Home > Op-ed | To bottom

NUJP to GMA: Rein in your troops, stop smear campaign

(Note: The following article was written by NUJP National Chairperson Inday Varona. Advocate’s Overview will resume on May 22).

Media organizations in this country have been doing their best to stem the killings and help the families of slain journalists. These groups have been monitoring investigation, providing information to law enforcers, crisscrossing between the executive and judicial branches of government, helping get protection for witnesses. For the living, they have been holding skills and ethics training, safety workshops, reporting threats and harassment to the proper bodies, and lobbying to turnaround economic and work conditions so conducive to the spread of corruption. If there is something Filipino journalists do not need these days, it is a “summit” to address the unabated killings of our colleagues.

A gabfest will not solve the problem. Law enforcement officials and the national leadership know the problem. In too many cases, the suspects and local officials and/or their henchmen, often active or retired cops or soldiers. When a journalist is killed for posing challenges to those in power, that in itself discourages citizens from bearing witness to the truth. In some cases where witnesses have stepped up, they, too, have found themselves under fire. The situation is worsened because witnesses in this country can expect little to nil protection for their role in advancing justice.

Witnesses cannot be enrolled in the witness protection program until a case goes to trial ­ when logic tells us that a case will never reach trial unless there are witnesses. These are problems no summit will resolve. Neither will threats and warnings eradicate these. Only a firm display of political will will discourage the collusion we have seen so far. Only a sustained campaign to protect witnesses will secure enough evidence and proof needed for the conviction of murderers. Certainly, ambivalence on the part of government officials can only encourage those who seek to silence media. We journalists begin to doubt this government’s sincerity when days after the President calls media an invaluable ally of democracy, her Armed Forces officials call us enemies of the state. Just when the Defense Department recalls that controversial presentation, acknowledging the “misimpression” it perpetrates, the chief of the AFP’s Northern Luzon command launches a book that categorically claims an underground communist group controls the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines. That is a barefaced lie and one that opens journalists to possible attacks from state security forces. The NUJP is tired of the double speak that emanates from Camp Aguinaldo.

If indeed the AFP has a functioning commander in chief, we challenge President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo: Rein in your troops. Tell them to stop this smear campaign. Silence in the face of these threats and harassment is a virtual declaration of war on media. Other proposed solutions raised by various sectors in government only highlight the culture of violence in this country. Media has no business seeking protection from rebels; they are interested parties to a long-running conflict that is a constant source of news. Arming journalists will not stop the murders. Certainly, gagging the press will not end the killings. If anything, laws that curtail press freedom will only embolden those who seek a cowed media. #

Home > Op-ed | Back to top