Phl now 2nd deadliest for environment activists

BAGUIO CITY – The Philippines was declared the second deadliest country for land and environmental defenders in the world and deadliest in Asia last year, according to international advocacy group Global Witness together with British daily The Guardian.

Citing 41 land and environmentrelated killings recorded in 2017, the tag was highlighted with “a broader crackdown by the country’s president, Rodrigo Duterte, as the key factor” in the sharp spike in murders of defenders opposing mainly big mining and plantation interests.

From third in 2016, the Philippines, Global Witness said, worsened to second deadliest country as “we faced the bloodiest year ever for environmental defenders.”

“Duterte’s crackdown against dissenters and critics clearly aimed to systematically uproot communities standing in the way of coal blocks, metal explorations and agribusiness ventures,” said Leon Dulce, deputy national coordinator of the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment.

Kalikasan PNE is among the local partner organizations of Global Witness.

The tag cited the case of indigenous lumad chieftain Victor Danyan and seven other tribe members reportedly killed by a composite team of Philippine Army troopers from the 27th and 33rd Infantry Battalions last Dec. 3.

The eight T’boli-Dulangan lumad, which also included Danyan’s sons Victor Jr. and Artemio, were reportedly tending to the agricultural lands they had occupied in defiance of the alleged land grabs of the DMCI company’s large-scale coffee plantation and a proposed 2,000-hectare coal mine, both located within their claimed ancestral lands.

The military claimed Danyan and his fellow lumad were New People’s Army rebels. According to a fact-finding mission held last Dec. 16-17 by Kalikasan PNE’s regional network Alliance for Genuine Development and human rights group Karapatan, the incident was “a massacre of civilians.”

According to Dulce, the Commission on Human Rights in Region 12 subsequently affirmed the mission findings in docketing the massacre as a martial law-related case.

“Until communities are genuinely included in decisions around the use of their land and natural resources, those who speak out will continue to face harassment, imprisonment and the threat of murder,” Global Witness senior campaigner Ben Leather told The Guardian.