Thank you for that question.
I would immediately take out the Abu Sayyaf. For me, at least, it has no political ideology to speak of. It is a group of bandits. However, with two other rebel groups, the government actually has signed agreements or treaties.
With the NDF, the government has signed what is called CARHRIHL, or an agreement to respect international humanitarian law and human rights in the conduct of their war, an application of the Geneva Convention. That's with the NDF. With the MILF, as probably you've heard, the government has recently had the framework of a peace agreement.
As a human rights lawyer, before I became a parliamentarian, we actually studied the accusations and charges of the victims, and the families of the victims, that it was the military who committed these acts. We found three evidentiary tracks in these killings.
First, these victims are usually officially vilified by the military—in PowerPoint presentations, in public squares—publicly saying that these persons are, as they sometimes call them, destabilizers. At most, they call them terrorists, or communists. In the Philippines, if you're called a communist, you really can die. The person who's vilified, whether an activist or an environmental advocate or an anti-mining advocate or a church leader, will die or disappear one or two months later.
The second evidentiary track we noticed was the impunity with which the crimes were committed. These crimes were committed in broad daylight, most of them, at least, in public squares, in town plazas, as if the perpetrator was not afraid at all of being accosted by the authorities and the police.
The third evidentiary track we noticed was the complete lack of interest on the part of the military or the police to investigate and prosecute the offenders. This is one evidentiary track that leads us to believe, and to believe the charges of the families of the victims, that the paramilitary units, at the very least, or the military, are involved, or at least government personnel are.
Of course, there are also other cases now where the military was arrested. Perhaps I can take a short amount of time to discuss the case of Benjamin Bayles, a lay leader of a church in the Philippines. He was shot on June 14, 2010. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, it was the same modus operandi, Mr. Sweet. Two armed men on a motorcycle, wearing helmets, shot him at three in the afternoon. They were arrested by the police. Once they were arrested, they were accused and charged with the murder.
During a budgetary deliberation, because of the claims of the family of Bayles that these persons were actually army members, despite the fact that the two accused claimed they were mere fishermen, and they used fake names, I was able to wrangle from the Secretary of National Defense an admission that indeed the murder of Benjamin Bayles, a member of the church, an activist of the church, was perpetrated by the Philippine army. In fact he was forced to mention the name, rank, and serial number of both of the accused in the killing. Recently it has been officially declared so by the court.
In any case, there have been such allegations by the families, and we believe both: the evidentiary tracks, which could be called circumstantial evidence, and overwhelming circumstantial evidence at that, and of course the direct implication, as in the case of Benjamin Bayles.
I would like to add that even the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, for example, has actually issued a warning statement. It did not mention Canada or TVI, but it did mention mining operations in Mindanao, especially in the ancestral lands of the Moro people, warning them from conducting such mining operations.
To a large degree, the perception has always been that the paramilitary groups committed these crimes.