Fr Shay Cullen’s Reflections

What Are You Willing to Die For?’
by Fr Shay Cullen

Pope Francis in Korea, August 2014 [Wikipedia]

What are you willing to die for? was the very challenging question that Pope Francis presented to the thousands of Catholics from Korea and other Asian countries gathered for the beatification of 124 martyrs in Seoul, Korea on 16 August. And it is also challenging for all of us who claim to be Catholics and Christians. His message was clear in calling on the youth and people to reject a life of selfish gratification based on gross materialism and living for wealth alone and instead to strive for equality and  protect the poor and their human rights.

The Pope visited a Catholic home for the elderly and embraced some of them showing compassion and love. In Korea, as in many wealthy nations, there are serious pockets of neglect of the elderly. Although the Republic of Korea (South Korea) is one of the wealthiest nations in the world half of the old folk live in poverty. Instead of cherishing and respecting them all with a life of  dignity and sufficiency like western materialistic societies many of the senior citizens are marginalized and rejected as people of little value.

Many are locked away in retirement homes and some tied to beds and chairs and given  tranquilizer drugs that leave them in a state of semi-conscious stupor that accelerates dementia. New legislation in Belgium and Switzerland and the Netherlands allows them to be helped to kill themselves by ‘assisted suicide’.  Where will this trend end? Soon the practice could be for nasty relatives and government care-givers to bully and persuade them to kill themselves and not go on being a financial and medical burden to the rest of us. This is an attitude arising from loveless, selfish materialism.

The Pope reminded us that the early Catholics of Korea sacrificed themselves for their needy bothers and sisters, They knew the price of discipleship  . . . and were willing to make great sacrifices. The Pope pointed out that their love and courage  and rejection of the strict unbending and unequal social structure of their day is an inspiration for people alive today. Their belief in Jesus of Nazareth and his teaching of a Kingdom of love, equality and social justice led to their execution. The rich can’t stand talk of equality.

MV Sewol [Wikipedia]

Pope Francis’s compassion for the bereaved families of the hundreds of school children who drowned when the MV Sewol sank on 16 April this year showed through also when he and the organizers of the Mass of Beatification did not allow the authorities to drive away the protestors, one on hunger strike, demanding the truth about the sinking of the ferry. The Pope had met them in private and now embraced them in public. Bishop Peter Kang U-il of Jeju stated that to forcibly move people crying for justice in order to celebrate Mass simply could not happen – if it did the Mass would have no meaning.

When Pope Francis comes to visit the Philippines in January he will find many martyrs, including priests and pastors, human rights workers, who gave their lives  for the poor and exploited and who were executed by death squads run by military and local government officials.

St Andrew
Kim Taegŏn

First Korean priest, one of 103 Martyrs of Korea canonized by Pope St John Paul II in Soeul, May 1984. [Wikipedia]

One of the worst suspected and accused military generals, the darling of the previous government of President Gloria Arroyo who herself is in detention for plunder awaiting tria,l is retired Army Maj Gen Jovito Palparan Jr. He was arrested recently after more than two years on the run from the charges of allegedly running death squads wherever he was assigned around the Philippines and allegedly left a trail of blood of assassinated civilians who dared to criticize the government. Known as ‘The Butcher’ for these alleged crimes, he will be put on trial for the disappearance and suspected murder of two student activists.
Like the Korean martyrs we should be ready to give up some comforts of oureasy life and defend abused children and those poor people exploited by the rich one percent  that owns 70 percent of the Philippines. We need the spiritual commitment and belief in what is right and good and to be ready to put aside selfish desires and greed to help others in great need.

This is the heart of the Pope’s message. When Francis comes to the Philippines I hope he will not be feted and manipulated by glory-seeking rich elites and publicity-seeking politicos. He will, we hope, visit the poor and victims of abuse and survivors of last November’s Supertyphoon Haiyan/Yolanda. He will see little reconstruction of homes, schools and public services. Political corruption is still rife and raging wherever there is money to be stolen. His message will be equally challenging for sure and we will do well to heed it and act in solidarity with those in great need wherever they may be.

shaycullen@preda.org, www.preda.org

Solidarity for Philippine Fair Trade

by Fr Shay Cullen

Raw sugar production in the Philippines [Wikipedia]

Fairness and justice is what the poor and the oppressed need from those elected to protect and serve them.When the people are in greatest need and government officials turn away then the people have been betrayed, abandoned and left without help. This is what I experience every day in our struggle to get justice for the victims of human trafficking child sexual abuse. But there is little justice. The rich and powerful can buy their way out of their crimes. It happens also to the farmers and the urban poor that their oppressors kill with impunity.

