Accents
Maguindanao Massacre (4)
Arroyo Regime in the Philippines Crowns Its Rule Of State Terror With Barbaric Show
Part 2
“Justice delayed is justice denied.” My roommate Rudy can be very legalese when he wants swift justice to the aggrieved party. This legal cliché he uttered for the 57 victims of the Maguindanao massacre on the wait for justice in this most gruesome election-related violence. Speedy trial is what the victims’ families want, Rudy said. And what the rest of the people demand, too, I added.
It is bruited about that political influence from the powers-that-be is delaying the wheels of justice from rolling. The more should the public demand for immediate redress of grievances. Justice must not be delayed, lest it boils down to justice denied. Thus the need for more vigilance, more protests, more condemnations of the brutality of the incident. Husbands and wives continue to mourn the loss of loved ones. Children suffer the loss of the family breadwinner while the perpetrators enjoy catered meals and comfy jails—grave insult to the family of the victims.
Below, Dr. Epifanio San Juan, Jr. continues with his treatise first published in countercurrents.org, an alternative webjournal. Famed intellectual San Juan (scroll down for his bio) places the “barbaric show” in global context. Read on:
From the start, Arroyo’s electoral cheating and corruption has been exposed, making her letimacy precarious. She needs periodic shows of violence to buttress the lack of consensual authority, more than previous presidents. In July 2006, Arroyo issued Executive Order 546. This move overturned a clause in the Philippine Constitution barring private armies such as those controlled by the Ampatuans and over a hundred political dynasties such as the Arroyos. The result: local officials like the Ampatuans and the police bureaucracies they control were given the power to create “force multipliers” in the fight against the NPA, MILF and MNLF, namely, AFP-sponsored “wild guns” of the CAFGUs and CVOs deputized to suppress political opposition. Estimates of the Ampatuan’s local army is about 800-1000 men, aside from those managed by four Ampatuan town mayors. Local analyst Jarius Bondoc and former congressman Michael Mastura have described the impunity of Ampatuan’s fiefdom, their control of all State funds and their clearance of police and military officials assigned to their area.
The Philippine human rights monitor KARAPATAN correctly links this old U.S. counterinsurgency method of “low intensity warfare” to Arroyo’s Oplan Bantay Laya, an inept and state-terrorist strategy to defeat the NPA and MILF. The counterinsurgency program of arming private armies such as the Ampatuans have led to extra-judicial killings of all “enemies of the state,” including those labeled front organizations. This happened with the dreaded U.S.-subsidized vigilante groups allowed by Corazon Aquino during her administration and in covert forms during the current campaign against the Abu Sayyaf.
Arroyo ends her de facto president plagued with corruption scandals and the worst human-rights record of any presidency, even including Ferdinand Marcos’. As of 2001, the Arroyo regime has to its credit 1,118 extrajudicial murders, 204 forcible disappearances, 1,026 tortured, and 1,1932 illegal arrests. These have all been documented by the UN Special Rapporteurs, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international monitors. The Arroyo regime not only has done nothing to render justice to the victims, but has even continued the policies that have laid the groundwork for this unconscionable violation of human rights. She has the gall to run for Congress next year to forestall any court case against her if thrown out of office.
Cognizant of historical precedents and institutional contexts, KARAPATAN concludes that the “Maguindanao massacre was an event waiting to happen with the continued implementation of this criminal government’s anti-insurgency program….Now the country is jolted by a brutal crime ostensibly committed by a private army of a warlord…For far too long has this regime considered itself a law above the citizens, contravening the laws laid out in the legal instruments of the land so that its coddled political allies have imbibed the mindset that they too can commit such transgressions with impunity. [The Maguindanao massacre] is the result of condoning and tolerating human rights violations.”
KARAPATAN calls on the immediate disbandment of the paramilitary units of the AFP and the gangster private armies of warlords and politicians. It calls on the abolition of the brutal Oplan Bantay Laya counter-insurgency program as a [state-terrorist] method to eradicate the festering insurgency in the land.”
Cynics will dismiss this appeal for sanity and ethical governance. Not only skeptics but commonsensical people will ask: How can the bloody Arroyo government carry out a mandate of giving justice to its citizens when Arroyo and her minions are guilty of crimes worse than the Ampatuans? As commentator Inday Espina-Varona remarked, “who will protect us from our protectors?” Witnesses have now testified that three police officers of Abusana Majid, suspended police chief of Maguindanao province, were at the scene of the killing (as reported by Cecilia Yap and Joel Guinto, 24 Nov. blog in Bloomberg.com). Arroyo adviser Jesus Dureza’s account of his highly comic ritualized “arrest” of Andal Ampatuan Jr. augurs beyond doubt of the eventual whitewashing and forcible “disappearance” of this case. Tragedy threatens to become a “Moro-moro” vaudeville, if not anticlimactic farce.
Symptoms of a failed state? Or just ordinary election-related incidents in a U.S. neocolony? Abuse of power by the Ampatuans cannot be checked by the Arroyo regime whose existence owes its illegitimacy to the electoral frauds in Maguindanao and ARRM territory of the Ampatuans. As Maria Ressa (blog in CNN Amanpour) suggests, charges against Ampatuan’s killing of political rivals have never prospered. Only a special court and international vigilance can sustain any charge against the Ampatuan clan of “crimes against humanity.” Only local mass protests can provoke world conscience and an international tribunal duly formed to investigate and render justice to the victims of this latest horrible product of finance-capital’s globalization scheme (evinced by the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan) to destroy the planet.
E. SAN JUAN, Jr. was recently a Fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. He was previously a Fulbright Professor of American Studies in Leuven University, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature at National Tsing Hua University and Tamkang University, Republic of China. He served also as a Fellow of the Center for the Humanities and visiting Professor of English, Wesleyan University; professor and chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University (1998-2001); an honorary fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland; and visiting professor at the Universita degli di studi Trento, Italy. His book Racial Formations/Critical Transformations (Humanity Books) won awards from the Association for Asian American Studies and the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights. His collected poems in Filipino (1960-90) are found in Alay sa Paglikha ng Bukang-liwayway (Ateneo de Manila University Press). Several collections of new poems followed: Sapagkat Iniibig Kita (University of the Philippines Press), Salud Algabre at iba pang tula (University of San Agustin Publishing House, Iloilo City, Philippines); Balikbayang Mahal: Passages from Exile (LuLu.com), Bukas, May-Nilad! and Panambitan at Parangal Kay Cherith (Philippines Cultural Studies Center).
(Email: E. San Juan, Jr. philcsc@gmail.com)
