MikeLigalig.com

EDITORIAL

Leila’s 3 questions

@inquirerdotnet
Philippine Daily Inquirer
12:32 AM August 5th, 2016
 
Sen. Leila de Lima took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to denounce what she described as the “well-oiled social media operation” to destroy her reputation and, more consequentially, to try to stem the wave of extrajudicial killings that started after Rodrigo Duterte was elected to the presidency.

It was a powerful privilege speech, in part because she was speaking from personal anguish.

“I have been vilified and attacked, not only in social media but also by the President’s men, as a drug lord coddler and protector. I have been ridiculed and called names in social media. Photos are photoshopped, videos are spliced, lies are manufactured …. But the truth is I was the only justice secretary since the 1986 Edsa Revolution who dared to eradicate the dominion of the drug lords inside Bilibid,” the national penitentiary.

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But it was the dehumanizing effect of about 500 extrajudicial killings in a month that she was most worried about, because of the role vigilantes played in dispensing “cardboard justice.” She said: “My concern is not only the killings tallied by the PNP as the formal law enforcement agency. At least we can put the PNP to task in our official legislative investigations. My gravest concern lies with the vigilantes of the night now operating almost all over the country, those harbingers of death spreading the apocalypse of our dehumanization.”

In the course of an hour-long interview she did that same night on INQ&A—the new Inquirer question-and-interview program that airs on dzIQ 990, Inquirer 990 Television, and Facebook Live—she raised three questions which not only summarize the new crisis but provide a focus to our ethical concerns over the spate of killings.

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Second: “What will we say, when future generations ask us?” That is, when our grandchildren ask, what did you do in the time of the killings, what do we say? Do we say we cheered the hundreds killed, because thousands of self-described drug addicts had surrendered and, without any program of rehabilitation, are thereby classified as “saved”? Do we say, well, we made the sign of the cross every time we saw a dead body on the streets? Do we say, we campaigned against the killing spree by clicking on a button on Facebook?

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The three questions, in other words, define the fundamental issue: How can true justice be served when the accusation is unproven and written on a piece of cardboard, and the accused can no longer plead his case?

http://opinion.inquirer.net/


the links for the video of the senator's speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Uy9UikQtBQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onuf2sRDfcI

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Any person undergoing a deep and profound personal crisis defends himself from the threat that brought the crisis into his life. In the same way, the nation must defend itself against the threat of the illegal drug trade lording over every aspect of our everyday lives. For so long we have been complacent about the magnitude of the problem. We have been indifferent to the number of drug pushers that have invaded our communities. We stayed silent as our impoverished youth succumbed to the promise of temporary escape from their harsh and brutish life, in the urban and rural areas, and became drug dependents.

This was the state of a nation in crisis under the threat of illegal drugs, until the overwhelming voice of the people voted to office the anti-drug crusader and Mayor of Davao City as President of the Republic, none other than President Rodrigo Roa Duterte.

Drug addiction, drug-pushing, and drug-related crimes, including bribery and corruption of our public officials and the penetration of our institutions by powerful drug syndicates, threaten our government, our people, and our society.

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I praise the President’s determination to make this campaign the centerpiece of his administration, when he essentially said: “Kahit wala na akong ibang gawin hanggang sa katapusan ng aking termino, kung hindi wakasan ang salot ng droga sa bansang ito.” I myself continued cleaning up the National Bilibid Prison of drugs, in follow-up operations before I resigned as Secretary of Justice. This anti-drug campaign at the Bilibid eventually culminated with OPLAN Galugad. Together with this is the confirmation that there is no shabu laboratory inside the national penitentiary.

I am with President Duterte every step of the way in his war on drugs.

Yes Mr. President, there is no shabu laboratory inside the Bilibid Prison, not even in the tunnels under it. Those who will search the tunnels will get a whiff not of the smell of cooking methamphetamine, but of methane that comes from the human waste of the prisoners above.

Sa termino ko lang po bilang Justice Secretary nag-umpisang maglinis sa Bilibid. Sa termino ko lang po giniba ang mga mararangyang kubol ng drug lords at naitapon sila sa Building 14, hiwalay sa mga ordinaryong preso. But of course, all of this has been sorely forgotten in the face of a formidable demolition campaign against me in the social media.

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But I will not use that time-honored principle as my primary defense.

My first defense is common sense. The Speaker of the House promised the investigation of the former Justice Secretary, the Secretary who has been sued and brought to court by the same drug lords subjected to a raid and then secluded inside NBP Bldg. 14. The Speaker intends to investigate me who, like the President and PNP Chief Bato dela Rosa, also received death threats from drug lords, for my success in isolating them from the rest of the prisoners, and for preventing them from further conducting their drug trade operations from within the walls of the national penitentiary.

