Resist state terrorism

“No one can terrorize a nation unless we are all his accomplices.” – Edward R. Murrow

I REFUSE to aid and abet this administration’s state terrorism. I have resisted the state-sponsored terrorism of past presidents of this Republic and I am not about to change that on account of the misleading chatter on social media platforms.

Yes, just as what past populist despots have done, Digong Dada has owned the new platforms of expression — thanks to enterprising online people.

State terrorism has been defined as “a form of terrorism which sometimes occurs when governments implement neoliberal policies lacking widespread support.” I dare say it’s lacking widespread support because far more Filipinos are not online. This administration’s noise on social media platforms is fake. We have uncovered them time and again since Day 1 of this administration.

The Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights, more popularly — or in this administration’s perspective infamously — known as Karapatan, aptly puts in its second issue of its monitor of Duterte’s first year in office.

“Duterte has become a public relations expert – spitting out arguments that drug users are less than human, strutting with public displays of apathy regarding national and international pressures, manipulating old verbal assault and threats against progressive organizations and human rights advocates who raise concern over the rights issues in the country.”

This administration can yarn every possible spin-off it could muster online but the fact remains that only 14 of every 35 Filipinos are wired online. This seemingly overwhelming “support” rhetoric on social media does not include the marginalized sectors, the sectors that have undoubtedly catapulted Digong Dada to the presidency.

I do not blame them. It is tempting, though. But I will not. These people have every right to hope for a better Philippines when Digong Dada promised it to them albeit in a brusque and curt manner. They have been manipulated and f***ed up (pardon my French) by the ruling system for so long that when Digong Dada came about, they were all too willing to pledge their allegiance to the seemingly no-nonsense talking politics.

However, his lies started unraveling from the very first day of his presidency. I don’t have to enumerate it here since it would take up most of the space for this column. I do call on readers to witness the state’s affairs with more critical lenses. Unrequited suggestion: Read up on this administration besides Facebook posts, Instagram memes and Twitter feeds.

The last thing you’d want is to be sucked into this administration’s hate rhetoric. And this hate rhetoric worsened with every engagement the president had since Day 1.

Yesterday, Digong Dada gave his second State of the Nation Address. I couldn’t wait for it since our Constitution specifically stipulates this to be done starting at 1 pm and I have to submit this column by 8 am yesterday, at the latest.

I have a soft spot for satires, as you may have noticed in my past columns. That’s why I was glad when I read Professional Heckler’s parody of Digong Dada’s Sona because to be honest about it, I did not expect the President to say something new. It would have been on his war on drugs, f**k human rights defenders, f**k the European Union, etc ad nauseum. It would have been like a “folk” song — folk this and folk that.

As I have mentioned in my past columns, satire is an effective tool in exposing the untruths issue by issue and politico by politico. However, the writer should focus their satirical lens to particular policies or individuals for this to be effective because if you satirize the whole political structure, then it will give the impression that all policies are the same. This would enforce further the status quo. In this case, the state terrorist wins.

A sample of Professional Heckler’s satirical take on the President’s Sona yesterday: “Nang ako ay maging pangulo, nangako akong magbibigay ng trabaho sa ating mga kababayan. Hindi naman sa pagmamayabang, tinupad ko ang pangakong ’yan. Ngayong hapon, kasama natin dito sa Batasan ang tatlo sa pinakamasisipag kong appointees. Hindi lang sila sa office nagtatrabaho kundi pati sa mga rally laban kay Robredo. Palakpakan po natin sina Mocha Uson, Kat de Castro at Arnell Ignacio.” (Applause.)

Digong Dada’s latest verbal stunt was when he said he is willing to go to war against the communist insurgency. Adding that he has the might of the Armed Forces behind him and the Maoists only have the indigenes on their side. He said he is willing to fight this war up to the last standing communist.

Wait. How many days, nay months, did it take him to quell a singular clan in Marawi City again? How is this administration addressing the end of contractualization? What is the position of this administration on the West Philippine Sea?

More importantly, when will he really jet ski and plant a flag on Scarborough Shoal?

Unabashed bigotry

“Bigotry is boring when we add modifiers.” – Gregory House, MD [Hugh Laurie].

THIS is what I love about the current administration — its consistency on being inconsistent especially when it comes to the Bangsamoro people.

That is why I wasn’t particularly surprised when the “Muslim ID” brouhaha hit the fan, so to speak. However, I cannot blame Muslims about how they reacted. This administration’s Muslim ID is dissonant to hizzoner’s pronouncements in the past.

Didn’t this administration vow to correct the historical injustices done to the Moros? Didn’t this President lambast a US President because of a massacre some hundred years ago? Digression: With the Duterte administration, the President and administration are interchangeable because he micromanages.

Everything this administration does can and should be attributed all the way to the top of the bureaucracy because he is the boss. He made it clear in all of his long-winded speeches, albeit with a repetitive topic (read: obosen).

