OP-ED EDITORIAL: OPINION / CARTOON – ‘Commensal relations’ – The Daily Tribune, Tuesday, March 27. 2018

A collusion between rights groups and drug lords to bring down President Duterte?
The possibility was raised by Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano although he said that non-government organizations (NGO) may have been unwittingly cooperating with narcotics syndicates in the anti-Duterte campaign.

The war on drugs of Rody has created enough turbulence to create an unlikely alliance between both groups.

Drug syndicates are frantic over the tight Philippine market where sales are drastically reduced as the crackdown continues.

The rights groups, in turn, harp on extrajudicial killings (EJK) which the political opponents of Rody such as Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV tries to periodically jack up and lately had claimed 20,000 summary executions supposedly by the police.

The actual number, however, is more than 3,000 deaths from legitimate anti-narcotics police operations.

Without giving names, Cayetano said NGOs were being unwittingly used by drug lords to demonize Rody.

NGOs such as the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) always append a solicitation message at the end of derogatory stories or statements on Rody which make it appear that the ultimate goal is to make money out of the mostly false allegations.

Without naming the groups, Cayetano said advocates who accused the administration of being behind summary killings and rights abuses were helping the cause of drug traffickers to frustrate Rody’s desire to rid the country of illegal drugs.

The commensal relations of rights groups and drug syndicates revolve around the use of the human rights mechanism that was supposed to assist the government in complying with human rights standards.

In the field of biology, a relationship among organisms in which one benefits from the other without serious effects on their true nature is called commensalism.

It is easy picking for traffickers to choose rights groups and by association, Rody’s critics, as cover for the effort to remove him from the Philippine equation.

It was easy to deduce that rights sensitive European countries will step up the pressure on Rody as the deaths in the war on drugs pile up.
It would not matter whether the deaths are indeed not undertaken by the police since the police forces being in the forefront of the campaign are liable to commit mistakes, which some say can also be induced by drugs money.

Cayetano said NGOs espousing human rights have become “big shots” in international conferences just by attacking Rody without exerting any effort to take an impartial look at the human rights situation in the Philippines.

The illicit relations among rights groups, Rody’s political foes and drug syndicates can be clearly illustrated in the recent trip of Trillanes in Austria to speak before United Nations (UN) Medication and Crime Convention, which was the same forum in which Vice President Leni Robredo made famous her “palit-ulo” video.

Trillanes in the forum did not represent himself but as a member of NRCNet which was the group that provided Robredo’s video to the UN body.

Robredo’s video cited the 7,000 deaths associated with the war on drugs that in turn Trillanes lawyer Jude Sabio used as basis for the filing of crimes against humanity charges against Rody before the International Criminal Court (ICC) which has nothing to do with the ICC preliminary examination of its prosecutor. The Sabio complaint was being used for political purposes by Trillanes and the yellows.
Trillanes nonchalantly admitted in a television interview that he did attend the UN forum in Vienna as representative of the NGO.

There is something strange in senator’s presence in the UN forum representing an NGO that advocates the legalization of drugs, the same way as rights groups suddenly became active and famous in keeping constant pressure on Rody.

In all these strange relations, the vile shadow of drug syndicates is ever present. / Written by  Tribune Wires  / Tuesday, 27 March 2018 00:00