That is what is happening to the Panay Fair Trade group in Panay island in the  central Philippines. Some members of the Panay Fair Trade Farmers’ Cooperative have been harassed, brutalized and their leaders assassinated. One day last March  Romy was with his mother-in-law at the public market when a motorcycle with two men drew close to him and opened fire, shooting him in the head. His mother-in-law went into shock and the killers escaped on the motorbike .They were only fifty meters from a police station. Romy Capalla, died on the spot. He paid the ultimate price for his solidarity with the poor. The same day fifteen kilometers away the small sugar mill of the farmers’ cooperative was mysteriously burnt to the ground by unknown arsonists. But the Philippine government has turned a blind eye to it all.

Trucks delivering sugarcane [Wikipedia]

The eyes of the world are not closed. A solidarity group of international observers for the Fair Trade movement from Europe and around the world will travel to Panay Island this August month in a demonstration of solidarity and support and also to speak out to the authorities to end the killing of the farmers and the leaders and respect human rights. The solidarity delegates will visit politicians, church leaders and speak with concerned groups to raise the awareness of the violations to human rights and the harm and great injustice done to the farmers.

The delegates from Europe, who include members of DWP and GEPA, Germany, and members of CTM Altromercatofrom Italy, together with thousands of Fair Trade supporters will join with the Philippine Fair Trade organizations such as Preda Fair Trade, CCAP and others to protest the violation of the human rights of the farmers and their families.

There are killer death squads assassinating farmers and one squad killed their leader Romy Capalla.

These are independent farmers growing sugar cane on the own land or as rightful tenants  and not part of the big sugar growing plantations. They have successfully broken away from the control of rich sugar barons who set a low payment for the sugar cane and a high price to mill it.

Cut sugarcane [Wikipedia]

This economic control causes the farmers to remain mired in cruel poverty and their children can’t go on to a better life. The farmers’ leaders and organizers are a dedicated group of human rights advocates and Fair Traders who are trying to bring a new and better life to the thousands of small farmers who are exploited in the sugar industry of Panay Island.

Fair Trade organizations in Europe buy Muscovado Sugar from the Panay farmers at a fair price and the farmers have prospered and have been able to raise funds to build their own sugar grinding and processing mill. They also sell Muscovado sugar locally to the supermarkets and make a good living, free from the dominating barons who feel threatened as more and more farmers want to join the association and mill their sugar at the association’s mill at a lower cost. They then earn more and prosper too. This is strong competition and the murderous attack on the members and Romy Capalla and the burning of the mill is believed to be the work of a few of these sugar barons. Romy will be remembered and celebrated as a staunch defender
of human rights.

Brown sugar examples: Muscovado (top), dark brown (left), light brown (right) [Wikipedia]

His brother is the retired Arrchbishop of Davao, Ferdinand R. Capalla. Romy was instrumental in setting up the project and his group had great success in organizing the  farmers into this Panay Fair Trade sugar-producing cooperative  where the small farmers held onto the land and planted their own sugar cane. They harvested and milled the sugar cane themselves in that small sugar mill that produced the Muscovado that is healthy and exported to stores around the world. They also have local sales.

Throughout the Philippines the plantation owners and the super-rich families form the ruling elite and they own or control 70% of the economy, manufacturing and agriculture in the Philippines. A few of the rich sugar planters apparently see the independence of the farmers having the own mill as a threat and a dangerous precedent for others . They want to control the entire sugar harvest and fix prices. But the strong organization begun by Romy Capalla resisted that and began the Fair Trade alternative.

All help and assistance is needed to support the Philippine Human rights defenders and Fair Traders. The greed of a few has destroyed the lives of the many. As always, they who do the most good are rejected, condemned and made to appear bad. It is the story of the Gospel , it is the hardship of trying to do justice ,changing the world for the better and doing what is right. We must never lose heart and take our stand.

shaycullen@preda.org. www.preda.org

Email: shaycullen@preda.org,
Information Officer: emmanueldrewery@preda.org

Just before Philippine Independence Day last week (12 June) a group of newly enrolled children from a shelter excitedly set out on the first day to walk to school at Gala, Sacatihan, Pamatawan, Subic, Zambales. The road up the hill would give them an easy walk to freedom through education – the great liberator. But then, as they crested the hill, to their dismay the quagmire that had the children squelching their way through ankle-deep sticky mud, symbolic of the political corruption, waste and abuse that mires almost one-third of Filipinos in pitiless, grinding poverty from which there is no freedom.

