Philippines extends martial law

PHILIPPINES — The Philippine Congress on Wednesday approved a request from President Rodrigo Duterte to extend martial law on the southern island of Mindanao for another year, which the president said was needed to fight armed groups there.

Mindanao was placed under martial law in May, after local militants backed by the Islamic State seized the city of Marawi. After months of fighting, the government declared victory there in October. But Mr. Duterte said Friday that a yearlong extension of martial law was needed to ensure the “total eradication” of militancy in Mindanao, an impoverished region where various armed groups have been active for decades.

Both houses of Congress approved Mr. Duterte’s request overwhelmingly, despite opposition lawmakers’ warnings that martial law was no longer needed and that to extend it risked eroding constitutional values. The martial law edict gives the military widespread powers, including the ability to carry out warrantless arrests and set up roadblocks and checkpoints. The president’s request for an extension came shortly after he halted efforts to reach a peace deal with the underground Communist Party of the Philippines, whose armed unit, the New People’s Army, has stepped up attacks in remote communities on Mindanao and elsewhere. Harry Roque, a presidential spokesman, said Wednesday that the extension of martial law was needed to fight “the communist terrorists and their coddlers, supporters and financiers” and to “ensure the unhampered rehabilitation of war-torn Marawi and the lives of its residents.”

In his request to Congress, Mr. Duterte said that while Islamist militants had been beaten back from Marawi, military intelligence had tracked Islamic State-linked gunmen spreading to other parts of Mindanao, the country’s main southern island and home to the only substantial Muslim population in the overwhelmingly Catholic Philippines. Mr. Duterte said these groups had stepped up their recruitment and “radicalization” activities.

Rights groups and opposition politicians have criticized Mr. Duterte’s request to extend martial law, warning that the authoritarian president was setting the stage for an eventual declaration of military rule across the entire country. Mr. Duterte has raised that possibility before. Francis Pangilinan, the leader of the opposition in the Senate, argued that the victory in Marawi ended the need for continued military rule. He said that if Congress agreed to extend martial law, “we will be in danger of becoming the monsters that we seek to defeat, those who have no regard for law, order or respect for the Constitution.”

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, arguing the president’s position in Congress, said that such perceptions were “far from what’s happening on the ground” in Mindanao, where the armed forces have reported that militancy is spreading.

(nytimes)