Based on the pronouncement of GMA and the members of her dubious ATC, there’s no stopping the implementation of HSA of 2007 come July 15 despite people’s protest to repeal it and multi-sectoral appeals to at least review the law. As GMA and her cohorts flaunt in the media, “it is timely to get the machinery going to go after suspected terrorists with the police more powerful, the law backing them.
This alarmed, but more so, outraged the civil society and the women’s organizations knowing that the law is as vague as ever, loose in its definition of terrorism as an act of sowing and creating a condition of widespread and extraordinary fear and panic among the populace. Looking closely at the nature of HSA, it should not be doubted that it is not just after the purported “barbaric terrorists” but that it salivates over progressive organizations posing immediate and strategic threats to the US-Arroyo regime being in pursuit of genuine democracy in the land thus, dislodging the interest of the current tandem.
HSA of 2007, patterned after US and Great Britain’s anti-terror bills is first, GMA’s bargain to her boss, the USA, for more military funding in a form of debt which will advertently burden even more the Filipino people; and second, it is the current regime’s systematic way of going after US-Arroyo’s critics and activists legitimately airing grievances of the different sectors. After United Nation reprimanded GMA for the unaccounted and justice-denied political killings in the country in which DOJ’s Raul Gonzales blasphemously called UN convoy Philip Alston “muchacho” of this entity, here comes another Frankenstein creation which like all its predecessors will be rejected by the people with, this time, mere vehemence.
GABRIELA is one with the people in staunchly opposing the implementation of HSA, a stinking, smelly creation of US-Arroyo regime that mock the Filipinos’ inherent right to freedom and democracy. It calls for the junking of the law knowing that more Jonas Burgos will disappear, more political activists will be brutally killed, and more women and human rights advocates will suffer at the hands of the callous armed men, and the Filipino people more degraded and robbed of their dignity, of whatever shred of democracy left.
Reincarnation of martial law? Certainly and perhaps, even worse.