For the second time, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) defied a Commission on Human Rights (CHR) order to present the “Morong 43” at the hearing on their complaint of human rights violations.
AFP and PNP lawyers tried to move for a suspension of the proceedings citing the absence of a court order for transporting the 43. They also claimed they tried to secure a court order but were overtaken by the Holy Week break, to which Comm. Cecilia Rachel Quisumbing responded
that they should have prioritized the matter.
Atty. Romeo Capulong of the Public Interest Law Center (PILC) and the National Union of People's Lawyers (NUPL) argued that the AFP and the PNP do not need a court order to present the 43 health workers before the CHR. He said there appeared to be a “willful violation” of the Commission's order.
Eventually the CHR, through Chairwoman Leila de Lima, decided to cite the respondent military and police officials for contempt, and ruled that the hearing should proceed.
Dr. Melecia Velmonte took the witness stand and confirmed that she owns the farmhouse at 266 E. dela Paz St., Brgy. Maybangcal, Morong, Rizal, where the 43 health workers were “arrested.” When De Lima noted that P/Supt. Marion Balonglong of the Rizal Provincial Police had testified during the March 18 hearing that the said house had been “validated” by PO3 Arnel Tarasona as belonging to Mario Condes, Dr. Velmonte said there is no Mario Condes among the house's occupants, nor in their neighborhood.
Dr. Velmonte also confirmed that the activity held at the farmhouse was a health training, in which she was among the lecturers. She said she did not notice anything like firearms, ammunition and explosives during the two times she was present in the farmhouse as the health training was ongoing, which were on Feb. 1 and 5.
In her account of the AFP-PNP raid which led to the “arrest” of the 43 health workers, Dr. Velmonte said that when she arrived at the farmhouse early morning of Feb. 6, she saw several vehicles including Army trucks and PNP cars. Her sister later recited the license plate numbers of these vehicles.
Dr. Velmonte's son Jose Manuel confirmed his mother's testimony. He also said there were “more than 40” participants in the training, and that there was no change in the composition of the participants – except for “one or two” who left on Feb. 4 and were replaced by two, who were both males. He would also share that there were only two people – the driver and the one who regularly went to buy food at the town market – who regularly went out of the property. In so asserting, he belied Balonglong's claims during the March 18 hearing that there were “several people going in and out” of the property.
He also testified that when he was shown the warrant, he saw the name “Mario Condes” and denied knowing anyone by that name. Later on in the hearing, he said their family lives in a small neighborhood, where there is a Masikat Condez, but no Mario Condes.
Jose Manuel also said that before the searches done on their property, there were three officers who tried to make him sign what to him appeared to be a blank inventory form. The searches, he said, yielded a few firearms and grenades, as well as tin cans containing what looked like gravel to him whkich members of the raiding team claimed were “improvised landmines.” There were also boxes of what the raiders claimed was C4; he described their contents as looking like oily cubes of clay.
Both Dr. Velmonte and Jose Manuel said it never occurred to them that the health workers were members of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army (CPP-NPA) nor connected in any other way to the underground.
In the afternoon, Supt. Allan Nobleza – who is supposedly due to leave tomorrow for a one-year tour of duty as United Nations (UN) peacekeeper in Kosovo – was summoned to the hearing and asked to verify Balonglong's claim that he was the ground commander of the PNP team that raided the Velmonte farmhouse; he denied Balonglong's claim. Nobleza also claimed the warrant that was served on Feb. 6 was based on “intelligence information” that there were “suspected NPA members” and “suspicious persons” in the property – contradicting Balonglong's March 18 claim that there was no information on the alleged presence of any CPP-NPA member in the farmhouse.
The CHR decided to set the next hearing for sometime next week.
(Reported 12 April 2010)