Assault not “rescue” the better term

ILOILO CITY (February 15, 2021) — TODAY, the news of police “rescuing” minors at the Lumad Bakwit School at the Talamban campus of the University of San Carlos, Cebu City, has gone viral in social media.

The PNP calls that “rescue” but human rights groups and participants of the Bakwit School, denounce it an assault on their rights.

It baffles sanity to see the incident as “rescue” by the police of children who were precisely at the sanctuary to seek protection from state-sponsored human rights abuses. They are refugees; they fled their mountain homes in Mindanao away from government forces, the very reason for their status as internally displaced persons.

The more accurate term is arrest or assault; the video footages show it by the angry and terrified looks of the children screaming while being taken away or “rescued”, to use the term coined by their attackers.

Philippine Star reports the figure of those “rescued” or arrested:  21 students of whom 15 are minors and their two teachers.

“Bakwit” is the bisayanized term for evacuee/s that those “rescued” are.  

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