My defense against the Speaker’s call for my investigation in the House is not interparliamentary courtesy. That is YOUR defense, Mr. President, when you defend me as a Senator of the Republic and this Senate as an institution from this blatant break of tradition in courtesy between the two Houses, and whenever you decide to demand an end to all this foolishness, before it blows up in our faces. AS I SO RESPECTFULLY REQUEST NOW, Mr. President.

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My defense against all this vilification is my untarnished record and reputation as a public servant, before this demolition job was launched against me both in the social media and by the Solicitor General.

My defense is my selfless dedication as the Chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights, as the Secretary of Justice, and now as Senator of the Republic.

In so many ways, and in all sense of the phrase, the President’s men have stood up the world on its head. It is time to put the world back on its feet. Binaligtad na po nila lahat ng kwento tungkol sa maganda nating nagawa sa DOJ, ni wala pa palang imbestigasyon.

Despite this, I am still giving the Solicitor General, the Speaker, and the Secretary of Justice the benefit of the doubt. It is possible that they are merely being peddled these 6 lies about me by agents of vengeance. Pakiusap ko lang sana ay bago nila paniwalaan ang mga kasinungalingan ng mga nasagasaan ko noon, ay suriin muna nila ang mga karakter at motibasyon ng mga taong ito. Huwag naman sana silang basta-basta na lang humusga, at patungan ako ng cardboard at balutin ng packing tape.

Mr. President, MY ONLY DEFENSE IS MY HONOR AND MY INTEGRITY.

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Mr. President, they are doing this to a sitting Senator. This is not only an attack against me, but against any senator who dares to be outspoken. Pagkatapos ko, sino ang isusunod sa inyo na mangahas na tumiwalag sa kanilang martsa, na hindi sasayaw sa kanilang musika? That is why ultimately, this is an attack on the Senate as an independent institution.

I will not fall without a fight. I will not go into that good night without nary a whimper, while all these misguided men use the President’s war against drugs as their platform to destroy any elected public official who dares question the methods by which this war is waged.

We cannot let anyone use the misfortune of this nation in this drug crisis to advance personal or political agendas. We cannot let anyone use the drug crisis we are now facing to silence all dissenting voices. If we let anyone do these, there will be no single voice left to warn us of our backslide to the depths of barbarity. We do not want a situation where not a single dissenter is left to remind the people that they have just traded the drug crisis with another one: THE CRISIS OF OUR FAILED HUMANITY AS A NATION.

We cannot go on being indifferent to the daily executions, without ultimately becoming a nation bound by a collective sociopathy. The day has already come when we can no longer tell who is morally wrong among us: the nine-year old street child sniffing rugby, or the policeman who shoots the child in the head for sniffing rugby. This is our descent as a nation into the darkness that these men have created for us.

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Mr. President, IMPUNITY, ONCE UNLEASHED, HAS NO BOUNDARIES. It does not care who dies. It does not care who suffers. It does not care who the victims are. Impunity has no sense of right or wrong. It is as amoral as it is immoral.

As a human rights advocate and human being, I plead to the government, this Administration, and to the President. There must be another way. There has to be another way.

WE MUST FIND ANOTHER WAY.

Yes, Mr. President, indeed, we must wage this war against drugs. But there must be another way. There HAS to be another way. There must be a way other than this method that brings us to our collective descent into impunity, fear, and ultimately, utter and complete inhumanity.

I fully support the war on drugs, and I sincerely desire its success. I am one with the President in his relentless and sustained campaign to rid our country of the drug menace. Nais ko lang na ang ating mga pulis at iba pang law enforcement agents ay maging totoong mga alagad ng batas, na sumusunod sila sa batas habang pinaiiral ito, na tumatalima sila sa mga patakaran at pamantayan sa pagsugpo ng krimen at pagdakip sa mga nagkasala, na isinasaalang-alang nila ang pangingibabaw ng batas sa kanilang pagtupad sa tungkulin.

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My concern is not only the killings tallied by the PNP as the formal law enforcement agency … My gravest concern lies with the vigilantes of the night now operating almost all over the country, those harbingers of death spreading the apocalypse of our dehumanization.

At late night of July 21, in a Malabon City public cemetery, shot dead were five (5), including a mother and her son who were then celebrating his birthday. The unidentified men who sprayed bullets on the group left a cardboard sign that tagged them collectively as “drug pushers.” The local police, whose outpost stood only about 30 meters from the massacre site, later came up with an incident report linking only two of the victims to the drug trade.

On July 19, an 18-year-old student was just in front of his house in Pangasinan, feeding his dog, when motorcycle-riding gunmen approached him and asked for his father. When he was unable to reply, they just shot him dead.

On July 9, anti-drug operations had turned Barangay Purok Islam, in Matalam, North Cotabato into a virtual ghost town, as many residents left for their safety. One raid produced eight ( 8 ) deaths. At 2 a.m., heavily armed policemen barged into a house of drug suspects while they were asleep. Some residents claimed that the victims were summarily executed in their bedrooms. A mother of the two (2) victims said: “[It was an] overkill. My sons were unarmed. We were treated like animals.”

