AJLPP Express Dismay On Cardinal Rosales’ Statements Against Human Rights and People’s Interests

Los Angeles --The Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines (AJLPP) based in the United States express its utmost dismay when they heard that Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales of the Catholic Church in the Philippines blamed both the US-Arroyo regime and the revolutionary forces in the Philippines as guilty of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and frustrated assassinations of hundreds upon hundreds of Filipinos.

Mario Santos, AJLPP National Corodinator stated that: "We were furthered alarmed and dismayed when he (Rosales) called these political killings as “gatingga (Tagalog for a “mere speck”.)

We found this statement as profane, gross and revolting as the abuses of the Catholic Church in the United States that they tried to cover up and now that are trying to pay. What Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales implied that military forces could engage in the aforesaid human rights violations on the false assumption that their revolutionary opponents do likewise is so unwise and unjust. "

Santos also said: " The AJLPP is sad that this sweeping statement of Cardinal Rosales truly emboldens the practitioners of state terrorism and inflames the civil war that is going on in the Philippines.

The human rights issue that has been resounding for some time in the Philippines and internationally is whether the military and the police forces of the Philippine reactionary state have the right to engage in extrajudicial killings, abductions and other gross human rights violations victimizing unarmed civilians.

It is highly anomalous and revolting that Cardinal Rosales has allowed himself to be a tool of the Arroyo regime in trying to counter the recent verdict of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, the US Senate hearing and the statement of UN Special Rapporteur Prof. Philip Alston.

Will Cardinal Rosales be the new Father Damaso or Father Salvi of the Dr. Jose Rizal novels during the anti- Spanish colonial period? Will he stooped to the level of AFP General Hermogenes Esperon who like Fr. Damaso ordered the digging of the grave of Crisostomo Ibarra’s father and to throw it at the Pasig River?

This is what General Esperon and the Gonzales group is doing to present skulls and bones and dig old graves as “evidences” against progressive party list representatives of BAYAN MUNA, ANAKPAWIS and GABRIELA Women’s Party lists groups.

We in the AJLPP, hope that in the near future, Cardinal Rosales finds the courage of Cardinal Sin who tried to be the pastor for the poor and the weak. Not be the collaborator for the rich and powerful, the shepherd of the black flock in Malacanang, Camp Came and Camp Aguinaldo." Santos ended.

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