Reaping the whirlwind December 19, 2006
THE latest casualties are Rep. Luis Bersamin of Abra province and his bodyguard. Bersamin had just emerged from the womb of Mt. Carmel Church and was about to board his car in the churchyard when a couple of men walked up to him and his bodyguard from behind and shot them dead. The assassins gunned down his bodyguard first before they shot him in the head as he whirled around. He died on the spot.
This murder occurred only days after the attempted murder of Rep. Robert “Dodot” Jaworski of Pasig City. Jaworski had every reason to fume and cry out, “Shame on you!” at those saying he had done this to himself as an election gimmick. The state of his car ruled out the idea, unless he was the kind of devil-may-care, winner-take-all, risk-taker who would cheat death by the skin of his teeth just to improve his chances at the polls. His car was reduced to a blackened pile of junk. But for the fact that the explosive tucked under the hood of his car emitted smoke before exploding, giving him time to scramble out, Jaworski would now be playing the harp with Bersamin in the ethereal regions.
Before this, the son of a mayor in Pampanga province was also shot dead a couple of weeks ago. I forget the details now, but I heard the mayor being interviewed on TV, his voice quaking with grief. He went on to issue veiled warnings at “whoever did this,” but whose identities he seemed to know very well, or deeply suspected.
I do not know what specific motives impelled these slayings. Abra politics has always been a little murderous, and Jaworski himself points to drugs as the cause of the attempt on his life. He has apparently been at odds with the drug lords of Pasig.
I do not know what specific motives impelled these slayings, or near-slayings, but I do know why they have happened, and why they will happen again and again and more brazenly over the next few months. Indeed, well past the May elections. They have happened and will happen because we have failed to stop the killings. Or more specifically, they have happened and will happen because we have failed to stop the killings of political activists and journalists in the provinces. The one is to the other as cause and effect. Very direct cause and very direct effect.
Not quite incidentally, the killings of activists and journalists continue unabated to this day. At the same time that Jaworski’s car was bombed, a human rights lawyer and a Bayan Muna party-list group member were murdered in Sorsogon. The way they were murdered made even the phrase “culture of impunity” sound almost tame. Lawyer Gil Gojol had just left the court after a hearing when he was gunned down in his van by motorcycle-riding gunmen. Bayan Muna’s Cisanto Frivaldo was right in his home when two men burst into it and shot him dead. Even home and hearth no longer offer protection to potential victims in this country.
I did warn in a column only a couple of weeks ago that we would be idiots to imagine that these killings would be confined to political activists and journalists in the provinces. The likelihood that they would spill over to other groups, notably politicians in light of the impending elections, I said, wasn’t just strong but inevitable. I said that with these killings left unsolved and unchecked, the party-list candidates in particular stood to be an endangered species. Or on a larger plane the opposition candidates.
That remains a very real threat. Not least in light of that banana-eating homicidal maniac Norberto Gonzales proposing to paint the party-list candidates red. He said in a radio interview: “There will be plenty who will run in the party lists in the coming elections. As national security adviser, it is important for me to show soldiers and police what groups are being used by the communists to continue their bad intentions on the public.” If he had thought to sign their death warrants, he could not have been more bloodthirsty.
But as has clearly turned out, the bloodletting won’t just go the party-list or opposition candidates’ way. Barely had the spit dried on my mouth, or the ink from my pen, when the slayings and/or near-slayings above took place with chilling rapidity. And with the same brazenness or utter contempt of law or decency that makes “impunity” such a pale description. Even churches no longer offer refuge from the death merchants.
The murder of Bersamin, in particular, throws us back to the pre-martial-law days when warlords walked this earth and Floro Crisologo was gunned down in church as he knelt on a pew to receive Holy Communion.
Frankly, I don’t know why we are so dense we cannot see that when we tolerate the killing of one group of people, we tolerate the killing of all groups of people. That when we incite the murder of other people, we invite the murder of ourselves. History does not lack for lessons there. You agree to the pogrom of the Jews, you agree to the slaughter of yourself.
We do not stop the killings of journalists and political activists right now, we assure that the coming elections will become one of the bloodiest in our postwar history, if not the bloodiest. We do not stop the killings of journalists and political activists right now, we raise a culture that says it is perfectly acceptable to dispatch your enemies to the next life, there is nothing in heaven or earth to deter you from it. That is a culture that like toxic rain, or an Arab curse, will befall all of us, and our children’s children. The bullet that finds the brains of other people will not lodge there permanently. It will find yours, too.
