JEDDAH, 23 February 2007 — THE ARROYO administration finally released the Melo Report to the public yesterday but not after much criticism from the press and politicians, and most notably after the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings released his findings to the press earlier this week.

The Melo Commission was formed last August to look into the spate of killings of left-wing activists and journalists. According to Karapatan, a Philippine human rights group, there have been 882 extrajudicial killings since President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo came to power in 2001, a number which includes the murder of 356 left-wing activists. The commission found what many people had already been saying for a long time — that a group of military officers were behind the killings. While neither the commission nor UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston said that President Arroyo had ordered these killings, it seems clear that neither did she do much to stop them or have them thoroughly investigated until now.

Human rights activists in the Philippines had long been asking the government to investigate and put a stop to these killings, but to no avail. Things got so desperate, what with the ongoing killings and the turning of a deaf ear by the Arroyo administration, that Filipino activists were forced to take their campaign for justice abroad to the European Union and the United Nations. When President Arroyo was preparing for a visit to Europe last year, she was told that the EU expected to raise their concern over the continued political killings in the Philippines. In August, Arroyo set up the Melo Commission to investigate the extrajudicial killings, and this she dutifully bragged about when she met with EU leaders in Finland and later in Britain the next month. Even then, EU leaders told her in no uncertain terms that she had to improve the human rights situation in the Philippines if her government expected to continue to receive European economic and technical aid and cooperation.

But all of these was being done extremely reluctantly and nearly in what I would call bad faith on the part of the Arroyo administration. Indeed, proof of this was the downright reluctance of President Arroyo to release the findings of the Melo Commission a few weeks ago to the EU and to the public, claiming that report was not yet final. To outside observers it just looked like the administration was stalling for time, hoping that it maybe could delay the release of the report until after the May elections.

What they had not seemed to have factored in was the appeal that Filipino activists made to the UN to investigate. The fact-finding visit of Alston to the Philippines to interview the families of murdered activists, and his subsequent comments to the press in which he said the military were responsible for a sizable number of the killings, left President Arroyo with no choice but to release the Melo Commission report and praise her own administration’s alleged cooperation with the UN and Alston.

But we now know that this is far from the truth. According to a report in the Daily Tribune presidential legal counsel Sergio Apostol asked Alston if he could delay the release of his findings until after the elections, to which Alston said “no.”

But more damning than that was the barrage of abuse that Alston was subjected to by Arroyo administration officials. Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez belittled Alston by calling him a hireling of the UN who is not even allowed into other countries, and claimed that the UN expert did not have the right to speak out on Philippine affairs because he had been in the country for only 10 days and had spoken to the leftists first.

But Alston has taken a serious look at the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines and his comments on what he observed are extremely telling. The Philippine military and Arroyo administration are in denial in insisting that they have nothing to with the killings, according to the rapporteur, and he added that the military had to seriously and thoroughly investigate accusations that some military officers were behind these killings, instead of just going through the motions of investigating.

Alston also pointed out that the accountability mechanisms put into place by the Philippine Congress and Constitution had to be restored by lifting Executive Order 464 and Memorandum Circular 108, which prohibit government officials from testifying in Congress without the written permission of the president.

The Philippine government and military have long held that the spate of extrajudicial killings were the doing of the communist New People’s Party through purges of suspected government spies from among its ranks. Alston said he did not believe this explanation and that the evidence presented by the military was “especially unconvincing.” While he admitted that the NPA had committed purges, he said that these killings would only account for 10 percent of all of the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.

The UN rapporteur also pointed out that there was a seriously low number of people implicated in extrajudicial killings who were even indicted on such charges. Alston pointed out that eight out of ten cases failed to move from police investigation to prosecution, showing a real lack of will on the part of the government in investigating and prosecuting such crimes.

The real test will now come with what the Arroyo administration actually does after the release of the Melo Report and Alston’s comments. As both have shown too clearly, the rhetoric of the Arroyo administration that it is vigorously pursuing the cases of extrajudicial killings is far from the reality of the government’s foot dragging and near total lack of action in this regard. The gap between rhetoric and action has never been so wide, nor so widely and publicly pointed out.

The Arroyo administration has a lot of work ahead of it to prove to the world and to the victims of such violence that it is serious in redressing the issue. I’m not very optimistic that it is sincere enough to be up to the task.

Let’s wait and see.

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