Subic, Zambales, Philippines

Like thousands of others, the road is a fake or ghost project that had never been fully built. Even urgent requests to the governor to throw gravel from the exposed river bed on to the muddy road are so far unheeded. The children suffer and it became so bad in the past week that 26 children transferred to another school.

This mess and the plunder and looting of public funds at the highest level of the Congress as the headlines announce daily is just one, very small indicator of a greater harm done to the people by some depraved and greedy politicians. How many more fake and fraudulent infrastructure projects are there like the one in Gala, Subic? There is no freedom from greed, it seems.

Filipino soldiers near Manila, 1899

Besides these small, allegedly corruption-ridden projects, the extremely wealthy ruling elite in the Philippine Congress have allegedly plundered and looted billions of pesos from the treasury. Three prominent Senators have been charged, arrest warrants are imminent and many Congress people will join them in jail. Their ‘jails’ are posh, luxurious, tiled, well-appointed bungalows built for ranking officers.

They are incomparable to the stinking jail cells where hungry street children are incarcerated, abused, beaten and raped for taking a banana in the market. The indictments by the Aquino administration are a glimmer of hope that change is possible but with billions in bribes at hand, justice is likely to be thwarted and they will never answer for these alleged crimes. These funds came from the taxes imposed on the people especially the 17 to 20 percent VAT that were supposed to be used for rural development to alleviate poverty and build barangay roads to bring the children to school.

Japanese soldier in front of American poster, Philippines 1943

Independence Day was to celebrate the political freedom of a nation from colonial domination and exploitation. It’s a tortured history. First, the impoverished oppressed Filipinos struggled for liberation from the Spanish and almost succeeded. On the eve of independence, the USA declared war on the Spanish, landed troops in Manila in 1898 and took over, then sent home the defeated Spanish. The Filipinos fought back but after a few years of bitter war marked by atrocities, the American forces conquered them. They subdued and
tamed most of the Filipinos. Then the Japanese invaded and ousted the Americans in World War II. The people suffered greatly and the Japanese were eventually defeated and again the Filipinos struggled for independence from the United States of America and in 1946, they got it with strings attached. But was it real freedom?

They got political independence and a lot of unfair and exploitative trading arrangements and unequal treaties that enabled American corporations to exploit the country at will until the present. They were swamped with Americanization. So it was not true independence, a great dependency had been skillfully arranged. The democracy was a sham. In reality, the rich Spanish-Filipino families in close cooperation with the American corporations ruled without much opposition.

Independence from the USA, 4 July 1946

The vast majority of Filipinos remained bitterly poor peasants and isolated tribal people. Philippine natural resources were ruthlessly exploited, enabled by unequal treaties, the riches of the nation flowed across the Pacific to America. The people were exported also. Filipino overseas workers flowed to the pineapple plantations of Hawaii to work in slave-like conditions.

Little has changed. Eleven million Filipinos still go abroad to find economic freedom. The majority live with 25% unemployment and freedom from poverty for the majority of Filipinos is still a dream. The economic news may boast of 7% economic growth but that is only for the oligarchy who have 70 percent of the wealth in their pockets.

To quote from an editorial in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a national broadsheet, on 11 March 2013: ‘The increase in the wealth of the 40 richest families in the Philippines that made it to the 2012 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires accounted for 76 percent of the growth of the gross domestic product (GDP). It’s one of the biggest rich – poor gaps in the free world and’, Habito [former economic planning chief Cielito Habito] observed, ‘the highest in Asia’. That is what they call ‘independence’. [shaycullen@preda.org,
www.preda.org]

Fr Shay Cullen’s columns are published in The Manila Times, in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and online.

THE MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL

By Fr Shay Cullen

Boy working in Gambia

June 12 is one day of the year set aside to remind us of the horribly painful truth that there are millions of children  around the world working in fields, factories, brick kilns, construction sites and sex clubs. The clothes we wear, if made in a poor developing nation, are likely to have been made with some form of child labor. The millions of single men on sex tours abuse working children to satisfy their perverted sexual fantasies; it’s a cruel world of exploitation of those declared to be the most important of all in God’s family and equal to Jesus of Nazareth. 

