Marcos Jr. is peddling lies in desperate bid for UNSC nod

At the Vin d’Honneur in Malacañang yesterday, Pres. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. asked the diplomatic community to support his administration’s bid for membership in the UN Security Council, citing the Philippines’ “rich experience” in “building peace, forging consensus, and finding new paths for cooperation.”

Marcos Jr. has repeatedly peddled these lies in a desperate bid to look good and hoodwink national and international audiences into supporting him without anything to show for it.

What is being seen and experienced in Marcos Jr.’s own backyard, however, are the dire consequences of his policies that foment unpeace and suppression of rights. The kind of “peace” that Marcos Jr. promotes is the peace of the graveyard, where dissent is suppressed in a society whose basic ills of poverty, landlessness and joblessness, corruption and mendicancy to foreign interests are realities that should be continually exposed and denounced.

Extrajudicial killings and other grave human rights and international law violations are being committed under Marcos Jr.’s watch, with him at the helm of a program that seeks to end insurgency by staging fake military encounters and killing civilians. Abductions and enforced disappearances are on the uptick, while arbitrary arrests and imprisonment continue with the weaponization of laws, including terror laws, to suppress political dissent and even humanitarian and development work.

Hamletting and de facto martial law exist in rural and indigenous communities when the military conducts ground and aerial operations via bombings, artillery attacks and indiscriminate firing. Thousands are red-tagged and threatened by the NTF-ELCAC and its minions. All these and more are supported and propped up by foreign military funding by the US government, in exchange for the Marcos administration’s willingness to accommodate US military basing, war mongering and intervention in the Philippines and in the Asia-Pacific region.

Marcos Jr. ‘s concepts of “peace,” “consensus” and “cooperation” and his candidacy for a UN Security Council seat should be consistently challenged–all these for whom? Clearly, it is for his ruling clique and for the interests of the US and its allies.

In the same breath, the UN Security Council should be challenged and condemned–security for whom? Clearly, with its track record of greenlighting wars of aggression by the US and its allies, it is for the interest of this cabal of imperialists.