Days of Swine and Hoaxes
Sometime seven in the evening of June 4, my sad republic has ceased as a democracy. Again.
Congress had approved on third and final reading the controversial Anti-Terrorism Bill (House Bill No. 6875) with an overwhelming 173 votes. Thirty-one voted ‘no’ and 29 abstained from the vote.
The President had earlier certified the bill as ‘urgent,’ thrashing necessary legislation and policies the government could have used to soften the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The approval of the bill repealed the largely flawed Human Security Act of 2007.
Since both versions from the Lower House and the Senate are similar, no bicameral deliberation, otherwise heated and lengthy, is required. The next step would be to consolidate both versions of the bill, if there is any consolidating to be done, within two days. The final version must then be sent to the Office of the President for his signature at the soonest possible time.
The Palace was quick to dismiss any criticism leveled on the bill by citing a provision where criticism, dissent and mass action are excluded in the definition of ‘terrorism’. Senate President Vicente “Tito” Sotto III raised exactly that argument, quoting Section 4: ‘ It does not include advocacy, protest, dissent, stoppage of work, a strike or industrial or mass action, or exercise of civil and political rights.”
Like I said in a previous essay, no lawmaker in his right mind — and with dreams of running for reelection — would openly admit in writing (in this case, through legislation) that this bill is, by and large, draconian both in intent and language.
Yet, any who had read the bill, including lawyers, and throw in all those staunchly loyal to the President, will tell you that the Anti-Terrorism Act is no more a solution to terrorism than Marcos’ Proclamation No. 1081 was to communist insurgency.
Wire-tapping as a tool for heightened surveillance plus warrant-less arrests on mere suspicion are more than sufficient proof of the bill’s draconian face.
The bill is set to legitimize state repression on a scale resembling, or more extensive than, Marcos’ martial law.
‘Now, aren’t you being a drivel too melodramatic?” you ask. ‘Sometimes you critics go way over your heads if only to prove a point.’
I don’t think so. Over the last three years, the Duterte regime has accomplished what Marcos couldn’t even do under a military dictatorship: embolden the murder of over 25,000 suspected drug users in a little over three years — in clear violation of our laws and the Constitution.
That number could fill the Araneta Coliseum with a seating capacity of roughly 16,500, a full house of 20,000.
The 2019 Human Rights Watch Report said, “According to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), 4,948 suspected drug users and dealers died during police operations from July 1, 2016 to September 30, 2018. But this does not include the thousands of others killed by unidentified gunmen. According to the Philippine National Police (PNP), 22,983 such deaths since the ‘war on drugs’ began are classified as ‘homicides under investigation.’”
These ‘unidentified gunmen’ were exposed for who they are eventually — members of the Philippine National Police — by none other than Putlizer Prize-winning Filipino journalist Manuel Mogato and Clare Baldwin in their Reuters special report, ‘Police describe kill rewards, staged crime scenes in Duterte’s drug war’.
What is even more shocking besides our streets being drenched with blood and the police participating in criminal acts is the fact that the regime accomplished this outside the boundaries of the law and the Constitution. A great majority of the dead and imprisoned were mere suspects, denied of their day in court and right to due process. In the heat of the crossfire, in 2018 alone, 54 children had been killed in the drug war.
Seventeen-year-old Kian delos Santos was later found by the court to have been executed by police in an empty lot a few paces from his home. The police lied about how it all transpired on the night of Aug. 16, 2017.
What we’ve witnessed so far is Duterte taking the cudgels for murderers in an ever-growing blitzkrieg against the poor and the destitute. In another Human Rights Watch report on the war on drugs, the group said, “Large-scale extrajudicial violence as a crime solution was a marker of Duterte’s 22-year tenure as mayor of Davao City and the cornerstone of his presidential campaign.
“On the eve of his May 9, 2016 election victory, Duterte told a crowd of more than 300,000: ‘If I make it to the presidential palace I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, holdup men, and do-nothings, you better get out because I’ll kill you.”
