• GILBERT P. BAYORAN
Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro raised his concerns over the University of the Philippines’ governance and supervision of student activities, following deaths of some of its alumni in armed clashes in Negros Island over the past years.
Teodoro, who on Saturday visited Army units that figured in two recent encounters in Negros Occidental, which resulted to deaths of 24 suspected New People’s Army rebels, said while UP has been described as a “laboratory” for learning and activism, such an environment should still be subject to regulation and oversight.
While he agrees on claims that the laboratory of UP is not merely in the classroom. Teodoro said “when you say laboratory, that is not to mean to say you do not regulate the activities that students do.”
Because a laboratory by definition, according to the Defense secretary, is a controlled environment, and “a school is principally and primarily liable for danger or damage to its students.”
In a statement earlier issued by the University of the Philippines, it appealed to the public to withhold judgment on the presence of its students in underserved communities. It added that no UP student is limited to lessons learned within the classroom.
We are not going to interfere academically, but certainly, when the activities of some of its students are contrary to law, Teodoro stressed.
Alysa Alano and Maureen Santuyo, both student activists of UP-Dilliman, RJ Ledesma and Vince Francis Dingding, both alumnus of the University of St La Salle – Bacolod and UP- Cebu, respectively, were among the 24 killed in separate armed encounters in Toboso and Cauayan, on April 19 and May 16, respectively, this year.
Jhon Isidor “Dee” “Ka Dahlia” Supelanas a prominent transwoman, also a UP Cebu alumna, also died in an encounter with Army soldiers in April last year in Brgy. Tapi, Kabankalan City.
All of them were members of either League of Filipino Students or Kabataan party-list groups, according to the authorities.
The United Sugar Producers Federation (UNIFED) also strongly supported the call of Negros Occidental Governor Eugenio Jose Lacson for schools to be more vigilant in monitoring their students, amid allegations that most “recruitment” to join the insurgency movement are happening on campuses.
UNIFED President Manuel Lamata said the presence of student leaders in the Toboso encounter is evidence enough that the insurgency group has a strong presence in our academic institutions.
“Sadly, many of them are even ‘scholars ng bayan,’ attending top-notch government funded universities,” Lamata said, adding that it is also incumbent upon the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod to investigate how one of their supposed student leaders ended up getting tagged as a member of the rebel movement.
Noting that recruitment in schools is not surprising and have been happening for decades, Lamata called on academic institutions to “strongly advocate among the students that there are democratic ways to air their grievances instead of being sympathetic or worse, join the rebel movement, that has been denounced not only locally, but internationally, as a terrorist group.”
Lamata hopes the Governor’s call to school administrators will be regarded as a priority agenda as the new school year is about to start.
The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict said the deaths of former activists allegedly turned into NPA combatants: Ledesma, Alano, Santuyo, Errol Wendel Chen, Vince Francis Dingding, Fil-American Lyle Prijoles, American national Kai Dana-Rene Sorem, now stand as undeniable proof of what government had warned about for years: the existence of a terror-grooming pipeline that systematically targets vulnerable youth, students, activists, and idealistic individuals, drawing them step by step into clandestine structures and eventually into armed violence and death.
For years, CTG-linked front organizations mocked these warnings and dismissed them as state propaganda. Today, the bodies recovered in Toboso and Cauayan expose the truth with brutal clarity, NTF-ELCAC said in a statement.
Their deaths particularly exposed the tragic trajectory long observed in Negros: immersion into ideological circles, gradual normalization of underground activity, isolation from democratic processes, and eventual absorption into armed structures where death becomes romanticized as revolutionary sacrifice. This is not activism, it added.*GPB