This administration is also systematic, too. Before the Muslim ID brouhaha, it clipped the executive powers of some seven governors and 132 mayors here in Mindanao. The reason, this administration said, is because they have been “engaging in acts inimical to national security or which negate the effectiveness of the peace and order campaign of the government; and providing material support to criminal elements.”

Even the most rabid supporters of this administration were included. Well, there being Muslims helped a lot in their inclusion in the list.

The multi-awarded mayor of Upi, Ramon Piang Sr. made it to the list. Cotabato Mayor Frances Cynthia Sayadi made it to the list, too. Maguindanao Gov. Esmael Mangudadatu and the 28 mayors under him have also been listed by the National Police Commission.

Haven’t these people showed enough support to the administration’s war on drugs? I’ve been reading these same names in the reports of our correspondents in their areas. I can distinctly remember Sayadi locking down Cotabato City when the Marawi crisis began and Mangudadatu’s all-out support to Masa Masid.

I can point out the inconsistencies and how bigoted this Muslim ID brouhaha is but I cannot narrate it funnier than what Armm Executive Secretary Laisa Masuhud Alamia posted on her Facebook wall over the weekend.

“And now some people in Luzon think I need a Muslim ID. I suppose they’re requiring this because we, Muslim Filipinos, don’t look Muslim enough as we are. I don’t look Muslim enough in person nor in these IDs, even when I’m wearing the hijab. So just to be sure, to be really 100% sure, they need me to present a Muslim ID to ensure that I’m really, truly a Muslim,” Alamia’s post reads in part.

I agree with her that the Muslim ID is “hilarious, if not tragically sad.”

Alamia started her post by saying “I need a bigger wallet.”

So here’s my equally “hilarious” suggestion to this administration. Since we have IDs for pretty much every single government service agency, I suggest these IDs be collated into one bar code for each citizen and then tattoo that bar code to the nape or forehead.

Better yet, RF tag the entire citizenry. That would really put the Philippines in the limelight. Sieg Heil!

Lawless

“Our people have seen what a mob can do in the hands of a tyrant who knows no law but his own. Lest we forget, the first person that Marcos executed was a drug pusher. But did he stop there?” –Atty. Jose Manuel “Chel” I. Diokno, national chairman, Free Legal Assistance Group; trustee, Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism

A COLLEAGUE posted a “crowd sourcing” question on his Facebook asking for one word to describe Digong Dada’s one year as president of the Republic.

I answered, “Unstable.” It should have been “lawless.” If there is a word to define this administration it is lawless.

Lawless in the sense that it holds the distinction of throwing due process out the window. It doesn’t adhere to what the Supreme Court says. It even mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.

It employs secret jails. It kills suspects, albeit with a veneer of legality, with impunity.

Although it has vowed to launch “change” in the country, the five pillars in the criminal justice system — just like before — is still pretty much only available to the rich and powerful.

The five pillars must work in concert with each other with checks and balances between them in order to best serve the public. Criticism of the Filipino legal system often centers around issues of disconnect. The five pillars represent many different facets of the legal system and society.

These are:

1.) law enforcement, including the Philippines the National Police and National Bureau of Investigation;

2.) prosecution, including the National Prosecution Service and judge advocate services;

3.) the courts,  including all levels from regional to the Supreme Court;

4.) corrections, including the prison, parole, and probation systems;

5.) community, including local governments and the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

Case in point are drug users who have voluntarily surrendered to authorities under Masa Masid but were gunned down days later, anyway. These incidents are all too familiar to most of us.

The other branch of government, by the way, is too wimped out after this administration made an example of one of its members who is currently languishing in jail.

Until this administration learns to respect the rule of law, social justice, and the fundamental rights of its citizens again, we will remain waist-deep in bovine excrement. Well, at least for the next five years. That is if we are still alive, by then.

Post no bill, please

CONSIDERING how many times this regime has been finding ways to mess up our civil liberties, it should change its logo to a fist with the middle finger sticking out.

As if the be-wigged stooge of President Digong Dada at the justice department hasn’t wrangled the Republic’s judicial system enough to serve the regime’s vendetta, here comes another stooge who wants to impose the historically “effective” ghetto-like branding – all, of course, in the name of waging the war on drugs.

About a fortnight ago, Interior Secretary Ismael Sueño opined to label houses that are supposedly “drug free” with a decal telling people the house is such.

Sueño suggests this will be better than the violent Oplan Tokhang. He is so convinced there is nothing inherently wrong with this that he vilified Amnesty International-Philippines when the latter called him out on his plan to brand houses. Sueño even resorted to a childish play on words against the Nobel Prize laureate saying: “They should be branded as human wrong group, not human rights group.”

Who will determine if the household is indeed drug-free? Who will evaluate and confirm this as a fact? How will they categorize and what are the rules of implementation of this branding campaign?

This came to him, Sueño said, after meeting with the regional peace and order councils recently.

He said this regime is shifting to a non-violent and positive way to combat illegal drugs. Is he admitting that Oplan Tokhang was wrong? The plastering of “drug free” stickers on houses, he said, will not be a police operation but by the civilian peace and order councils from the regional down to the barangay level.