Preda Fair Trade organization has campaigned for years to free children from the worst forms of child labor like unpaid slaves in sex bars and clubs. They are in the most hazardous situations where they have to dress in bikinis, pole-dance, be groped, laughed at, molested and be exposed to life-threatening diseases and even physical assault. In many bars, they are sold to highest-paying sex tourist. 

Eight-year-old boy working on a train in India

Beth-Ann was given by her father to a distant relative when she was 12 and she was never sent to school. Instead, she was turned over to the mamasan of a sex hotel and
brought up there as a sex object for local and foreign men. When rescued at the age of 15 by Preda social workers, she had the mentality of a 9-year-old, illiterate and unable to relate to adults, having been a sex object for most of her life. There are thousands like her in many countries.

She is slowly recovering and trying to live a normal life outside of the sex bar and bravely learning to read and write and finding a new set of behaviors and values. There are thousands like her who are still slaves, working in sex bars with the connivance and licensing approval of local government officials who benefit from the sex industry themselves and frequently are hotel or bar owners. 

Young girl in Morocco

Child labor is, in most situations, the evidence of extreme poverty and exploitation of the poor and the marginalized people. The children are offered jobs as domestic helpers in the city, a down-payment is made to the parents in a remote village and the children are carried off to the sex bar or brothel. Another destructive form of so called sex-work for young teenagers is making pornography. Their images are sold live on the internet for pedophiles to view them. This is a billion dollar business and the children are the work force.

How is it that until 1989, child labor was generally accepted as necessary, desirable even, and it many years for the Convention on the Rights of the Child to be written and passed. I was a delegate to the drafting conference in Helsinki. Then Convention No 182 on the worst forms of child labor was written and passed by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and passed as international law by the United Nations in 1999.  I marched through Geneva to lobby the ILO to pass Convention 182. It bans the worst forms of child labor. However, it is still being violated around the world. Millions of children are unschooled and work in every kind of labor situation to help their families survive.

Girls making bricks in Nepal

How is it that children have been held in work bondage for thousands of years and forced to work and be sexually abused. What has been forgotten are the extraordinary statements and acts of Jesus of Nazareth in regard to children. When asked who is the most important in the Kingdom of God, Jesus placed a child in front of them and said a child is the most important of all. He gave them the inalienable right and place of greatest importance in God’s family.

The Little Children Being Brought to Jesus, Rembrandt, 1647-49

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam [Web Gallery of Art]

‘The most important in the Kingdom is this child’, he told his followers. ‘To accept one of them is to accept me’, he said. What an extraordinary declaration made at a time when children were considered the property of parents and as non-persons with no rights and only part of the work force. The Church did not oppose it or declare it as intrinsically wrong or have a dogma about it, despite the practice of child labor being a direct contradiction of the Gospel values and of Jesus himself.

Children engaged in diamond mining in Sierra Leone

Children were number one in Christianity at the beginning, until the institutionalization of Christianity that is. It took secular society in 1989 and 1999 to recognize the inalienable rights of the child. Sadly, it was not the Church that advocated and established in international law these rights of the child. Instead, it has a nasty history of child abuse, a contradiction of the teachings of its founder. It is now that Pope Francis and enlightened church leaders and child rights advocates are vigorously undoing that past and trying to make amends for that most unjust and abusive past.

We were all children once and may have memories (or suppressed memories), of childhood hardships, drudgery, hard work and even abuse. We can be happy that we have survived and we can understand more easily the suffering and plight of the millions of children who continue to suffer abuse, illiteracy and life of hard labor. They may not survive.  This we can prevent and undo.

We must draw on the spirit of truth and empowerment and be prophetic, missionary, active in speaking out and defending children and promoting their rights. They are the most important in God’s kingdom, (Matthew 18:1-5, Mark 9:33-37, Luke 9:46-48) and have a place of honor that must never be taken away from them.

[shaycullen@preda.org, www.preda.org]

Fr Shay Cullen’s columns are published in The Manila Times, in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and online.

Photos taken from Wikipedia entry on Child Labour.

