Far From Neutral Notions - Philippine politics, culture and stuff

This absolutely blew me away. I know I should pay more attention to who’s who and what’s what, but never - ever - in a million years would I have thought that Enrile, the architect of Martial Law, was the chairman of the Senate human rights committee. That’s beyond absurd, that’s ludicrous.

It seems Enrile had harsh words for UN human rights investigator Phillip Alston, saying “don’t lecture to us about how to handle an insurgency problem”, because the senator apparently considers himself an expert in the field. I’ll say. In his tenure as Marcos’ Defense Minister, he staged a phony assassination attempt on himself to kick start Martial Law, during which, in it’s 9 years of implementation (1972-1981), a conservative estimate of over 1,600 people have disappeared, and thousands more detained. With the Marcosian way the Gloria administration handles it’s critics, I daresay the reason why Enrile hasn’t initiated a Senate inquiry on the matter is fairly obvious; after all, it’s precisely what he did, decades earlier.

Popularity: 2% [?]