Now, if this regime can dismiss the Constitution like some used baby diaper whenever it wishes, imagine what it can and will do when repression is made legal.
I have worked with language long enough to know that arrest on mere suspicion, topped with heightened surveillance, go squarely against the basic tenet of democracy, which is “a person is deemed innocent until proven guilty”.
For the police to have the authority to detain suspected ‘terrorists’ for 10-24 days sans any charges puts this bill right up where the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus stands for all time as the precursor to martial law.
During Marcos’ martial law, the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus led to the disappearances of several youth leaders, journalists and writers, activists and critics. Primitivo “Tibo” Mijares, former confidant and Marcos’ right-hand-man, was one of several who disappeared a few months after publishing his critique of the Marcos regime, The Conjugal Dictatorship.
Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano describes the desaparecido (the disappeared) in these words: “The technique of the ‘disappeared’: there are no prisoners to claim, martyrs to mourn. The earth devours the people and the government washes its hands. There are no crimes to denounce nor explanations to give. Each death dies over and over again until, the only thing your soul retains is a mist of horror and uncertainty” (Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War, Monthly Review Press, 1983, p. 23).
What I find utterly disturbing about the bill is the hoax it is trying to perpetuate, and there are two: first, that the bill is a perfect weapon and tool in quashing terrorism; and second, that terror acts belong to the sole province of the citizenry and not the State.
I don’t even have to expound on the first hoax in light of how this regime proves itself the bumbling amateur when it comes to intelligence gathering. Suffice it that the ‘Oust-Duterte Matrix,’ which the Palace released sometime April 2019, is a tomfoolery no greater than the sum of its imagined parts.
Former spokesperson Salvador Panelo had to trip over his own tongue if only to explain why the information and names came from an ‘unknown’ source. ‘Unknown’ and ‘one who wishes to remain anonymous’ are two very different things. This only goes to show how uncoordinated and disorganized this regime’s intelligence gathering capabilities are, that they have to bank on the imagination to accomplish anything.
As for the second, nothing can be more absurd. If anything, it is the State that has a history of abuse, torture, brutality and what can be safely defined as terror acts, including mass murders. Most Presidents from Marcos to Duterte have a massacre riding their bloody coattails.
In a previous article I wrote, “A brave, angry world,” I listed down every other terror act — from Marcos’ Escalante massacre (which allegedly involved former President and Marcos chief of staff Fidel V. Ramos), Mendiola massacre of Cory Aquino’s day to the Maguindanao massacre under Gloria Arroyo’s watch, and of course, Nonoy Aquino’s Kidapawan massacre.
The ongoing intimidation and assassinations of environmental and land activists, including farmers, priests and human rights lawyers form a long list of massacres under the Duterte regime. His bogus ‘war on drugs’ tops the list.
Why this bill conveniently overlooked the obvious is clear: it wants to spread its narrative that the people are the only ones who can be guilty of terrorist acts, thereby excluding the State in the roster of terrorist organizations. This, I feel, is the real intention of the bill, among others.
Consider this: the death toll of the 10 biggest terrorist acts in the country, starting with the Rizal Day Bombing in Dec. 2000, fail to even come close to the tens of thousands who fell through massacres, assassinations and extrajudicial killings sanctioned by the State all across different administrations — from Marcos to Duterte.
If this is not proof that we have more reason to fear state terrorism than actual plots from terrorist organizations, I don’t know what is.
How all this will pan out in the next couple of weeks and months remains to be seen. This much is certain: Filipinos will be facing a battle for their lives. In one corner, the novel coronavirus, in the other, their own tyrannous government.
Left with little choice, democracy will have to go underground. For now it must consolidate its voices to keep the fire of freedom burning.
This is not the first time we’ve been shackled in fear and thrust into the fire. This is also not the first time we’ve fought and won.