If I recall right, there’s something in the Bible that says as you sow, so shall you reap. It’s true, whether you believe the Bible or the Koran.
You sow death, you will reap death.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=39060
This murder occurred only days after the attempted murder of Rep. Robert “Dodot” Jaworski of Pasig City. Jaworski had every reason to fume and cry out, “Shame on you!” at those saying he had done this to himself as an election gimmick. The state of his car ruled out the idea, unless he was the kind of devil-may-care, winner-take-all, risk-taker who would cheat death by the skin of his teeth just to improve his chances at the polls. His car was reduced to a blackened pile of junk. But for the fact that the explosive tucked under the hood of his car emitted smoke before exploding, giving him time to scramble out, Jaworski would now be playing the harp with Bersamin in the ethereal regions.
Before this, the son of a mayor in Pampanga province was also shot dead a couple of weeks ago. I forget the details now, but I heard the mayor being interviewed on TV, his voice quaking with grief. He went on to issue veiled warnings at “whoever did this,” but whose identities he seemed to know very well, or deeply suspected.
I do not know what specific motives impelled these slayings. Abra politics has always been a little murderous, and Jaworski himself points to drugs as the cause of the attempt on his life. He has apparently been at odds with the drug lords of Pasig.
I do not know what specific motives impelled these slayings, or near-slayings, but I do know why they have happened, and why they will happen again and again and more brazenly over the next few months. Indeed, well past the May elections. They have happened and will happen because we have failed to stop the killings. Or more specifically, they have happened and will happen because we have failed to stop the killings of political activists and journalists in the provinces. The one is to the other as cause and effect. Very direct cause and very direct effect.
Not quite incidentally, the killings of activists and journalists continue unabated to this day. At the same time that Jaworski’s car was bombed, a human rights lawyer and a Bayan Muna party-list group member were murdered in Sorsogon. The way they were murdered made even the phrase “culture of impunity” sound almost tame. Lawyer Gil Gojol had just left the court after a hearing when he was gunned down in his van by motorcycle-riding gunmen. Bayan Muna’s Cisanto Frivaldo was right in his home when two men burst into it and shot him dead. Even home and hearth no longer offer protection to potential victims in this country.
I did warn in a column only a couple of weeks ago that we would be idiots to imagine that these killings would be confined to political activists and journalists in the provinces. The likelihood that they would spill over to other groups, notably politicians in light of the impending elections, I said, wasn’t just strong but inevitable. I said that with these killings left unsolved and unchecked, the party-list candidates in particular stood to be an endangered species. Or on a larger plane the opposition candidates.
That remains a very real threat. Not least in light of that banana-eating homicidal maniac Norberto Gonzales proposing to paint the party-list candidates red. He said in a radio interview: “There will be plenty who will run in the party lists in the coming elections. As national security adviser, it is important for me to show soldiers and police what groups are being used by the communists to continue their bad intentions on the public.” If he had thought to sign their death warrants, he could not have been more bloodthirsty.
But as has clearly turned out, the bloodletting won’t just go the party-list or opposition candidates’ way. Barely had the spit dried on my mouth, or the ink from my pen, when the slayings and/or near-slayings above took place with chilling rapidity. And with the same brazenness or utter contempt of law or decency that makes “impunity” such a pale description. Even churches no longer offer refuge from the death merchants.
The murder of Bersamin, in particular, throws us back to the pre-martial-law days when warlords walked this earth and Floro Crisologo was gunned down in church as he knelt on a pew to receive Holy Communion.
Frankly, I don’t know why we are so dense we cannot see that when we tolerate the killing of one group of people, we tolerate the killing of all groups of people. That when we incite the murder of other people, we invite the murder of ourselves. History does not lack for lessons there. You agree to the pogrom of the Jews, you agree to the slaughter of yourself.
We do not stop the killings of journalists and political activists right now, we assure that the coming elections will become one of the bloodiest in our postwar history, if not the bloodiest. We do not stop the killings of journalists and political activists right now, we raise a culture that says it is perfectly acceptable to dispatch your enemies to the next life, there is nothing in heaven or earth to deter you from it. That is a culture that like toxic rain, or an Arab curse, will befall all of us, and our children’s children. The bullet that finds the brains of other people will not lodge there permanently. It will find yours, too.
If I recall right, there’s something in the Bible that says as you sow, so shall you reap. It’s true, whether you believe the Bible or the Koran.
You sow death, you will reap death.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=39060
posted by dqfan06 @ 9:19 AM
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