Malaya Movement condemns State-Sanctioned Terror-Tagging
Statement on Recent Terror-Tagging of the Malaya Movement, US-based activists
It has been brought to our attention that the Malaya Movement has been tagged as a “communist front” both by the National Task Force to End Local Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) on its official Facebook page on May 29, 2020 and a Facebook page called For the Global Public on July 29, 2020 together with our allies from BAYAN-USA where it posted individual pictures of its national officers by similar Facebook pages.
We, from the Malaya Movement, condemn these posts, especially coming from an official government body. The terror-tagging of our organization by none other than the NTF-ELCAC and For the Global Public are intended to distract from legitimate issues and advocacies that we bring to the public. These are further proof of a systematic efforts by the Duterte regime and its agents to curtail dissent and suppress people’s rights.
Red-tagging, or terror-tagging, is a dangerous and oft-used tactic by fascist governments against individuals and organizations in an attempt to discredit them. In the Philippines, terror-tagging is used to justify harassment, arrests and assassination by state forces and its armed goons.
To cite a recent case. Zara Alvarez’ was terror-tagged and placed on a “terror-list” released by the Duterte regime in 2018, along with nearly 600 people, and her vicious assassination last week was a clear indication that these seemingly innonucuos acts are deadly. Brandon Lee, a U.S. citizen, was also a victim of this. For years he was vilified by state agents and members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines as an enemy of the state.
We also want to point out to the ongoing and rampant practice of disinformation and weaponization of social media by the Duterte regime through its troll army and his armed goons in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP). It continues to use social media platforms such as facebook to conduct disinformation and worse, terror-tagging, that has real life and deadly consequences, especially when the AFP and PNP treats this as a green light for assassination.
We demand that the NTF-ELCAC take down these malicious and baseless posts. We also call on our members and our supporters to continue to document and report these malicious Facebook pages who are engaged in disinformation and terror-tagging. They are instruments of repression by the Duterte regime.
Join us on the Global Day of Action against killings of human rights defenders on Sept, 7th.
