Wellington (dpa) - Filipino labour unionist Dennis Maga is conducting a speaking tour of New Zealand to condemn political repression and killings in his homeland a week before President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo arrives for an official visit, a union leader said Monday.
Maga is speaking particularly about killings during last week's Filipino elections, said Laila Harre, secretary of New Zealand's National Distribution Union.
Arroyo plans to attend the Asia-Pacific Regional Interfaith Dialogue May 29-31 at Waitangi. It aims to strengthen regional security, promote peace and tolerance between different religions, and build networks between religious communities in South-East Asia and the South Pacific.
Harre said the Philippines National Police description of last week's polls as "relatively peaceful" was an outrage.
She called the Philippines the "Colombia of the South Pacific" where hundreds of government-sanctioned killings have been ignored and said Iraq was the only country more dangerous for journalists.
"Four poll watchers were killed last week, bringing the total number of killings during this election to 126," she said. "A left-wing political party leader was also abducted, another attempted abduction failed and another poll observer also went missing just in the last week."
Harre said Maga was president of the "Free Ka Bel" movement to free Ka Bel Beltran, an ailing 74-year-old congressman and chairman of a large trade union federation, whose detention for 16 months in a hospital had been labelled unlawful by the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
Maga charged that Ka Bel was just one of many victims of increased political repression in the Philippines under Arroyo's administration.
"Besides intimidating political opponents, 858 extrajudicial killings have been documented since her rise to power," he said. "Over 130 of the deaths are from just one party representing the urban poor.
Most of the victims of the political killings have been leftist, political, human-rights and labour activists. Activists have accused the military of being behind most of the attacks, and several foreign fact-finding missions, including one conducted by a UN human-rights investigator, have concluded that the armed forces could indeed be blamed for most of the killings and about 180 forced disappearances.
Amid mounting international pressure to resolve the political attacks, the Philippine government has called on various foreign governments and organizations, such as the European Union and the United Nations, to help it investigate the killings.
"We are very concerned that your prime minister is hosting the president when our elections are being slammed by our media, independent watchdogs and international observers as rife with fraud, intimidation, killing and coercion of voters," Maga said.
He called it a "tragic irony" that the Philippines was elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday.
