Stop the killings! October 4, 2006

(Conclusion)

HOW do we stop the killings?

Three things.

First, precisely with forums like this. The point is to bring international attention and pressure to bear on the Philippine government for those killings. They have no place in the global democratic community. No, they have no place in the global civilized community.

The importance of this can never be sufficiently belabored. There is one point about the killings that seems to escape the notice of foreign journalist organizations that have rightly condemned the atrocity. That is the fact that most of the victims have worked outside Metro Manila. That is the case in particular with the journalists. There seems to be an implicit taboo on the killing of journalists in Metro Manila. Nearly to a man or woman, the journalists have been killed outside the capital.

It’s not hard to see where that taboo comes from. It doesn’t come from the would-be assassins’ healthy respect for the national media, it comes from the would-be assassins’ healthy fear of international opinion. If the killers have nothing to do with government, they stand to be tracked down resolutely with the flailing of the international press. If the killers have to do with government, the government stands to be reviled passionately with the driving of the international press.

The confinement of the murders to the countryside is surprisingly true as well for the activists. Though a few activists have been murdered in the fringes of Metro Manila, most have been felled well outside of it. The people of the Bayan Muna party-list group that I’ve talked to at least have told me they still felt relatively safe -- such as any dissenter can still feel safe in the Philippines -- in Metro Manila. But that was before the recent murder of Makati City Mayor Jejomar Binay’s security aide, Pablo Glean. If that is a political killing, and it looks every inch so, it is a scary pass. It ups the ante on the mayhem.

Three groups of people are particularly vital in bringing pressure to bear on the Philippine government for this. The first is the international press and human rights community. As Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo found out in her latest trip abroad, where she was hounded by the human rights and press groups wherever she went, her local constituents may be deaf to the cries of the dying, but not so the world.

The second is the Filipino press community abroad, specifically the one in the United States which is the biggest. And the third is the larger Filipino community abroad, again particularly in the US, which is the biggest, most articulate and most vocal. The last two were active participants in Edsa People Power II, the new technology, encompassing e-mail and cellular phone, which allowed Filipinos abroad to participate in the events in the home country in real time. Filipinos abroad didn’t just watch the ousting of Joseph Estrada as spectators, they completely literally took part in it.

If the ousting of Estrada remains contentious to this day, stopping the killings is not. That goes beyond partisan loyalties and concerns. We do not stop the killings in the Philippines, we promote dictatorship in the Philippines. It is as simple as that.

The second thing to do is to fight the tangle of justification for the killings, specifically the ideology or culture of war and national security.

One of the astonishing things I found out early last year when I went to several provinces to talk about the killings of journalists was the ease with which some members of my audience seem to have factored in, and even rationalized, the killings. One expressly wondered if the victims hadn’t brought their fate upon themselves by “going overboard.” The radio commentators in particular, they said, were dripping with venom all over the airwaves.

My reply to this was and is: You grant that half of the victims were disguised journalists, the other half would have been true ones. The latter would have been exposing corruption in high places. If only one of them died, it would have been intolerable. For a whole tribe of them to do so, it gives government, who has a sacred duty to protect them, no reason to exist.

More than that, nothing justifies the murder of journalists, paper-thin or rock-solid as their credentials might be. Not corruption, not intemperate language, not stepping on the toes of people. At worst, where they are corrupt and intemperate, they deserve censure, not death. At best, where they are doing their jobs, they deserve medals, not coffins.

Finally, how do we stop the killings?

Well, to what do we owe the killings finally?

We owe them to the fact that we have a regime that, like the martial-law one, is nearly universally held to have no electoral mandate. No, that like the martial-law one is nearly universally held in contempt by the public. We owe the killings to the fact that the current regime, like the martial-law regime, has resorted to defending illegitimate rule by force, or to defending dictatorship -- how else call a rule without the people’s mandate? -- by the ways of dictatorship. We owe the killings to the fact that the current regime, like the martial-law regime, is trying to kill resistance by killing resisters, to kill protest by killing protesters.

How to stop the killings finally?

Lose Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. You will forgive me if I do not use the honorific “President” before her name.

Last year, at the heart of the crisis in government, an archbishop came out to say, “But ousting Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo won’t solve all our problems.” What I said then, I say now: “It won’t solve all our problems, true, but it sure as hell will solve a great many of them.”

Certainly, it will stop this problem. Certainly, it will stop the killings.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=24626

Stop the killings! October 3, 2006

(This is an abbreviated version of the remarks I made at the 4th Global Filipino Networking Convention 7th NaFFAA Empowerment Conference. My topic was what the Filipino journalists abroad might do to stop the killings in the Philippines.)

I’LL GET straight to the point: How bad are the killings?