SHOUTING INTO THE SILENCE

by Fr Shay Cullen

Street children, New York City, 1890 [Wikipedia]

One of most important things for a happy meaningful life is to have a goal, a positive purpose that does good for others and for ourselves. It can be helping in the community, volunteering in a Fair Trade shop, supporting a shelter for the homeless, or raising funds for a worthy cause.

Some people feel called to be involved with a campaign for peace and human rights and to make this a happier, more peaceful and forgiving world. Some set out to save the environment from destruction and degradation and to protect the planet and the people. Others are dedicated to protecting human rights and ending violence by non-violent means. That means doing all we can to bring about justice in the community.

That’s no easy task; there is so much injustice, inequality and unfairness that a situation can overwhelm us. That’s when we trust in the spirit of truth. When the powerful dominate the poor, it can be heartbreaking and depressing. In the Philippines, a mere 40 families account for 76 percent of the growth of the gross domestic product (GDP). Two such families had a combined wealth of $13.6 billion, equivalent to six percent of the Philippine economy. One percent of the population own or control 70 percent of the national wealth.

When we look at government figures, it shows that 25 million people struggle to survive in dire poverty and barely survive on about one US dollar ($1) a day. That is six percent of the Philippine population. Those in the next bracket are not much better off. This huge disparity in wealth is at the core of Philippine poverty and hardship. The ruling elite have arranged it all in their favor. So economic growth figures do not reflect any improvement in the lives of most Filipinos.

But with a strong belief that good can overcome evil, that truth can vanquish lies and deceit, that right can overcome wrong and that life can overcome death, many things are possible. That is the spirit of Pentecost, the power of the inner spirit of hope, compassion and integrity to change the world. This is the spirit that gives us the power to be prophetic. That means to have courage to speak out and denounce evil, wrongdoing, sexual exploitation of children and corruption. That spirit also gives hope and a belief that positive action can eventually bring about a more just society where people have enough for a life of dignity.

A modern prophetic voice that has inspired me over the years is that of Danny Smith who, with Lord David Alton, founded the Jubilee Campaign, a registered charity in the UK. Danny has been tirelessly working for human rights around the world since 1981 and almost single-handily campaigned with powerful effective results against many injustices.

His most successful campaigns saved children from the cruel abuse of sexual exploitation in the Philippines; he exposed and saved children left to die in cruel orphanages in China; he worked to release hundreds of children in prison in Brazil and Manila. In a powerful campaign in the UK, he exposed child sacrifices in Uganda (video below) and in the UK itself and got strong political action to stop it. He inspired and supported many more great causes. These great stories and many more are told in a inspiring new book Shouting into the Silence, published by Lion.

We need to read about people like Danny Smith and his wonderful wife Joan and their family and their life’s work. They are committed to uplifting the dignity of all people. The book also has an intriguing life history of Danny that is truly fascinating, a family journey spanning continents. He may be contacted at danny@jubileecampaign.co.uk

Of the many prophetic and spiritual figures with whom I have worked over the years, Danny has been one of the most dedicated and consistently effective in bringing about more justice and social change by political lobbying, media advocacy and public speaking and financially supporting the poor and needy people in the developing world. We need many more like Danny in this world; his book and story is inspiring.

However, the prophetic mission is fraught with difficulties and challenges. Enemies rise up filled with envy and jealousy and crush the good and the just. The book’s title Shouting into the Silence refers to the closed hearts and minds and ears of many people in power who do not want to listen to the message, or hear the cry of the people for justice. They are closed to the suffering of the oppressed who are being driven off their land by rich land grabbers.

Fr Rufus Halley and Fr Fausto Tentorio

There is a great silence that the prophetic voice tries to penetrate. Then there is the harsh opposition, the death threats, physical assaults and the assassination of the modern prophets. In the Philippines, the most recent has been Romeo Capalla, an advocate of justice for the farmers of Panay Island and a promoter of Fair Trade. Fr Fausto ‘Pops’ Tentorio PIME, an Italian missionary, was also gunned down for taking a stand for the rights of the indigenous people in Mindanao. Fr Rufus Halley, my classmate, an Irish missionary of the Columbans, brutally murdered for standing with the oppressed Muslim people in Mindanao and many more social workers and human rights advocates.

The mission for justice is the greatest challenge, the most prophetic and the most dangerous. We all need the spirit of truth to dwell within us to enable us to endure to the end and break through the great silence that ignores injustice and abuse and keeps the poor in bondage. This is what we can overcome with the spirit of hope and power to love others more than ourselves.

