Episcopal News Service March 13, 2007
'Stones cry out' against suppression of Filipino progressives Hearings detail government-backed killings in Philippines
By Nan Cobbey
With their own lives very probably on the line, nine human rights activists from the Philippines this week told stories of government-sponsored terror at a series of public hearings in Washington, D.C., several of them sponsored by church organizations.
Three bishops and six leaders of justice-oriented organizations, a delegation sent to the United States by the National Council of Churches of the Philippines, testified during Ecumenical Advocacy Days March 9-12 to a deteriorating climate of fear in which friends and colleagues were being murdered in a campaign to eliminate activist leaders and silence their protests.
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.
''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.''
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. 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.
Full story and photo:
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_83474_ENG_HTM.htm
--Nan Cobbey is associate editor of Episcopal Life, the national newspaper of the Episcopal Church.
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