The Filipino people are under constant attack perpetrated by the US-Duterte administration. Since the start of the Rodrigo Duterte presidency, there has been almost 200 bombings, shellings and strafing all over the country. The destruction and damage to the lives, livelihoods and lands of the Filipino people demands the immediate attention and action of the international community.
The systematic attacks against civilians have become more vicious when in 2017 US-Duterte instructed its fascist forces: “Go ahead, flatten the hills”, and “I’ll bomb you, I’ll include your structures” referring to indigenous Lumad schools in the Mindanao hinterlands. Ever since, the AFP has indiscriminately dropped several hundreds of heavy bombs, hundreds of rockets and thousands of explosive shells in almost every region of the country. Each year, the number of these violations have increased – from 11 violations in 2017, 19 in 2018, 40 in 2019, 55 in 2020, to 68 in 2021.
It is the poor farmers’ and indigenous communities in the remote areas that are hit the hardest. Many have been killed. Tens of thousands have been forced to evacuate their communities and the environmental damage will take years to recover, if it will at all. As communities and mountains were targeted indiscriminately, houses, farmlands, farm animals, ancestral lands and hunting grounds have been destroyed, leaving hundreds of thousands of civilians without livelihood and source of subsistence. Moreover, the terror that these aerial bombings, shelling and strafing caused the Filipino people is unfathomable.
We join the Filipino People in Struggle to:
- Call for an immediate end to the bombings by the US-Duterte regime.
- Demand a stop to all arms sales and military aid to the US-Duterte Government.
- Demand that the US-Duterte government seriously heeds the people’s call for adequate COVID-19 response and social programs such as health care and education, instead of using public funds on war efforts against the Filipino people.