There are two groups of victims: the journalists and the activists.

The killings of journalists began not long after Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo took office in 2001 and have reached alarming levels today. By May last year, two important international media organizations were already railing at the mounting body count of Filipino journalists. The US Committee to Protect Journalists ranked the Philippines the second most dangerous country for journalists, next only to Iraq. Reporters Sans Frontiers for its part noted that: “A culture of impunity reigns, for which the highest government authorities are responsible, that has allowed killers and those who send them to murder so many journalists in every corner of the country.”

Conditions did not improve after May 2005 -- they deteriorated, frighteningly rapidly. These are the figures today, according to the National Union of Students of the Philippines, which has been monitoring this: Some 86 journalists have been killed from 1986 to the present. From 2001 to the present alone, which is Arroyo’s term, 46 were killed. That is more than half the number of journalists killed since the country toppled down a dictatorship and restored democracy.

The killings of activists are far more alarming. Indeed, the numbers are mind-boggling. According to the rights group Karapatan, the political killings from January 2001 to Sept. 16, 2006 number 755. That is a veritable bloodbath. The sheer number alone must suggest method in the madness. This is no sporadic killing, this is systematic mayhem.

The “war against the New People’s Army,” which Arroyo unleashed some months ago, has added still new dimensions to it. Last month, the newspapers were reporting one murder per day, for the most part of suspected New People’s Army (NPA) members and sympathizers, both concepts -- NPA member and NPA sympathizer -- expanding in meaning by the day as fast as the number of dead. Alongside this, government and military officials have been far more open and combative in their advocacy of murder as a method in winning, if not hearts and minds since the dead are left with neither, at least at all costs.

Is government indictable for the killings of the journalists? Yes. Indirectly so, but yes.

At the very least a slaughter of this scale of one of the most precious assets of a democratic community constitutes criminal negligence. I don’t know that any American official, not to speak of American president, can continue to hold office with this monkey on his back.

At the very most, there is nothing in government’s attitude toward journalists to encourage warlords, drug and gambling lords, and overbearing lords in government to respect journalists, or even just fear not being able to get away with murder. Indeed, there is everything in government’s attitude toward journalists to encourage warlords to think they will meet only with indifference or even silent applause for ridding the world of infuriating pests. The killings send a dark message to journalists in general, which government itself, whether it is directly involved in them or not, is not loath to spread. That message is: You’re critical of government, you may not expect government to lift a hand to prevent your disappearance from earth, or heaven forbid lament it.

Is government indictable for the killings of the activists? Yes. Directly, immediately, and implacably so.

This isn’t just a case of omission, this is a case of commission. This isn’t just police negligence, this is a policy environment.

At the very least, there is the principle of command responsibility. That was the principle Judge Manuel Real of Honolulu invoked in finding Ferdinand Marcos guilty of the torture and killing of several thousands of Filipinos in the class suit brought against him by 3,000 of those victims or their kin. His judgment was affirmed by the Pasadena Court of Appeals. It cited the case of General Yamashita who was found guilty of the atrocities wreaked by his troops for his failure to “take such measures as were within his power and appropriate in the circumstances to protect prisoners of war and the civilian population.”

And those were conditions of war, when atrocity was rife. Ferdinand Marcos’ -- and Arroyo’s -- conditions were and are conditions of peace, when respect for life should be rife.

At the very most, there is Arroyo’s repeated promotion and commendation of the minor-league Yamashita, Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan, the last publicly and loudly during her State of the Nation Address. She singled out Palparan for a job well done, proposing his fellows find inspiration in his example. She did not tell Palparan that in a democracy people are presumed innocent until proven guilty; she told Palparan to keep up the good work. She did not tell Palparan that in a democracy there is a distinction between combatant and non-combatant, between soldier and civilian, between people who believe in Marx and people who take up arms; she told Palparan he had exceeded expectations. She did not tell Palparan that in a democracy it is wrong to murder first and say “I … am … sorry” later; she told him to stand up and bask in the applause.

That isn’t just elevating mayhem into policy, that is elevating mayhem into virtue. (To be concluded)

* * *

Tonight is “Stop the Killings” Night at Conspiracy Café and Garden, Visayas Avenue in front of Sanville (landmark, Shell Station). Gary Granada, Bayang Barrios and Cynthia Alexander play. Who knows who else might decide to jam -- those things have a way of attracting jamming. Be there. Stop the killings and your Tuesday night blues: Listen to some great music.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=24375

Millennium blues October 2, 2006

I REMEMBER IN THE EARLY 1970S READING an article in the Wall Street Journal about a typhoon in Bangladesh. The typhoon was exceptionally severe to have merited space in a newspaper whose normal attention, as its name proclaimed, was riveted to the ramparts of American capitalism. At the time, Bangladesh was an epically benighted country, having just emerged from the loins of Pakistan in a grinding war. It was so impoverished, or indeed famished, that George Harrison, the “quiet Beatle,” loudly drew attention to its plight in a concert called simply enough “The Concert for Bangladesh.”

