US court gives asylum to Filipina allegedly raped by rebels
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 04:51:00 05/09/2008
SAN FRANCISCO -- A Federal appeals court has granted political asylum to a woman who claimed to have been gang-raped and tortured 26 years ago in her native Philippines.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled on Tuesday that Rosalina Silaya was a target of the communist-led New People’s Army rebels because her father fought during World War II under US Gen. Douglas MacArthur, then supported President Ferdinand Marcos.
When Silaya was 23, she said, members of the NPA barged into the family’s home, knocked her unconscious and kidnapped her.
Over three days, she was beat up, cut, burnt and raped before the men dumped her, still naked and bound, in her family’s living room. She became pregnant from the rapes and delivered a daughter in 1983.
Silaya said after the ordeal she was “fearful all the time.” She added, “Wherever I went in the Philippines ... I was afraid the NPA soldiers would find me.”
That fear led her to take a job as a nanny in the United States in 1985 and did not return home when her visa expired, she said.
An immigration judge had ruled her case did not fit the asylum parameters, but the appeals court disagreed, saying “the facts of this case compel a conclusion that members of the NPA kidnapped, raped and abused Rosalina because her father was a World War II veteran.”
In Manila, former member of the Communist Party of the Philippines and now Bayan Muna party-list Rep. Satur Ocampo said Thursday he was puzzled by the case of Silaya.
“That’s a strange story; the NPAs don’t do that,” he said. “I’m not aware of such an incident. It wasn’t publicized, if it happened at all.”
Ocampo said he wondered why Silaya did not bring the case to a Philippine court after it happened, and waited for 26 years to bring it up.
“That’s very suspicious. She could have raised the case here at the time; there was a mechanism for such cases,” he said. Agence France-Presse, TJ Burgonio
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