Palparan: Soldiers could be behind militant killings

Palparan: "Soldiers could be behind militants killings."

He said na probably "individual responses" raw yan ng mga iilang sundalo to avenge the death of their fellow soldiers at the hands of the NPA. Kaya pala hindi ma-solve solve ang iilan sa mga kaso sa pagpatay ng mga leftists. Understandably, there's a reluctance from the military and the admin to go after their own people.

Controversial Army Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan, commander of the Army’s 7th Infantry Division, yesterday admitted that soldiers could be behind the killings of left-wing activists but, he stressed, they were not ordered by the military leadership to do so.

“I am relatively to blame for the killings since I encouraged people to fight insurgency,” Palparan said.

Calling the killings as “individual responses,” he reckoned that the soldiers could be out to avenge the death of their brothers-in-arms in armed clashes with the communist New People’s Army (NPA).

Palparan also admitted that he had encouraged, too, people to take the law into their hands.

“But I cannot give the same order to my soldiers. I have encouraged people who were victimized to get even, but it’s their individual responsibility (to own up to the killings),” he said.

Whatever.

So you're saying na gumaganti ang sundalo sa NPAs by targetting leftist militants and critics labeled as communists? Why not go after those NPAs instead?

At kung may solidong ebidensiya naman kayo laban sa mga militants na yan, bakit hindi na lang sila kasuhan, instead of encouraging soldiers to go vigilante on them?

This permissive policy/culture of targetting leftists or critics labeled as communists coming from the top leaders of this administration is not very helpful, IMO.

Conrad de Quiros on Arroyo and Palparan:

Nothing to connect GMA to the killings? You have to have lost all sense of sight, hearing, smell, taste and feeling to mouth that. At the very least, what is government there for? There’s nothing more ludicrous—the kind that kills when you laugh—than GMA cajoling the witnesses in the killings to come out so she might stop the mayhem. And what, unless the witnesses materialize—something she herself has discouraged by stopping witnesses against her from appearing before the Senate—she is freed from the duty, the responsibility, the imperative, to stop the mayhem? And what, so that the witnesses, who will then have implicated themselves as being in the company of suspected NPA members, will become target practice for Palparan?