Hasn’t Sueño been listening to his boss? Didn’t Digong Dada push for the postponement of the barangay elections because “most” barangay officials are allegedly involved in the illegal drugs trade? Now, Sueño wants these people allegedly involved in illegal drug trafficking to decide which house in their barangay is drug-free? If he doesn’t see the problem of conflicts of interest in that arrangement, I personally don’t know what will.

How sure is Sueño that this new branding campaign will not be used by barangay chairpersons as a subtle campaign for their own pedestrian political careers? Let’s not forget we are going to elect a new set of barangay officials this coming October. I, for one, am not expecting for such decal. This is because I have been at odds with our barangay chairman in Consolacion – a Roa, I might add – since he practically abdicated his mandate to policing our village of drug users and hooligans. My regular (at 165 of them) readers will bear this out since I have been writing about his governance style or to be accurate his lack of it.

Plus, let me remind Mr. Sueño that we are in the Philippines – a third world impoverished country – where a house does not automatically mean one family. I live in a house being shared by two other families. Should our brilliant barangay chairman decide not to stick a decal on our house on my account – just to get back at me – won’t that be unfair for the other two families, who may or may not be involved in illegal drugs?

I am most certain that this will be used arbitrarily by barangay chairpersons who want to stay as chairpersons in their barangays after October.

“Plus, let me remind Mr. Sueño that we are in the Philippines…”

Which company will be printing the drug-free decals. Who stands to gain from this enterprise? In street vernacular: Pila man gyud, ser?

I mean, how different is this to Nazi Germany’s posting of a Star of David on the homes of Jews not too long ago. This may be a reverse of what Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim did before, spray-painting houses of suspected drug traffickers but its effect is still the same. It will discriminate the household members of a house with no drug-free sticker plastered on it.

So, no, Mr. Sueño, I will not participate in your version of a Star of David – respect my right to private property and post no bill, please.

Never Again

“No one should experience what the PC-INP (Philippine Constabulary-Integrated National Police) did to us while in detention at the PC Barracks in San Pedro Street, (Davao City).”

By Cong B. Corrales¹

IT WAS A SATURDAY, he recalled going to campus that fateful day wearing the prescribed army greens for their scheduled Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) formation.

“My classmates greeted me at the gates frantically to tell me that some of my friends were arrested earlier and that some have gone into hiding,” he said smiling—somehow amused at the turn of events.

Alfredo “Ka Paris” Mapano was barely an adult at 18 years old when strongman Ferdinand Edralin Marcos placed the entire country in a state of martial law through Proclamation No. 1082. However, he was already a member of the Samahang Demokratikong Kabataan (SDK)—a left-leaning student organization.

Marcos made the live television broadcast of the proclamation two days later—September 23, 1972.

He said the members of the now-defunct Philippine Constabulary-Integrated National Police (PC-INP), who patrolled their campus that Saturday, failed to notice him because Mapano—like the other students—was wearing fatigue.

“I went underground for three years,” Mapano said. He was captured in 1975 in his hometown in Davao Province.

“No one should experience what the PC-INP did to us while in detention at the PC Barracks in San Pedro Street, (Davao City). If the government is punishing us for fighting for what we believed in the why were the military who committed all those atrocities during martial law never held accountable,” lamented Mapano.

Currently detained at the Misamis Oriental Provincial Jail in Cagayan de Oro City, Mapano—now 58 years old—hopes President Benigno Simeon Aquino, III could understand people like him being a son of a political detainee.

President Aquino's father—the late Senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr—was also jailed under criminal cases like illegal possession of firearms, murder and conspiracy to commit sedition, among other trumped up charges.

“Now that the son of probably the most famous victim of martial law (President Aquino) is in power, he should be in the best position to empathize with the detained political prisoners all over the country,” he said.

THIS PARTICULAR SATURDAY—August 1, 2009—Mapano was not as lucky as he was in Davao some 40 years ago.

The combined personnel of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, National Intelligence Coordination Administration and the 4^th Infantry Division of the Philippine Army arrested Mapano while the latter was “on family integration leave” at a local apartelle in Barangay Carmen, Cagayan de Oro City.

Four years after his arrest and facing multiple criminal charges in various municipalities, Mapano hopes President Aquino would grant political detainees like him “general, unconditional, and omnibus amnesty.”

“I am old and I would like to spend my twilight years with my children if I'll be granted amnesty,” he said.

Alfredo “Ka Paris” Mapano—together with 10 other political detainees—is still detained. There are 385 political detainees currently languishing in jails across the country.

1This narrative is adapted from an interview inside the Misamis Oriental Provincial Jail on September 17, 2012 when Mapano led 10 other political detainees in an eight-day fasting to commemorate the martyrs of martial law and to drum up support for a general, unconditional, and omnibus amnesty. Excerpts of the narrative first appeared on TV5's online news portal—Interaksyon.com—on September 17, 2012.