In a protest action at the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency office on the 4th year of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), human rights alliance Karapatan reiterated its call for the abolition of the task force and slammed the bicameral conference committee for restoring the cuts to NTF-ELCAC’s PhP10-billion budget for 2023.
“Instead of restoring this agency’s budget, the public would have been better served with the abolition of the NTF-ELCAC with its funding rechanneled to social service programs,” said Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay.
In a protest action at the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency office on the 4th year of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), human rights alliance Karapatan reiterated its call for the abolition of the task force and slammed the bicameral conference committee for restoring the cuts to NTF-ELCAC’s PhP10-billion budget for 2023.
“Instead of restoring this agency’s budget, the public would have been better served with the abolition of the NTF-ELCAC with its funding rechanneled to social service programs,” said Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay.
The NTF-ELCAC’s proposed budget for next year had been slashed by half by the House plenary, with P5 billion realigned to other uses after the agency had reportedly utilized only 2% of its project funds for 2022. In 2021, it was able to complete only 48% of its so-called barangay development support projects.
The agency has had a history of problems with fund utilization, with the Commission on Audit reporting a number of anomalies in the NTF-ELCAC’s use of its 2020 budget, including “incomplete documentation, low fund utilization and unutilized funds, unauthorized fund transfers and lack of guidelines on the use of funds.” The COA had also reported the NTF-ELCAC’s failure to liquidate P33.4 million in its 2021 budget.
In spite of this, the NTF-ELCAC’s budget has dramatically risen, from only P1.7 billion in 2020 to P19.2 billion in 2022.
“It is especially objectionable that after all the plenary debates and interpellations done in the open to scrutinize the NTF-ELCAC’s budget, the bicameral conference committee suddenly backpedalled just on the say-so of House speaker Martin Romualdez and senior deputy majority leader Sandro Marcos,” said Palabay. “We believe that the NTF-ELCAC’s budget was restored as part of the horse-trading and dirty-dealing that go on away from public scrutiny in the bicameral conference committee.”
The NTF-ELCAC has gained notoriety for red-tagging, harassing and intimidating political activists and other government critics and for instigating forced mass surrenders of civilians alleged to be supporters of the revolutionary movement. Many of the victims of NTF-ELCAC’s red-tagging campaigns had ended up arrested and detained on trumped-up charges, while others have been killed by vigilante groups or in armed encounters staged by the military.
Urban and rural communities have also been subjected to encampment of soldiers, threats, harassment and intimidation, forced surrenders and bombings in military operations affecting thousands of peasants, indigenous people, workers and urban poor. These military operations, Palabay said, are part of the task force’s “whole of nation approach” in dealing with the Communist Party of the Philippines, New People’s Army and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines.
“An agency that has been running roughshod on the people’s civil and political rights and does not address the real roots of the armed conflict does not deserve a single centavo from the public coffers,” said Palabay.