Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Free the 43 Health Workers
Alliance of Health Workers (AHW

PRESS RELEASE
February 9, 2010

References:

Emma Manuel, National President, 09178008634
Robert Mendoza, PRO, 09183186377

We, health workers from different hospitals, clinics and institutions nationwide, strongly condemn the illegal arrest of 43 health workers in Morong, Rizal. We are angered by the inhumane treatment and torture of our fellow health workers at the hands of the supposed “protectors” of the Filipino people. We hold the military and police men under their Commander-in-Chief Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) responsible for this open brutality against the health workers who are serving the Filipino people.

The 43 health workers were arrested under a false warrant during a health training on February 6, at 7:00 am by a composite team of 300 military and police men from the Philippine Army's 2nd Infantry Division and Rizal Philippine National Police headed by Col. Aurelio Baladad and Supt. Marion Balonglong. They were charged with illegal possession of firearms and explosives. They were held incommunicado for more than 48 hours and bore signs of torture.

Two of the health workers are community doctors who are serving poor patients through medical missions and regular clinics. Dr. Merry Mia-Clamor and Dr. Alex Montes treated hundreds of patients in Rizal, Bulacan, and Metro Manila communities affected by Typhoons Ondoy & Peping last year. The doctors are members and staff of Council for Health & Development and Community Medicine Development Foundation that spearheaded the National Health Training.

Gary Liberal is a head nurse of the Operating Room of Jose R. Reyes Memorial Medical Center (JRRMMC) in Manila. He is the National Auditor of the Alliance of Health Workers (AHW), the Union President of JRRMMC Employees Union, and is a board member of Operating Room Nurses Association of the Philippines (ORNAP). He has served as a nurse in JRRMMC for almost 18 years and was one of the instructors during the health training.

Lydia Obera, one of the 43 health workers, is a teacher by profession, and is a community health worker for more than 20 years serving in different non-government health institutions. She is a staff of the national office of AHW.

Drs. Merry and Alex, Gary and Lydia, together with others shared their knowledge, skills, and time to the community health workers, in response to the increasing need for trained health personnel in the countrysides. The 43 health workers are serving the most deprived and far-flung communities, long time neglected by the Philippine government.

With this illegal arrest & detention, the GMA government through its most rabid military and police officers are attacking not only the health workers but the poor Filipino people sick and dying in poor communities. They are depriving again and again the poor Filipino majority of the most needed services provided by these health workers. In time, they will face the wrath of the united Filipino people.

We call on all service-oriented, freedom-loving people in the Philippines and other countries to make a stand, resist the attack against the health workers, against our health and our rights.

Free the 43 health workers now!
Hold the GMA government accountable to these human rights violations!
Continue the struggle for better health for the Filipino people!

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Notes: The All U.P. Workers Union, Manila Chapter is an affiliate of the Alliance of Health Workers (AHW). The AHW is a labor center primarily catering to Public Health Workers. It has more than 20,000 members in more than 30 affiliate unions, public health employees associations and individual members nationwide
 

Immediate release demanded for framed-up doctors, health workers
Date:
9 February 2010
Reference Person:  Elmer "Bong" Labog, KMU Chairperson
Contact information: 0929-629-3234
 

Fascism evolves anew under Arroyo

Kilusang Mayo Uno joins the clamor for the immediate release of the 43 health workers, including doctors, framed-up and detained for three days now by Rizal military and police.

Around 300 soldiers and police forcibly raided on Saturday morning the compound of Dr. Melecia Velmonte, where training is being conducted for volunteer doctors and health practitioners for community health work. They were accused as NPAs and guilty of illegal possession of firearms. But before any warrant of arrest was shown to them, the training participants were lined up, frisked, blindfolded, and hand-cuffed. After which, the military allegedly found C4 explosives, guns, grenades and landmines in the compound. The health workers were brought to Camp Capinpin in Rizal and held incommunicado until present.

The charges and framed up evidences against the health workers are obviously baseless, and were concocted to suppress health workers aligned with the critics of the Arroyo administration. These doctors and health workers do health service in far flung and poverty stricken communities – areas where government’s social services are hardly felt.

The frame-up and mass arrest demonstrate how Arroyo’s fascism evolves in a vain effort to crush the people’s movement for genuine social change. From extra-judicial killings, abductions, and black propaganda, Arroyo’s Oplan Bantay Laya took on a new form two years ago with the massive cases of trumped up criminal charges filed against progressive militants, mostly from Southern Tagalog also. Last year, some militants experienced being harassed to death by military agents. Now, it seems that frame-up is the newest method of the regime to quell opposition and sow terror among the public.

The incident, an unprecedented one, also proves that no one is spared under the regime’s bloody campaign. Since 2001, the US-Arroyo regime has already victimized journalists, lawyers, and doctors – professions that supposedly enjoy safety under a democracy.

From concocting criminal charges to concocting evidences as bases for detention, the US-Arroyo regime is sending a message that it is hell-bent in its ambition to end rebellion before its term ends in a few months. We are sending, however, a clearer message: As long as oppression, injustice, and poverty is perpetrated by the ruling classes of this society, resistance and the progressive movement will only get stronger.

What the military has done to the doctors and health workers should incite the strongest condemnation and action. They have offered their knowledge and skills in sincere service to the masses. As they are detained and kept from continuing their noble cause, let us enjoin more people to take action for their immediate freedom, and for the genuine liberation of the masses they have served. #

Friday, February 12, 2010
Have you cured Ka Roger?,’ other shockers
By DJ Yap
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:50:00 02/12/2010

THE INTERROGATOR’S taunt outraged Dr. Merry Mia Clamor as she sat blindfolded, her hands cuffed, in a room she could not describe, facing somebody she could not see.

