Military should ''properly identify the enemies of the state
Amid the red tagging issue against the military, its new chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Lt. Gen. Cirilito Sobejana said the military should learn from its mistakes and "properly identify the enemies of the state."
"We need to look back on what are the erroneous thing that happened or the mistake that we have committed and we should draw lesson from that. So henceforth my instruction was that whenever we talk or whatever things we do we should be deliberate, we should exercise due diligence so that we will be able to provide better service to our people," Sobejana said in a television interview on Friday.
"We should not hurt anybody unless he is the enemy of the state, so we have to really properly identify the identify the enemies of the state as what i've said, so that there will be no collateral damage and so on, so rest assured that we will be deliberate on what we are doing, he said.
"We will do our job in a very deliberate manner, we should be extra careful especially in giving statements, we should be very accurate in determining the enemies of the state because I do believe that for us to win this war we should not just make ourselves bigger but make the enemy smaller, so it's better to create friends than creating enemies, besides we are mandated to serve the people so we should not appear as the enemy of the people," he added.
Sobejana made his statement, after Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade, National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) spokesman accused Inquirer.net reporter Tetch Torres-Tupas as a propagandist who allegedly helped terrorists.
Sobejana did not give a direct answer if he agreed with the accusations of Parlade, but he noted that the AFP "will validate the statement."
"We will discuss about it, then we will present to the public whatever evidence that we are able to gather, on what will be the result of our investigation," he said.
"Not necessarily investigation (against) Gen. Parlade, but we have to investigate or validate, about the involvement of anybody, not necessarily Inquirer but it applies to all, as what i've said we will exercise due diligence," Sobejana noted.
"I would like to just make clear that the AFP has its designated spokesperson and that is Maj. Gen. (Edgard) Arevalo and Gen. Parlade is the designated spokesperson of NTF ELCAL so I could not tell him directly in his capacity as the spokesperson of NTF ELCAL but if Maj. Gen. Ed Arevalo made that statement then immediately I can correct it, I can correct him especially if there are no concrete basis of his statement," he added. Robina Asido/DMS
