Raid, not rescue: State terrorism under a frayed blanket of lies
The Lumad people do not need “rescue” from the hands of state forces — the same elements who neglected their call, displaced them from their homes, bombed their livelihood and schools, and massacred their leaders.
Yesterday* saw the violent operations of the Philippine National Police (PNP) Central Visayas in the Bakwit school inside the University of San Carlos in Tambalan, Cebu, arresting 25 people: 21 of them are Lumad students, 2 are Lumad elders, while the other 2 are volunteer teachers.
In the clip recorded by Save Our Schools Network and Aninaw Productions, it is obvious that the Lumad students, children, and civilians were crying for help. The police operation is no rescue but a violent raid. To say that it is a rescue operation is to hide state terrorism under a frayed blanket of lies.
I remember the first time that I talked to Chad, one of the arrested volunteer-teachers, in the aforementioned raid. Amid the dangers of Anti-Terrorism Law (ATL), he left a reminder, a spark of reaffirmation for all the victims of the law’s chilling and life-threatening effects: “For us to continue fighting back, we need to have a will and inspiration greater than ourselves.”
This is the second time that Chad will be arrested for fighting alongside the Lumad people in their fight for land and for self-determination. The first was in year 2017, when he strongly condemned the Martial Law in the region of Mindanao, joining a lightning protest which resulted in the unjust arrest of him and seven other people.
In the middle of the online interview for a project regarding the Anti-Terror Law, we repeatedly heard feedback and disruption on the line. “We are being recorded,” he said. However, we disregarded all the intervening elements in the online setup. “Let them be, there is nothing illegal in discussing these [the dangers of Anti-Terror Law and the alarming cases of red-tagging].”
Cases of state surveillance are not foreign to him and to the communities that he was organizing. They are consistent targets of red-tagging. He narrated that in a provincial peace and order council meeting in the CARAGA region, civil society organizations (CSO) reported that his face was being used by the local officials and military personnel to describe “terrorists” in the region. Seemingly ironic conduct for a place and event supposedly advancing peace.
“It is threatening, but this is a surface-level attack to extract us from our mandate to expose the state terrorism against the land of the Lumad people and the culture of impunity,” said Booc, referring to the red-tagging cases waged against him and the IP community. He was also a victim of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC)’s terrorist-naming, an office directly reporting under President Rodrigo Duterte.
Due to these life-threatening assaults against him and the Lumad people, he is one of the petitioners of the 26th petition against the ATL, representing the indigenous people alongside Samira Gutoc, Kakay Tolentino, Amirah Ali Lidasan, among many others.
This is the ravage brought by the Anti-Terror Law, it is continuously used to strengthen the legal apparatus of the state forces to justify violent crackdowns and irrational persecution. It is in no question, just like the unity of the petitioners against ATL: all of us are terrorists under this law and regime.
Notably, the first to be charged of the Anti-Terror Law were indigenous people on September 14, 2020. Two Aetas, Jasper Gurung, 30, and Junior Ramos, 19, were accused of being terrorists, reportedly tortured, and allegedly forced to confess that they are part of the New People’s Army (NPA). Under the hands of the military, Gurung and Ramos recalled being beaten repeatedly and were forced to eat their own feces.
In another case, taking impunity into the account: no one is being held accountable yet for the massacre of 9 Tumandok leaders with 17 individuals illegally arrested and charged with illegal possession of firearms — another worn-out lie against the human rights defenders and the marginalized sectors. Not only lives were taken but this hapless incident on New Year’s Eve prompted the displacement of 16 communities, giving way to the impending construction of Jalaur Mega Dam — a giant project that Tumandok people were fighting against for more than five years.
Threadbare at it is, these cases of raiding indigenous people communities bring nothing but violence. The badges of the state forces were all blood-stained, adding to their persistent denial of their brutality. It is easy for them to brand activists, human rights defenders, and indigenous people as terrorists when they have all the rifles and bullets to frame one.
Recalling the community experience and systematic scope, Bakwit schools, coming from its colloquial term “evacuate”, are established to reinforce education and community livelihood as they struggle against the displacement caused by the large-mining corporations’ takeover to the ancestral domain and the militarization to defend these corporations and big business ventures.
Chad was right that we should not deter from looking at these cases, from individual to systematic level. “These are shreds of evidence of state terrorism,” he said. When he mentioned that red-tagging is only the surface-level attack of the state; arrests, torture, death, and human rights violations were the bigger part of the iceberg. And for us to triumph all these, we should ensure that the collective resistance will grow big enough not only to remove the blanket of lies that hide the state terrorism on sight but to capacitate ourselves to strike back.
*The incident happened on February 15, 2021. A day before this story was published under The Catalyst.
