The case of detained women health workers reflects the state of indigenous women’s rights

Quezon City (March 8, 2010) -- Twenty-six (26) of the 43 health workers arrested and detained by state forces in Camp Capinpin are women.  Two of them are indigenous women – an Igorot and a Mangyan.

“The plight of the detained indigenous health workers reflects the state of indigenous women’s rights in the Philippines,” said KATRIBU Partylist President Beverly Longid, stressing that “indigenous women have been very vulnerable to state violence and impunity, not to mention visceral labeling and criminalization under the Arroyo administration.”

The rights of the indigenous health workers and their colleagues were brazenly violated when they were unlawfully and unjustly arrested on trumped up cases, and detained in a military camp where they were subjected to torture, threats and harassment,” said Longid.
 
“Such climate of impunity has thrived amidst the extra-judicial killings and horrendous massacres in the country which already claimed the lives of 137 indigenous persons since 2001, including 19 minors and 13 women, 4 of whom were pregnant,” revealed Longid, citing the Shadow Report submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (UNCERD) in 2009.
 
Longid an Igorot, also said that the circumstances of the health workers and their grassroots beneficiaries also provide a glimpse into the economic, social and cultural dimensions of the state of human rights of indigenous women and their communities.

An assessment on the situation of indigenous children, youth and women conducted by the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF)-Philippines and the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) conducted in 17 provinces reveals that “basic services do not normally reach IP communities.”

Echoing the recent UN report on the state of the world’s indigenous peoples, Longid said that indigenous women and their communities in the country continue to be “over-represented among the poorest, the illiterate, the destitute; they are displaced by wars and environmental disasters; indigenous peoples are dispossessed of their ancestral lands and deprived of their resources for survival.”

“It is precisely government’s misrepresentation and neglect to provide basic services such as education and health that drove the health workers to serve poor communities. Now such neglect becomes the crime of the health workers and the continued deprivation of the poor?” Longid lamented, calling for the “immediate release of her katribus (fellow indigenous persons) and the rest of the detained health workers.”

She also slammed the systemic discrimination of indigenous women and their exclusion from political and economic power, enjoining her fellow indigenous women to join other women in the country and elsewhere in the world to continue marching and struggling for equal rights and equal opportunities. # www.katribu.org

Reference:

Beverly Longid
President
KATRIBU Partylist