"By this gesture, the prisoners are saying that if there’s anyone who deserves to go to jail, it should be Mr. Estrada, the biggest gambling lord of them all," said Danny Beltran, secretary-general of the Ecumenical Movement for Justice and Peace (EMJP).
He said that today is doubly significant, it being International Human Rights Day.
About 212 political prisoners in detention centers in Bicol, Cebu and Davao and in the New Bilibid Prisons (NBP) in Muntinlupa City, took part in the hunger strike, organized with the help of the EMJP and the militant human rights group Karapatan.
At 8 a.m. today, the EMJP and its allied groups will hold an hour-long "ecumenical Mass for people’s rights" at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani on EDSA. After that, they will proceed to the NBP for a human rights forum with political prisoners at the maximum security compound’s social hall.
Marie Hilao-Enriquez, Karapatan secretary-general, said the hunger strike also highlights the human rights record of the Estrada administration.
She bewailed the government’s lack of respect for the rights of political prisoners, most of whom she claimed are communist dissidents who are facing ordinary criminal charges in court.
She said that since Mr. Estrada assumed office, the militarization of the countryside has increased as the government declared an all-out, counter-insurgency war against the New People’s Army and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
"Mr. Estrada greeted the new millennium with a human rights record tainted by the blood of the victims of massacres and summary executions, and drowned by the tears of victims of torture, forced evacuation and various forms of human rights violations in the countryside," she said.
Karapatan said it has recorded 974 human rights violations allegedly committed by the government since Mr. Estrada became President in July 1998. — Romel Bagares