IN MEMORY OF SLAIN STUDENT

Youth group urges Palace to scrap revival of mandatory ROTC

INQUIRER.net / 02:34 PM August 05, 2016

Akbayan Youth on Friday called on Palace officials to scrap their plans of reviving the mandatory
enforcement of Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) in memory of Mark Welson Chua, a student of
the University of Santo Tomas who exposed corruption within their ROTC program, leading to his
murder and the passage of the National Service Training Program (NSTP) Act of 2001 which rescinded
ROTC as a pre-requisite to graduation.

We hope Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo remembers how many young people fought for
the abolition of mandatory ROTC in college, including Mark Chua who bravely exposed the corruption
within their ROTC program and ended up giving his life for speaking truth against power, said Akbayan
Youth Chairperson Rafaela David.

READ: Palace to push for revival of compulsory ROTC for college students

ADVERTISEMENT

The youth group also said that instead of instilling discipline and patriotism, the program only promoted
bullying and violence in campuses, and even sexism and discrimination.

At such a young age, ROTC exposes the youth to grueling and violent hazing practices, from physical to
psychological abuse, to instill in them fear and blind obedience. Worse, it is their fellow youth who
becomes perpetrators of this cyclical system of abuse. It is not love of country nor discipline that ROTC
instills in the youth, but the greed for power and bullying, David said.

If you are physically weak, feminine or gay, ROTC will force you to man up! With premium on being
macho, the ROTC openly discriminates against those who are weak or those who stand out of the mold
of a standard cadet, she added.

READ: Student groups oppose making ROTC mandatory again

The group also urged the government to promote democratization within schools, and not
militarization, which they said only silences the youth.

The colleges and universities must be safe spaces for the youth, where they can learn how to responsibly
use their freedoms and learn how to be active citizens. Government thus must promote other citizenship-
based education courses and community service programs that instead empowers the youth to act and
creatively express their solidarity with their fellow Filipinos, not programs such as the
ROTC that seek to silence, disempower and force the youth to conformity she concluded.

Akbayan Youth vowed to fight against efforts that would repeal the reforms achieved in making ROTC
non-compulsory for college students.

Chua was a Mechanical Engineering student of UST and ROTC officer who divulged the irregularities within
their organization to the university officials and publication. He received death threats for the act. His corpse
was found floating in the Pasig River near Jones Bridge on March 18, 2001. Ma. Czarina A.
Fernandez, INQUIRER.net trainee/CDG/rga