Fr Shay Cullen’s columns are published in The Manila Times, in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and online.

[shaycullen@preda.org, www.preda.org]

SAVED FROM THE DEATH SQUAD – BY STREET CHILDREN

by Fr Shay Cullen

What should be a matter of outrage and great moral concern for every Filipino and decent human being is the very recent, well documented revelations by Human Rights Watch alleging the actions of a death squad in Tagum City, Mindanao, where hundreds have been murdered including street children as young as nine. The killings were allegedly carried out by hit men allegedly on orders of the former mayor. Each person was killed for a payment of only five thousands pesos (US$110).

Tagum City [Wikipedia]

One Shot to the Head: Death Squad Killings in Tagum City, Philippines is a 71-page report released on 22 May with damning evidence and interviews with former hit-men who allegedly said they were paid by former Mayor Rey ‘Chiong’ Uy to kill anyone they were told to. One text message allegedly set them in motion. They were paid US$110 for every killing and they divided it among themselves, one former hit-man said in a taped interview posted on YouTube (see video above). The former mayor has denied the allegations.

Tagum City National High School [Wikipedia]

Tagum City’s former mayor helped organize and finance a death squad linked to the murder of hundreds of residents, said Phelim Kine, deputy Asia Director at Human Rights Watch. Rey Uy called these citizens ‘weeds’. He and other city officials and police officers underwrote targeted killings as a perverse form of crime control.

Such revelations are not new in the Philippines. Other city officials throughout the Philippines have been accused of using death squads to kill street children and anyone considered a threat or critic of local government. As many as 298 victims have been documented in this Human Rights Watch Tagum report. The report said: Targeted killings have continued but with less frequency since Uy stepped down as mayor in June 2013.

The Human Rights Watch press release said that ‘On April 28, 2014, the media reported that the Philippines National Bureau of Investigation had recommended the prosecution of four security guards employed by the Tagum City government for their alleged role in the abduction, torture, and murder of two teenage boys in February 2014’. The current Tagum City mayor, Allan Rellon, reportedly told the media that he was ‘bewildered’ by the allegations, saying  that, as a local chief executive, ‘I abhor any form of summary killing’.

This is not the first report documenting the dark side of Philippines where government officials, have been accused of using private assassination squads of hit-men that go around on motor bikes killing children, priests, missionaries, pastors, church and human rights workers. This column has documented many of these murders. The Sun Star of Davao has bravely documented many of the death squad murders over the years. Investigations by the Philippine Commission on Human Rights have failed to uncover the killers or those behind the murders.

A prominent columnist in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on 24 May defended the death squads and the actions of Mayor Uy and the Mayor Rodrigo Duterte of Davao City saying no one in the Philippines is complaining about them except Human Rights Watch. Citizens would have benefited too, he wrote, if the police in Manila had implemented a plan to organize a death squad to eliminate alleged corrupt judges and prosecutors.

The killings are done to drive away begging street kids, create fear and silence critics and defenders of human rights on the pretext of preserving law and order by killing people said to be suspected criminals. Anyone can denounce their neighbor as a drug pusher and it’s likely that person would be killed. This is how the tiny minority of wealthy Filipino elites use fear, force and murder to intimidate the people, eliminate rivals, cheat at elections and stay in power through family dynasties. Thus, the one percent can rule the nation as they have always done. The hit men do it for money and the elites do it for political and economic advantage. They  act with total impunity.

The Human Rights Watch report gives credence to the many allegations made by Filipino human rights workers for many years including this writer who exposed a Davao death squad and was sued by former Davao City Mayor De Guzman in 1999, although no allegation was made against him personally. After a harrowing, dangerous year of legal defense, and a scary visit to Davao City where a group of street children formed a protective cordon around me at the airport lest the death squad would kill me. I was trying to save them, but they saved me.

Mayor De Guzman withdrew the allegation on the day when I was to be arraigned in the Davao City Regional Trial Court. The intervention of Archbishop Fernando Robles Capalla of Davao persuaded the Mayor to withdraw the charge. The Archbishop’s brother Romy Capalla, a human rights defender was assassinated with a bullet to the head last March in Iloilo for his work defending the rights of small farmers to organize independently of land owners and practice Fair Trade. The sugar mill they operated was burned down destroying their livelihood. No one has been caught for the brutal murder.

