The Grand Art of Deflection

FOR almost the whole last week of February, two major international non-government organizations (NGOs) for the media, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) based in New York, USA, and, the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) based in Paris, France, were in the country to purportedly call on the Philippine government to do something about the case of slain Palawan broadcaster and medical doctor, Gerardo ‘Doc Gerry’ Ortega.

They were accompanied during the visit by another supposedly ‘independent’ media watchdog, ‘Free Press Unlimited’ based in Amsterdam and the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), a noisy but ineffective media rights advocate whose main effort is to decry violations of media rights, both real and imagined, in order to get funding from abroad.

Ortega was killed on January 24, 2011 in Puerto Princesa City, Palawan, and the “mastermind” has since been established as none other than then Palawan governor, Mario Joel Tolentino Reyes and his brother, Mario Jr., then mayor of Coron.

All the suspects in this heinous crime were subsequently arrested, charged in court and ended up in jail; the Reyeses initially avoided capture by escaping to Thailand but were subsequently arrested in 2015 and brought back to the country to stand trial.

In 2018, however, the brothers were granted bail by the court; Joel ran anew as governor the next year but was miserably defeated. Acting on a petition, the Supreme Court in July 2023, canceled his bail and ordered him rearrested but he is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, his brother continues to attend the court hearing being held in Puerto Princesa.

Joel is now the subject of ongoing manhunt operation by law enforcement bodies, along with other suspects in the killing of journalists, with the effort being coordinated by the Presidential Task Force on Media Security (PTFoMS).

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, has recognized the PTFoMS, created in 2016 under Administrative Order No. 1, as the country’s “mechanism” in addressing all cases of violence against media rights.

After meeting with government officials from the PTFoMS, Philippine National Police (PNP) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), this group of parachute crusaders and their local factotum held a press conference last March 1, 2024, where the CPJ claimed they turned over “new and actionable information” on the whereabouts of Joel Reyes, further lamenting that Joel remains at large “13 years” since the killing of Ortega.

Given the sequence of events we narrated, this assertion is clearly false and is merely an attempt by these self-pontificating, foreign-funded media NGOs to create the likewise false impression that we do not have a functioning criminal justice system.

That they merely conducted a media stunt at our country’s expense is shown by the fact that the much ballyhooed ‘new and actionable information’ they left for us to act is, actually, garbage.

I mean, their precious information claimed that Joel Reyes is hiding out in a province in Central Luzon, incidentally, one of the biggest and densely populated. No specific village, house number or even a single witness that our authorities can talk to for validation. In other words, a trash of an information. Searching for a needle in a haystack is what their information actually amounted to.

To our mind, their parachuting here is just their way of justifying how they spend the money given to them by their “donors” while deflecting our attention to the more atrocious violations of media rights and freedom elsewhere in the world that they dare not comment upon.

Among the many, we refer to the more than 200 journalists—their families not included—killed by Israel’s continuing barbaric assault on Gaza and the West Bank. Their “fault?” They were Arabs and Palestinians reporting on the world about what really is happening in that God-forsaken corner of the world.

There too, is the case of Gonzalo Angel Lira Lopez (Gonzalo Lira), an American citizen of Chilean descent, novelist, film maker and commentator, who died inside a prison in Ukraine last January 12, 2024 after months of torture by its dreaded internal security forces.

Lira’s reason for being arrested in April 2022 by Ukrainian authorities? His reporting of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine that contradicts the official narrative of the Zelensky fascist regime (and that of the Western mainstream media) on the development of the war.

And what about Wikileaks founder, Australian citizen Julian Assange, who remains in a British prison since 2019 and the subject of US request for extradition so they can jail him for the next 175 years?

His only “crime” is releasing thru Wikileaks the documented war crimes of the US, UK, and their NATO confederates that they all committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There has been global indignation against the US and its Western minions over these affairs that touched on the core of press freedom and our universal right to freedom of expression and opinion. These incidents are eye-openers for the rest of the world on the true evil nature of ‘Western democracy.’ Their ‘rules-based order’ is centered on violence against the rest anchored on fake adherence to core human values such as human rights and press freedom, in short, on hypocrisy.

Given these, we should all be wary each time some international NGOs land in our country to fault us over our human rights records and media rights violations to hide the gross crimes being committed by their own governments in some faraway land and even to their own citizens.

To our mind, this is the Grand Art of Deflection being foisted on us by these alien hypocrites so we would have no time to reflect on their own crimes.

Let us always keep these things in mind.