the matter: I strongly condemn the violent dispersal committed by the Philippine National Police against the protesting national minorities on the morning of October 19, 2016.
National minorities are here in Manila for the Lakbayan of National Minorities for Self Determination and Just Peace. Their fight for self determination is a fight against the plunder of their ancestral lands and heightened militarization and extrajudicial killings of national minority rights activists who are struggling to survive in a system which sees them as nothing more than a bothersome lot that must be swept away, killed and buried deep in the ground.
Yet their call for self determination and survival is also a call for the survival and development of the Filipino nation. The push for an independent foreign policy was in support of Rodrigo Duterte’s stated objective to break away from the United States and cultivate new and closer relations with other countries on the basis of mutual respect and cooperation.
For those not in the know, the United States and the Philippines does NOT have a brother-to-brother relationship, or even a friend-to-friend one. For over one hundred years the Philippines has been a vassal state of the United States, subject to US whims and caprices and dependent on American goodwill for most of our needs. Ours is a history of neocolonialism, where our people do backbreaking work for foreign masters on thrones that our people built with sweat and blood. Ours is a country with past leaders that kowtow to the needs of the foreigner and blind to the wants of the local and indigent. Ours is a nation where dictators are supported by their big white brothers while those greedy white hands take most of what we have. Ours is a country where our farmers feed the rich while slowly dying of hunger themselves.
Ours, too, is a country with a police force that would rather defend the insignia of a foreign country than uphold its vow to serve and protect the Filipino people.
Our national minorities came here to demand immediate relief from all the landgrabs and militarization and killings from the government, and that is their right. But policemen running over protesters and chasing them down and beating them up is not a right, it is murder. It is fascism at its finest.
If State security forces can do this travesty to protesting national minorities here in the city, where everyone is looking, imagine what national minorities are experiencing in the hands of the military and police in the countryside?
I do not understand why some people fail to see the crux of the matter: Filipino policemen endangering the lives of fellow Filipinos for America, a foreign country. If you do not see something wrong there, then there is something wrong with your eyes.
a life on fire 