[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.19.18″ custom_padding=”54px|0px|54px|0px|true|false”][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.19.18″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.19.18″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.19.18″]
PRESS RELEASE
23 September 2021
Environmental activist group Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan PNE) raised the alarm over reports that the Philippine military is attempting to incarcerate Bai Bibyaon Ligkayan Bigkay, the lone woman chieftain of the indigenous Lumad people currently in sanctuary.
“We urge civilian authorities to stop the military’s attempts to arrest Bai Bibyaon by rounding up her family to force her out of her sanctuary. This is the latest atrocity aimed at stopping Bai Bibyaon and her brethren from opposing the entry of big mining, agribusiness, and logging in their ancestral lands in the Pantaron Mountain Range,” said Leon Dulce, national coordinator of Kalikasan PNE.
“It is hypocritical of President Rodrigo Duterte to play the victim of the climate crisis before the UN General Assembly when he continues to crack down on climate activists and environmental defenders here back home,” he furthered.
In an urgent alert released by the Save Our Schools Network, it was reported that the 56th Infantry Battalion of the Philippine Army forcibly gathered Bai Bibyaon’s relatives in the municipality of Talaingod, Davao del Norte province.
56th IBPA personnel reportedly forced them to sign documents authorizing the retrieval of the Lumad leader from her sanctuary.
Bai Bibyaon. Image source: bulatlat.com
Bai Bibyaon is a widely recognized environmental defender who was awarded the 2017 University of the Philippines Gawad Tandang Sora award for leadership withindigenous people’s struggle for human rights and dignity. In 2018, she was recognized as the Most Distinguished Awardee of the 5th Gawad Bayani ng Kalikasan for her indispensable role in protecting the last virgin forests of the 12,600 square-kilometer Pantaron Mountain Range.
Pantaron is one of the last biodiversity corridors with old growth forests in the Philippines. It is a rich ecosystem with habitats for the critically endangered Philippine eagle, the vulnerable Philippine brown deer, the Philippine flying lemur, a Mindanao-endemic gymnure, and other endemic, rare or vulnerable species of flora and fauna.
“At least 31,180 hectares of mining applications are trying to get headway into the Pantaron Mountain Range. As we suspected, the recent mining revitalization policies such as Mr. Duterte’s Executive Order 130 on mining coincides with a surge of human rights violations,” observed Dulce.
The Philippines was recently ranked as Asia’s deadliest country for land and environmental defenders for eight years running, and currently third deadliest in the world, in the annual report on land and environmental defender killings of international investigative group Global Witness.
“We enjoin the Filipino public and the international community to join us in demanding the government to keep their hands off Bai Bibyaon. We must defend environmental defenders like Bai Bibyaon as they are our first and last line of defense against the worsening impacts of environmental destruction and climate change,” Dulce ended.#
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]
