The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) on expresses its outrage over the burning July 2 of the radio station dwRC Radyo Cagayano in Baggao town in Cagayan province by eight armed men wearing ski masks who also blindfolded, muzzled and tied station manager Susan Mapa and volunteers Erik Ayudan, Arnold Agaraan, Armalyn Badua, Arlyn Areta and Joy Marcos.
While thankful that no lives were lost in this latest atrocity, the burning of the station was as brazen an attack on Press Freedom and the People's Right to Know as any of the scores of murders that have claimed 81 colleagues' lives since 1986, when democracy was supposed to have been restored to our benighted land, and 44 since President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo came to power in 2001, the highest toll of any administration.
For while the arsonists deigned to spare the lives of our dwRC colleagues, they struck at the very heart of why the media exist – the inalienable right of the people to free access to information by which they can chart their individual lives and our future as a nation and as a people.
The brazenness of the arson is underscored by the fact that reports reaching the NUJP indicate the station was a joint project of the mayor of Baggao and a local farmers' organization with government funding from the party-list Bayan Muna.Again we demand that the Arroyo government order its law enforcement agencies to act with dispatch to find, arrest and prosecute the brains and perpetrators of this condemnable atrocity.
For, as we have said again and again in the still unsolved cases of so many of our murdered colleagues, and as various human rights and sectoral groups have pointed out in the case of the hundreds of activists killed or involuntarily disappeared since this administration came into power, inaction can only mean culpability or, at the very least, a tolerance of such a wide-scale and wanton violation not just of the media's but of the people's civil, social, political and human rights.
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