I remember the Wall Street article well because of the way it started. I was working at the time under a boss who was a stickler for old-fashioned journalism, who demanded that reportorial stories begin in the “inverted pyramid” style. That is, where all the important facts were up front, the first paragraph, if not the sentence, containing the what, who, where and why. This story did not begin that way, which opened up whole new vistas for me.

It began with the sentence: “A typhoon came to Bangladesh with precious little to destroy.” It captured in that pithy way the essence of things. Notably, the cruelty of the event, devastating a country that was no stranger to devastation. It drove home not just the furiousness of the storm but the cosmic irony of it: It was a divine, or devilish, comedy that made you cry. What a truly, monumentally, hapless country, you thought.

That was the sentence that leaped to my mind last Thursday, with “Philippines” instead of “Bangladesh” in it: “A typhoon lashed at the Philippines with precious little to destroy.”

In the scheme of things, that is even more cosmically ironic, or divinely or darkly comic. At the time the Wall Street Journal wrote its story in the early 1970s, the Philippines, if no longer expected to become the next Japanese miracle—no small thanks to Diosdado Macapagal, who wrecked industry with decontrol; and Ferdinand Marcos who wrecked everything else with rapacity—at least stood at par with, if not better than, its Southeast Asian neighbors. Today, thanks to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, it has become the new Bangladesh. An idea Bangladesh itself, which has raised itself up by its bootstraps over the years, might object to violently.

Those were my mortal thoughts last Thursday while the winds swirled around me. I do not mean that in a metaphorical way, I mean that in a completely literal way. I caught the storm last Thursday in quite a dramatic way. I physically caught it. I was due at Naia past noon that day as I had a plane to catch to Hawaii. I was due to speak at a gathering of Filipinos in the United States in an event called the 4th Global Filipino Networking Convention 7th NaFFAA Empowerment Conference. My session had to do with media and the killings in the Philippines.

I had no wish to miss it. And so despite the shrill warnings of Pagasa the night before that there was a super storm brewing that day—which bore the almost farcical name “Milenyo”—I drove off to the airport past noon. Since schools and offices were closed that day, I thought it would be a short and sweet, though gray and wet, trip. I thought wrong. Very, very wrong.

By the time we got to Ortigas, the winds started rattling our car, a thing that failed to faze my son whose first instinct was to click away at the world with a camera. Oh, the invulnerability of youth! Traffic crawled to a halt past Ayala, some branches of trees having fallen on the road, the vehicles traversing it snaking this way and that to avoid the obstructions. AM radio began screaming Nature’s fury, reporting flash floods, landslides and fallen electrical posts south of Metro Manila. The devastation was plain for me to see. On the airport road, on our opposite lane, the tangle of poles and wires housing a huge billboard had crumpled and fallen on a bus, crushing a section of it. It was a jumble of twisted metal, and I wondered how long it would take to extricate the bus from it.

The winds were howling madly by the time we got to the road going to Naia. The branches of trees littered the road plentifully and the winds shook our car like an angry mob. Once we got to Naia, the distance from the car to the womb of the airport took on the aspect of eternity. Getting off the car was hard enough, opening the door gave the sensation of pushing against heaven. Traversing the covered walk to the gate of the airport was a veritable war. The floor had gotten slippery from the driving rain, and as I struggled past it—I felt like swimming upstream—the winds hurled missiles in my direction. They were in the form of signs, posters and whatever else wasn’t fastened to the ground in that place. I cowered, and got hit in the arm by a poster.

In the safety of the airport womb, I worried about my son who was driving home. Globe was down, and I waited in line at the pay phone to call him up in his mobile. I was vastly relieved to know he was OK, his voice suggesting he was pretty oblivious to Providence’s improvidence.

My flight was 3:30 p.m., but it was close to 10 at night when we finally took off. As I waited at the airport that late afternoon looking through the glass panels where a haze had collected in the distance limned by a dull gray light, and while soft tones tinkled through the loudspeakers, and passengers padded the floor like zombies inside the airport lounge, I thought:

A typhoon came to the Philippines with precious little to destroy.

* * *

Tomorrow, all roads go to Conspiracy Café and Garden in Visayas Avenue in front of Sanville (landmark, Shell Station). The “Stop the Killings” Bar Tour moves on to it. From there, the tour goes weekly over the next couple of months. I’ll announce the stops along the way.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=24185