Fil-Canadians Decry Violence Against Kidapawan Farmers

Cecile Docto, ABS-CBN North America News Bureau

Posted at 04/05/16 7:19 PM

VANCOUVER, Canada – Activist group Migrante BC held a rally in Vancouver calling for justice for protesting farmers in North Cotabato. Three farmers were killed and hundreds injured when the police fired at protesters barricading the Cotabato-Davao Highway in Kidapawan City last week.

Migrante BC denounced the violent dispersal of farmers and Lumad indigenous people in Kidapawan saying the Aquino government has once again showed its cowardly way of dealing with grave economic and social problems in the country.

They are also demanding the immediate release of calamity funds and that the perpetrators of the crime be brought to justice.

Migrante BC’s Jane Ordinario, a Kidapawan native, cannot comprehend how the police can shoot at unarmed protesters.

“Masakit na makita yung pangyayari na 15,000 sacks lang iyong hinihingi hindi pa mabigay ng ating gobyerno,” Ordinario said.

The farmers have been asking for disaster relief from the government after a long and extreme drought destroyed their farmlands.

“People have nothing to eat, and for people who have not understand starvation, you don’t know the extreme desperation it creates,” said University of British Columbia graduate student, Chaya Ocampo Go.

Go said this is also a call for climate justice for victims of the strongest El Niño phenomenon in modern history.

Go stressed Canadians should know the Philippines and other parts of the world are already suffering because of climate change.

“Ngayon na. It’s not a distant day that it will happen one day in the future. It’s happening today. It’s happening in Yolanda. It’s happening now in El Niño.”

Meantime, members of British Columbia’s grassroots organizations have joined Migrante BC in condemning the violence.

Aiyanas Ormond, who stayed in the Philippines for eight months, saw the deplorable conditions of peasant farmers and their struggle for economic justice.

But Ormond, Canada is a part of the problem.

“Canadian corporations, particularly mining corporations in Mindanao, are very much implicated in the environmental destruction and the landlessness and poverty and the struggles there,” said Ormond, chairperson of the International League of People’s Struggles in Canada.

He said Canadian people should unite in the call for social justice in the Philippines.
(Source: ABS-CBN.com)