The disembodied voice had sneered: “Ginamot mo na ba ang buni ni Ka Roger (Have you cured Ka Roger’s ringworm yet)?”

The 33-year-old physician did not reply.

“I was shocked. I could not say anything,” she told the Inquirer Thursday in her first interview with the media since she and 42 other health workers were arrested on Feb. 6 in Morong, Rizal, on suspicion of links with communists.

The interrogator was apparently referring to Gregorio Rosal aka Ka Roger, the spokesperson of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

The 43 detainees, including two doctors and other health professionals, were finally allowed to confer with their lawyers belonging to the National Union of People’s Lawyers and of the Public Interest Law Center in their tightly guarded detention cells at Camp Capinpin in Tanay, Rizal.

The eight lawyers led by Edre Olalia were assisted by Commission on Human Rights (CHR) Chair Leila de Lima.

Presumption of innocence

At a meeting with Brig. Gen. Jorge Segovia, the commander of the 2nd Infantry Division, De Lima said the military’s treatment of the detainees did not meet human rights standards.

“Even assuming that they are really all NPAs (New People’s Army, the armed wing of the CPP), they still have rights. All civil and political rights are still available to them, especially the constitutional presumption of innocence,” De Lima said.

To which Segovia replied: “The presumption of innocence that applies to NPAs should also apply to our soldiers… As far as our officers are concerned, they’re only trying to do their job.”

Earlier, the CHR accused the military of subjecting the 43 detainees to “psychological torture”—a charge Segovia denied.

'It’s a shame’

Clamor said she was teaching volunteers first aid and other basic medical procedures at a health training seminar in the early morning of Feb. 6 when she and the other health workers were arrested.

She said her unseen interrogator’s question served to trivialize her efforts.

“I was doing this with the purest intention—to train volunteers and to give them skills so they themselves can help others in their community,” Clamor said.

“It’s a shame… I chose to stay here in the Philippines instead of going abroad. I chose to stay [despite] the knowledge it would be a thankless job,” she said.

Clamor said that as a member of the Council for Health and Development (CHD), she had taken part in medical missions and other health training seminars in Rizal, Bacolod, Negros and Iloilo.

Logistics

Segovia said the detainees had not been allowed to see their lawyers until Thursday largely because of a logistical problem.

He said it was the biggest number of arrests of “underground personalities,” and that Camp Capinpin had no ready facility to accommodate all 43 health workers.

The military also needed to process the detainees’ identities, he said.

Olalia at one point objected to the “underground” tag, prompting Segovia to rephrase his remark by adding “alleged.”

Another problem, according to Segovia, was that some of the detainees refused to reveal their identities, and their lawyers also did not provide the right names to the military custodians when seeking permission to meet their clients.

But Olalia said the right of a person to see a lawyer upon arrest was so crucial that denying it constituted a serious breach of human rights.

‘Violated’

“We felt violated. We were illegally arrested. We were questioned without a lawyer present,” Clamor said from her cell.

Recalling her first night in detention, she said the questioning was relaxed at first, with the interrogator asking where she worked, what she did, and so on.

But the tone turned hostile as the night wore on.

When she said she did not want to answer any more questions without a lawyer, she was told: “You’ll be long gone before your lawyer comes.”

Husband Karapatan exec

But while she had initially been denied access to a lawyer, Clamor said her husband, Roneo Clamor, was granted permission to see her.

“He took it in stride. He’s used to situations like this,” she said of her husband, the deputy secretary general of the human rights group Karapatan.

Clamor said she did not experience rough treatment from the soldiers except during the arrest, when they pointed long firearms at her and the others and ordered them to lie on their bellies.

“We appreciate the handling of the female guards,” she said.

In an interview with reporters, Segovia insisted that all 43 detainees were NPA members.

The military provided reporters a list of the detainees, including name, aliases, addresses, age, educational attainment, schools and “position” in the NPA.

Clamor’s position was listed as “national level.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

Online campaign

The Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has launched an online campaign for the release of the 43 health workers.

In a letter posted on Tuesday on its website (http://www.ahrchk.net/ua/mainfile.php/2010/3362/), the AHRC said two of the 43, Janice Javier and Franco Romeroso, were illegally held from September 2008 to June 2009 and tortured by state forces to admit that they were NPA members.

The two were released for lack of evidence but were rearrested, along with Yolanda Caraig, in Morong Rizal, on Feb. 6, the AHRC said.

It also named Clamor of the CHD, Dr. Alex Montes of the Community Medicine Development Foundation, nurse Gary Liberal, midwife Teresa Quinawayan, and other members of the CHD staff as among those arrested.

The AHRC listed the case under its “urgent appeal” desk, which, it said, was a tool “to create an international support network and open venue for action.”

It expressed the hope that the letter would reach United Nations representatives, national human rights commissions, court houses and government officials.

The AHRC suggested that the letter also be sent individually to President Macapagal-Arroyo, CHR Chair De Lima and other government officials by fax or mail.

Melissa Roxas’ case

In a separate statement dated Feb. 7, the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan chapter in Canada said it was “demanding the immediate and unconditional release” of the 43 health workers.

The group said the arrests were “reminiscent” of the alleged torture suffered by US citizen Melissa Roxas in May 2009 in the Philippines, when she was abducted while on a medical mission.

With a report from Maricar Cinco, Inquirer Southern Luzon
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