A Survey by Ateneo de Davao University says 98 percent of those polled support the mayor, government and 77 percent support the police. Perhaps they dare not say otherwise. Western embassies have warned their citizens not to visit Mindanao due to the crime rates. The death squads have not deterred lawlessness, only added to it.

The report is available here. 

Email [shaycullen@preda.org visit www.preda.org] 

Fr Shay Cullen’s columns are published in The Manila Times, in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and online.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS UPON US

By Fr Shay Cullen

Tacloban City after Supertyphoon Haiyan/Yolanda 8 November 2013 [Wikipedia]

The sights, sounds, and smells that assailed me as I was walking through the devastated chaos and destruction of Tacloban City in the Philippines last year, soon after the most powerful storm ever to hit land, made me realize that this was the future. This utter devastation wrecked by a vengeful nature on her tormentors was going to be repeated across the globe. Climate change is upon us.

Extreme weather conditions will be what we can expect in the future. In the UK last year, massive unprecedented flooding cut off towns and villages. The economic cost was massive. We have to ask why and what can be done to prevent such destructive weather conditions getting worse and less frequent. The Philippines experienced 25 typhoons in 2013.

Humans are the custodians of the creation and guardians of the planet and yet we have sinned against it. Now it’s time to repent and make amends, but how?

Krupanj, Serbia, after May 2014 floods [Wikipedia]

As I write this, the Balkans are experiencing the worst flooding since records began 120 years ago. Vast areas of countryside, towns and villages are inundated and as many as 300 landslides have destroyed property and 35 people were killed. In three days rain that would normally fall over three months hit the region causing destruction, death and huge commercial loss. In Afghanistan a few weeks ago, an entire village with hundreds of people was buried alive when a rain-saturated hillside came roaring down to bury and smother them all.

Every news bulletin seems to carry reports of another huge ecological disaster; droughts and wild fires in the United States are consuming forests and fields, and even more destructive floods are to come in Europe we are told.

Last week, the United Nations‘ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made it’s latest report after seven years of exhaustive research and number crunching to inform and convince us that catastrophic climate change can be averted and even reversed if we act now. The report was made by 1,250 eminent scientists and experts and endorsed by 146 governments.

It’s for real: the planet has warmed up and we humans have caused it by burning fossil fuels non-stop for the last 150 years. That has to stop. We must turn to alternative sources of energy, the report strongly advises, or else..

The worst offenders are the oil- and coal-burning industries. Their power plants, factories, houses and cars warm the earth by releasing CO2 gas. The carbon dioxide and methane gases create a blanket around the earth causing this warming. This in turn has melted huge sections of the polar ice caps and removed nature’s big reflector of sun light. Antarctica is melting too. Soon the rise in ocean levels will be covering lo- lying islands and beach fronts.

The permafrost in Siberia and Canada is melting, releasing even more deadly methane gas from the once frozen bogs and releasing it into the atmosphere. The effect on food production and water resources will be massive and will lead to food shortages and the social impact will be great; migration and armed conflicts will erupt.

House in Tacloban City after Hayian/Yolanda 8 November 2013 [Wikipedia]

China, one of the worst climate polluters with its thousands of coal and oil power plants is in direct conflict with Vietnam after moving an oil drilling platform into waters claimed by Vietnam. Riots, property destruction and the evacuation of thousands of Chinese from Vietnam are the news this week.

The content of the reports of the IPCC are vehemently denied by powerful business interests in the gas, oil and coal industries. These thermal tycoons want the burning of fossil fuels to continue but the time is coming when fossil fuels have to be abandoned and left in the ground. Alternative renewable sources of electric power like solar, wind and geothermal electric generation have to power the future.

Huge investments have to be made in wind and solar power. Natural gas is a much cleaner source of energy, though with some limitations, but a better alternative to coal. The common people and their governments have to stand up to the polluters of the planet and bring closer that day when the demand for oil and coal will taper off. In the Philippines, crony capitalists are manipulating the national leadership and ‘capturing’ the regulators to persuade them to approve more coal plants.

We all have to be caretakers of our God-given world, the garden of Eden is sadly wilting and dying and we humans will be dying in body and spirit with it through disease, famine, and extreme weather events. Remember, more than 6,000 people were killed by Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda on 8 November. There will be many more dying in future storms and floods of equal magnitude. We must preserve all life, especially the life of the planet itself. 

