Keep red-baiter Etta Rosales away from CHR – KMU

“Why appoint Akbayan party-list chair emeritus Etta Rosales, who has sounded like military butcher Jovito Palparan in linking legal progressive groups to the Communist movement, to the Commission of Human Rights?”

This was the reaction of labor center Kilusang Mayo to  news that Rosales, a rabid anti-communist agitator and red-baiter, is President Noynoy Aquino’s choice for the CHR post which Leila de Lima formerly held.

“For the longest time, Rosales has toed the military’s line in dismissing the extra-judicial killings of activists and civilians under the Arroyo regime as mere result of ‘internal purging’ among communist ranks, and that legal progressive organizations are linked to the CPP-NPA-NDF. Appointing her to the commission which should solve the killings with impartiality is highly unreasonable if not insane,” KMU executive vice-chairman Lito Ustarez said.

“Even during the visit of UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston to probe the bloody human rights violations under Arroyo, Rosales was on the side of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, echoing the line that the killings were part of the internal purging being undertaken by the Communist Party of the Philippines.” 

“When she chaired the House Committee on Human Rights during the 13th Congress, Rosales merely sat on hundreds of resolutions seeking investigations into extra-judicial killings since 2001,” the labor leader added.

Ustarez recalled that in January 2007, Rosales and Akbayan Party-list released a statement asserting that “Bayan Muna continues to express sympathy towards the NDF.”

In 2004, Rosales’s partymates in Akbayan accused KMU, Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), Cordillera People’s Alliance (CPA), Migrante, among others, “as groups that are associated or working closely with the CPP.”

In the 2010 elections, Akbayan senatoriable Risa Hontiveros-Baraquel said something similar: “It is actually their refusal to condemn the atrocities and abuses of the CPP-NPA that indirectly helps human rights violators like Palparan to commit further abuses.”

 “Such McCarthysist red-baiting is what the military uses to legitimize the black propaganda and brutal killings that it undertakes against members of progressive party-lists and people’s organizations.”

KMU said it will campaign for Rosales’s non-appointment to the CHR. “The Commission on Human Rights right now needs someone who has the resolve to hold the perpetrators of extra-judicial killings liable. Rosales clearly does not have that resolve. What she has is her fervor to link progressives with the CPP-NPA-NDF.”