Where Now for the Abusive AFP?
Where Now for the Abusive AFP?
To honor its electoral promises, the incoming US administration must confront the AFP, along with other agents of repression which have operated with impunity during the Bush years. Alston’s condemnation of that impunity was unmistakable, but the Pentagon, US Special Forces, and various intelligence agencies have ignored such criticism, promoting the Bantay Laya counterinsurgency program that runs roughshod over Human Rights and makes a mockery of any notion of a “democratic space”. The new Obama team in Washington, DC, has the opportunity to restrain the whole obscenity of counterinsurgency whether in Iraq or Afghanistan or Colombia or the Philippines. The Obama revolution won’t have achieved much if it cannot guarantee people in these troubled countries the freedom to practice democracy – or their own version of it – without the endless fear of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.
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