EDITORIAL | The Ampatuan Massacre 5 Years On: Who Cares? There is no sugar-coating what this day means, what it says of our country. Today we commemorate failure. Injustice, impunity: these are but symptoms of a larger malaise, of the worst affliction that can visit a person and a people. November 23, 2009, should forever remind us of the only logical direction to the most appalling trait that can be imputed on a nation: apathy. Five years ago, in Ampatuan, Maguindanao, 58 Filipinos were brutally murdered. Five years later, four witnesses to the massacre, and to the casual plotting that led to it, are dead. No one has been sentenced. Zero convictions and witnesses dropping like flies only mean that the Ampatuan massacre is a continuing crime. The assault on all Filipinos right to life, the right to free expression, their right even to have choices in their leaders, did not start with this one ill-fated convoy being blocked as it headed to register a local candidate for Maguindanao governor. Neither has the threat – that gun barrel at the back of your head – been lifted by all the coverage and rhetoric, nor even by the listing of 197 accused. (Listing is an accurate term, btw: only 108 have been arrested and arraigned, 89 people tied to heinous crime are still at large.) Impunity - literally, the absence of punishment - breeds a whole culture of injustice. From the smallest, far-flung towns to the highest seats of national power, Filipinos and their leaders have taken a slow-grinding police and prosecutorial system to be givens in the face of spoiled, fast-flying, glib, and ultimately more powerful criminals. Justice delayed is not only justice denied, it is the mocking death of us all. The families of the victims, most of whom lost their sole breadwinners, must deal as well with continuing threats and offers of bribes. The prosecution efforts are in such a mess that Justice Secretary Leila de Lima has had to assume personal supervision over the entire matter. Her first task was to finally come clean on national dismay. President Benigno Aquino III four years ago assured that convictions could be expected by the time he steps down in 2016; De Lima now says this is highly unlikely. At the moment, the court is mired hearing petitions for bail of 42 of the accused and conducting the trial proper for the arraigned suspects, including 66 who did not seek bail. The prosecution has presented 152 witnesses. Four potential witnesses have been killed, as we have mentioned, including one Dennis Sakal, just last week. Three relatives of other such potential witnesses have also been murdered. The defense has not even had its turn with its own parade. Both defense and prosecution are claiming Sakal, who was reportedly scheduled to testify next week, as their witness. It does not matter. Not only is he now dead, his only purpose now is to highlight government’s failure to secure everyone involved in the massacre trial. And worse. The court has granted, for lack of evidence strong enough, bail to 41 police officers accused of manning the checkpoint where the victims were stopped before being herded to their deaths. Meanwhile, two military officials - now retired Major General Alfredo Cayton and now Brigadier General Medardo Geslani - who refused requests for security for the ill-fated convoy, were promoted. Mr. Aquinos presidency, which was anchored on pledges of justice, respect for basic rights and freedoms, and good governance, had given hope to the families of the massacre victims. He had given hope to us all. And yet today, when pressed to account for progress, any sign of progress, against the festering plague of impunity, he has been quick to uphold only his own sense of integrity, which stands only on his own denial that killings in the Philippines, beyond the usual murders common to any society, illustrate a societal and systemic syndrome crying out for leadership and political will to be interrupted and then hopefully finally addressed. At a press conference with visiting US President Barack Obama, Aquino was asked about continuing killings of media workers in the Philippines. (No less than 33 under his term, according to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines.) In a callous and poorly veiled excuse for the governments inaction and/or inefficacy, the President claimed, without presenting any evidence, that many of the victims were not actually killed because of their media work. It is a claim he has repeated several times since. Not that the question matters. Nothing justifies murder in a society with even pretensions of civility, democracy, and rule of law. To this point, it should not even be necessary to remind that most of those killed in Ampatuan were journalists. But it is important. It is vital to understand why media workers are under the gun, and why their fate is tied to yours. And why anybodys apathy indicts and condemns everybody elses present and limited future. As early as November 2004, one of our editors wrote: Where such attacks on the messengers are mounting, what can be said of life in general? Despite their fluctuating standing in society, journalists - as journalists everywhere like to say - are canaries in the mines. If thats too romantic, then try them, see them, as frogs in the pond. You need not love them, but the point is made: Absence of noise should upset us… A silent night should make us wonder whats in store tomorrow, just as a silent town should make us wonder what has caused all the doors to be closed, all the windows to be shuttered, all the streets to be empty. There are towns in the Philippines where to be a journalist is to volunteer to test the danger in the air. There are towns…where journalists are endangered not so much by bullets as an environment whose steadily rising heat everyone has learned to tolerate to the point that they are oblivious to the boiling all around them. All over the world, many journalists have paid with their lives to deliver and be the news people need to run, to fight, or at least give a damn. To ignore their lament is to risk being slowly boiled alive. Filipinos are getting killed for various reasons. Over and above the numbers for murder, no matter how those numbers are broken down, there is only one statistic that matters: that for proper prosecution, that for justice rendered. In the case of the massacre we commemorate today, we need not understand or analyze the victims by their gender or work or economic standing. Not by religion or motivation, not by their number of children nor by the days they lived. We need only remember this: zero convictions. By that, the running number of victims is more or less 100 million. interaksyon/article/99743/editorial--the-ampatuan-massacre-5-years-on-who-cares
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 03:04:31 +0000
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