Senators back call to drop ROTC bill after hazing death

ROTC REVIVAL A Marine trains a group of students enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) on how to handle a rifle. —MARIANNE BERMUDEZ

Several senators on Friday voiced support for calls to drop the proposed revival of the mandatory Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) following the hazing death of Adamson University student John Matthew Salilig, after undergoing the “welcoming rites” of the Tau Gamma Phi fraternity.

“Scrap the bill making ROTC mandatory,” Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III told reporters, adding that it should just be “optional” to those who want to pursue a military career.

Senate Majority Leader Joel Villanueva, a Tau Gamma member, said having active and reserve military officers was not an assurance that students would be protected from physical abuse and violence while undergoing ROTC training.

He cited the killing of Mark Welson Chua, a University of Santo Tomas student who was murdered in 2001 after he exposed the corruption and other irregularities committed by ROTC officers in his school.

Chua’s family, he lamented, had yet to secure justice for his tragic killing until now.

“Tau Gamma, which I am a part of, has been implementing a ‘no-contact’ policy for many years now. Yet we’re all shocked that this happened [to Salilig],” Villanueva said in a Zoom press briefing.

Besides, Villanueva said Congress had passed two laws—the National Service Training Program Act of 2001 and the GMRC (Good Manners and Right Conduct) and Values Education Act of 2017—to instill discipline among Filipino youth.

“Are these laws not enough to attain what we want under the proposed mandatory ROTC? Until I see the very important components of the proposed measure, I will not throw my support [behind its passage],” the Senate leader said.

“As of now, I have to say I have reservations [about the measure]. After what happened to my fraternity brother (Salilig), my reservations were further strengthened,” he added.

‘No compelling justification’

Senator Risa Hontiveros said the call to set aside the move to bring back the mandatory ROTC training has become “even clearer” after Salilig’s murder.

“There is no compelling justification to revive the mandatory ROTC program,” Hontiveros said.

Senator Nancy Binay also shared the views of her colleagues as she maintained that ROTC training “does not have the sole franchise to teach discipline and love of country.”

“It’s so hard to understand, align and reconcile love of country with a training course that is flawed to the core. It’s also hard to explain why the supposed ‘tradition of discipline’ accounts for a long list of hazing cases,” Binay said.

But Senators Ronald dela Rosa and Sherwin Gatchalian, the two main proponents in the Senate of the ROTC training revival, both rejected the arguments of their colleagues, with the latter insisting that military training would help “inculcate discipline and good citizenship among the youth.”

“It is precisely incidents like these that ROTC intends to eliminate by molding our youth to respect our country and one another,” said Gatchalian, apparently discounting the fact that fraternity-related violence and hazing had been prevalent even when ROTC was still mandatory.

“The [proposed] law is airtight and equipped with safeguards that will prevent abuses from happening,” he said.

Dela Rosa, on the other hand, said Salilig’s death was not related to the efforts to require students undergo military training, saying it was a “desperate move from antiROTC leftist groups” that wanted to “exploit” the hazing incident.

“What is the connection? The victim died because of fraternity hazing and not [due to] ROTC training,” Dela Rosa argued.

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