[shaycullen@preda.org, www.preda.org]

Fr Shay Cullen’s columns are published in The Manila Times, in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and online.

Christ as the Man of Sorrows, Albrecht Dürer, c.1493

Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe [Web Gallery of Art]

SILENCE ABOUT CHILD ABUSE IS A CRIME

By Fr Shay Cullen

There is growing international clamor for the filtering and blocking of child pornography and cyber-sex on the internet. The Philippine National Telecommunications Commission NTC) is under national and international spotlight for not implementing the anti-child porn law law since 2009. They have promised to do it by June, five years late. Why?

It was the death of a 17-year-old boy in Scotland that led to the international outcry and investigation into a criminal syndicate in the Philippines that uses the internet and cybersex chat rooms to extort money from youngsters but drives them to suicide.

They use young women on computers connected to the internet to contact and cajole young teenagers and older men to expose themselves and perform some sex act in the privacy of their room before an internet-connected camera, thinking they are in a relationship over the internet.

Unknown to them, the act is recorded in a distant country by the perpetrators as in the Philippines, and the criminals then say they recorded it and threaten the victim to make it public to his or her family and friends unless they pay big money to the extortionist.

As many as 470 such cases of ‘sextortion’ (as it is called) was reported to police in Hong Kong in 2013 and 160 were exploited through this cybersex trap this year alone. But thousands more are ashamed to go to the police and they just pay.

Detective Chief Inspector Gary Cunningham of Police Scotland told the media that he was acting on the request of the boy’s family to catch the criminals. With many more such crimes being reported, an international investigation was launched with the help of US Homeland Security, Interpol and Philippine National Police and it succeeded in arresting 58 Filipino suspects.

If the NTC makes good on its promise to enforce the 2009 Anti-child Pornography law, the foreign- and Philippine-owned Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would have to obey the law and block such disgusting images of trafficking and cut down the cybersex abuse. Children are used in this kind of internet abuse too and they are traumatized and damaged for life.

The criminals and many in government and industry laugh at the law and say the images are just child’s play; but it is criminal paedophile play. But they have never seen these horrific images; if they did they would be committing a crime just bypossessing and viewing them. So they have to believe the investigating police, the therapists and socials workers who rescue and treat the victims. What the common person and ISP money-taking tycoons must come to know is that the illegal content passing through their servers, computers,and cellphone towers is child rape and horrific acts of sexual abuse of children, some as young as three.

Every such photograph and video of child sexual abuse is a cruel criminal act of abuse. The fact that the ISPs and cellphone companies do not block the abusive images, where there are so many software methods to do so, is presumed to be for money. Their inaction and failure to follow, respect and implement the law is in fact an act of silence. Doing nothing is a grave sin of omission and complicity in crime.

Their silence is tacit approval. Correct me if I am wrong please. I and the nation would love to hear the side of the corporate tycoons and their shareholders that allow and enable this abuse to happen.

How can it happen when government are so strict and punitive to vulnerable and helpless street children and beats and jails them in filthy, infested prison cells? Are the good and honest executives of the NTC going to really implement the law?

They have stated that they will in June 2014. We are waiting to applaud and praise them. The ISPs and all internet service providers have to comply. It should have happened in 2010. Hundreds of thousands of children have since suffered abuse when they could have been saved.

Church, government and civil society groups have been shamefully silent for too long. The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has made some lame statement but it falls far short of a loud, non-stop campaign, like that which some bishops and priests and lay-people mounted against the reproductive health act. They have sinned grievously against children by not speaking out and advocating the respect and implementation of the law to block child pornography and cybersex online. The law, if implemented, will greatly reduce  child abuse. Pope Francis has called for such action. Will the Filipino Bishops obey?

It is good to hear that in Puerto Princesa in Palawan, Bishop Pedro D. Arigo has spoken out, just a lone voice in the great wilderness of child abuse, calling for an end to ‘sex tourism’ and cybersex online. He needs many more to join his call and shout from the house tops as Jesus of Nazareth told us to do. Faith without action is dead, says St James in The New Testament. Our faith should drive us with courage to fight this evil and never let it grow and swallow our children.

Each one of us must answer for this. Blame others, yes, if there is clear evidence of abuse and exploitation but blame ourselves if we have done nothing to save the children and end the suicides.

[shaycullen@preda.org; www.preda.org]

Fr Shay Cullen’s columns are published in The Manila Times, in publications in Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, and online.