FFPS: Support the International Solidarity Mission

We hereby share a statement published by the Friends of the Filipino People in Struggle (FFPS) that we received.

Support the international solidarity mission and ramp up international solidarity with communities in the Philippines against state suppression!

FFPS strongly condemns the ongoing harassment, intimidation and surveillance of the International Solidarity Mission (ISM) by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), and other state forces.

Urgent reports and video-footage from the ISM show ongoing military harassment of the delegation in Rizal province. During a confrontation with the 80th Infantry Battalion of the Philippine Army (IBPA), soldiers demanded the names of the attending delegates. Given the US-Marcos regime’s record of red-tagging, blacklisting (the banning of international solidarity activists from entering the Philippines) and other forms of repression, such demands are clear intimidations and harassment of the mission. Throughout the day delegates were followed and photographed, and even now, as of this evening in the Philippines, soldiers remain stationed less than 20 meters from the facility where the delegates are staying.

From day one of the ISM, there has been a persistent trend of continuous harassment, intimidation and surveillance by state forces in most of the provinces that the mission is mobilizing to.

In Leyte, Eastern Visayas, a state operative in green plain-clothes, posing as a civilian, was spotted listening to the delegates’ conversations during their arrival. When the delegates confronted the operative and asked for identification, he admitted that he was part of a covert operation and refused to produce an ID. Such surveillance has continued throughout the mission in Leyte, including unnamed elements and intelligence agents of the AFP and Philippine National Police going to the place where the delegates are staying, at several times.

In Mindoro, the delegates faced threats and harassment at their campsite by elements linked to the NTF-ELCAC. The NTF-ELCAC is one of the main machineries of the US-Marcos’ regime’s crackdown and violent suppression of all forms of dissent through the whole-of-nation approach and the NAP-UPD [Translator’s note: National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development], just as it was of the previous administration.

All of these reports clearly show the US-Marcos regime’s attempts to thwart the just and urgent solidarity efforts of the mission. In essence these actually only further implicate the regime and its state forces, underscoring that they have something to hide. The ISM visits local communities to discuss and document cases of climate injustice and militarization, including IHL violations and other forms of suppression. If Marcos and his cronies had nothing to hide, there were no reason to suppress the missions.

At the same time, it underscores the importance of the mission. As highlighted by the Peoples Rising for Climate Justice (PRCJ) which organizes the ISM, “even as state agents threatened the delegates, the very presence of the mission proved a decisive win. The need for solidarity for affected communities by twin evils of climate injustice and militarism underscores the need to protect the environment and its defenders.”

With the implementation of a de-facto martial law in the countryside by the US-Marcos regime, these forms of state attacks that the mission faces, and worse forms of suppression, are experienced by the local communities on a daily basis. This is why it is so important for the ISM to help break through the military cordons around civilian rural villages and expose the crimes of the US-Marcos regime to the world.

Call To Action

As the US-Marcos regime intensifies its de-facto martial law and all forms of attacks on civilians, and its repression of the International Solidarity Mission, FFPS calls on everyone in the international community to support the ongoing solidarity efforts by amplifying their voices.

There is an urgent need for solidarity responses to these ongoing state attacks to help ensure that the mission can do its work, and to help promote all the findings of the ISM. These can be in the forms of solidarity statements, press releases and interviews, the printing and sharing of ISM (urgent and daily) reports, solidarity graffiti’s as well as other means to bring the Solidarity Mission outcomes to a bigger public. We also encourage everyone to widely share the reports by the PRCJ, by FFPS and other organizations involved in the solidarity mission.

As FFPS we are proud to participate in this important and concrete effort of international solidarity with communities in the Philippines affected by climate imperialism and militarism, and we call on everyone to stand with the delegates amidst suppression, and strengthen our support to the struggles of the Filipino people.

Previous post 22 Arrested in Combative Demonstration in Norway