Close encounters
As I watched the Senate hearing on extra judicial killings early this week, I went back in time, some 20 years ago, when I headed the human rights and peace education program of the Benigno S. Aquino Foundation, now known as the Ninoy and Cory Aquino Foundation. Our aim was to work with the Philippine Public Safety College to inculcate peace and human rights values in the training of police officers.
I recruited Feliece Yeban, a top-rate human rights educator from the Philippine Normal University, and the late Babes Lioanag, a compassionate psychologist, to develop the curriculum for the PNP. With their facilitators, we went to several places in the country to conduct five-day interactive workshops for middle to top level officers. We learned a lot in those close encounters with the police, but our most intense experience was with a group of chiefs of police at a workshop in Antipolo.
They were a well-bonded group of tough police officers who, we immediately saw, were only forced to join the workshop by their superiors. They eyed us – an all-woman team – with cynicism, and decided that they would grin and bear it, perhaps humor us, and have some fun away from their usual routine at work.
But the workshop was not anything they expected. There were no outright lectures on human rights. Instead, we had games and exercises, chi-gong and meditation, and discussions that made them look into themselves and recognize their own humanity. It was analytical and deeply personal. Slowly, we saw their defenses break down and we were soon relating like old friends and trusted confidantes.
Our participants had graduated from the military and police academies during the martial law years. They cut their teeth as law enforcers operating in a dictatorship. Now, after EDSA, the rules were different, there was all this talk of human rights and dignity, and frankly, they were perplexed. It has been almost 20 years since we worked together in that workshop, and the officers are now retired.We have lost track of each other. But their stories, so human and so disturbing, have remained with the team.
They admitted that they committed human rights violations during and after the martial law years in the course of their work. Feliece recalls their story that when they were ordered to prove the body count they claimed during their sorties, they cut off one ear of their victims and kept these in an empty bottle of Nescafe to show to their superiors.To be able to live with what they were ordered to do, many of the men turned to drugs and alcohol.
Many were traumatized and dehumanized. However, there was no psychological support available to them. As Feliece wrote on Facebook recently, Paolo Freire was right: Oppression is dehumanizing for both the victims and the oppressors.
Feliece recalled that during one of our sessions, an officer broke down and wept uncontrollably remembering how he had summarily killed someone and buried him. Although it happened a long time ago, he now thought of the family of the person who he had made to disappear. It happened that one of our facilitators had a relative who had disappeared. As it turned out, they were talking about the same person. It was a precious moment of closure for both of them.
From our interaction with the police, we realized that getting them to respect and observe human rights is not only a matter of converting their hearts and minds to human rights values. Feliece observed rightly that for them to be able to uphold human rights in practice, the police must have ample support in terms of skills, equipment and legal and psychological services.
For example, they had to know how to handle their firearms correctly and shoot straight. However, we were told that they never had enough bullets for target practice, so when they found themselves in a life or death situation, the tendency was to shoot first, often overdoing it without meaning to. And in a bind, faced with charges or murder or homicide, they had to find and pay for their own defense lawyers on their meager salaries. This was why, we realized, policemen planted evidence or salvaged their victims, to be sure they came out of such situations clean. It was also why they made money on the side from illegal gambling and other rackets.
With little institutional support and an unprofessional workplace, they were expected to uphold the highest standards of professionalism and human rights.
This week, as senators lectured the PNP chief and peppered him with questions on how the police establishment works, I realized that not much has changed in the PNP. Try as its chief to shape it into a professional force, the old practices of torture, salvaging, planting of evidence and other short-cuts, along with making easy money on the side, through extortion and peddling of illegal drugs, continue to exist.
And human rights are back as the prime “enemy” of law enforcement. As a human rights educator, I know we reached individuals, but it seems our workshops hardly had an effect on the institution. Now the police are at the forefront of the president’s war on drugs and they are ordered to win it at all cost.
Our law enforcers have a job to do, but to do it right, they need deep institutional support in terms of training and equipment, knowledge, and psychosocial and legal services, not to mention orientation in the values of human life and dignity – their own and their targets.’ Without such support, it will be a continuing bloodbath covered up by the usual excuses. With the horrible job given them, they will only continue to be dehumanized.