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On July 3, five (5) men were shot dead in what the police said was a follow-up antidrug operation in the Golden Mosque compound in Quiapo, Manila. The wife of one of the five deceased claimed there was no shootout. “My husband was only trying to fix our water supply that morning when he was shot. He was unarmed,” the wife explained. “We are so poor that we can barely afford to buy food. How can we even buy a gun?”

And so the gorefest continues.

The fact that our attention span has waned as I enumerated only a fraction of these killings already shows how desensitized we have grown to the killings as mere numbers and statistics. We now casually eat our breakfast watching human beings wrapped in packing tape, or lying in pools of blood. Sa araw-araw na lang na ginawa ng Diyos mula nang naging malinaw ang resulta ng nakaraang eleksyon, nasanay na tayo na ang ating almusal ay suman na bangkay at dinuguan.

We must force ourselves to be reminded that the victims are always flesh and blood to their families and loved ones. Hindi sila suman o dinuguan.

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As for the killings carried out supposedly in pursuit of police work, there is the usual explanation that the executions were done in the course of legitimate law enforcement operations. Nanlaban daw. Nakipagbarilan daw. Nang-agaw daw ng baril habang naka-posas. Pero alam naman natin na minsan ay style bulok na yang mga paliwanag na yan. We are aware of incidents of police rub-outs. We know about the shortcuts taken by some law enforcers in the guise of self-defense. The use of force, it appears in some cases, may not be necessary, or, if necessary, was not proportional.

We still have a system of law that processes and punishes wrongdoers. We have our Bill of Rights that accord the right to be presumed innocent. What is worrisome in this situation is that the war on drugs is becoming a convenient pretext for misguided or utterly corrupt law enforcers to kill just any one.

Ang magagandang layunin ng gyera laban sa droga ay nasisira nitong mga karumal-dumal na pagpatay. Tandaan sana natin na ang pagpatay na walang katwiran at walang legal na basehan ay krimeng malinaw. Ito ay iligal. Ito ay imoral.

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We cannot base our reactions to these killings on the popularity of the President.

Last Friday, the Ateneo de Manila University, through its President Fr. Jet Villarin, issued a statement condemning the nation’s acceptance of these killings as the new normal. Before that, De La Salle University President, Br. Jose Mari Jimenez, urged the La Sallian community in a pastoral letter to make a stand against the culture of death.

Ateneo has reason to cry. Its Math teacher, Emmanuel Jose Pavia, was killed while on his way home. The motive for his murder is lost in the hundreds of street assassinations now taking place. Impunity, once unleashed, has no limits. It simply does not care about the nuances of who gets killed, and why.

The message is this: Let us not wait until another Atenean on his way home is killed. Let us not wait until a La Sallian is killed. Let us not wait until another student or teacher from any other school, or a worker or commuter or motorist, is killed.

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If we are to shirk from our natural, moral and legal duty to condemn the abuses of power, to condemn any and all wrongdoings, the victims of our silence are not only the summarily killed, but values that are sacred and universal: the very right to life, the rule of law, due process, and justice for all.

Mr. President, drugs destroy lives, but we need not destroy lives to destroy drugs. Ang paggalang sa buhay ay hindi balakid sa pagsugpo ng droga at mga krimen. May mga paraan at mekanismo sa ilalim ng ating mga batas upang maisagawa ang gyera laban sa droga habang itinataguyod ang pangingibabaw ng batas at pag-iral ng karapatang pantao. Our legal arsenal is equipped. It should be strengthened to carry out the objectives of this war on drugs. The war on drugs can be waged without sacrificing the sacredness of life, obedience to the rule of law, and adherence to human rights.

Freddie Aguilar once sang: “Higit sa lahat ay tao.”

This is the biggest truth: “Higit sa lahat ay tao. Higit sa lahat ay buhay.”

The right to life is the most ancient and most basic of all human rights. It is the source of all human rights. The UN Declaration on Human Rights proclaims that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) declares that “every human being has the inherent right to life” and that “this right shall be protected by law.” “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.” Our Bill of Rights commands that “no person shall be deprived of life … without due process of law.” Section 11 of Article II of our Constitution proclaims that “[t]he State values the dignity of every human person and guarantees full respect for human rights.”

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Malinaw na ang laban na ito ay hindi lamang pansariling laban ni Leila de Lima. Ito ay laban ng mga karaniwang Pilipino para sa pagbabago, para sa pagyabong ng buhay, para sa kaginhawaan ng pamilya, para sa katiwasayan ng pamayananan, para sa kaayusan ng pamahalaan, at para sa kabutihan ng lahat.

If this Administration is sincerely concerned about the spate of killings of suspected criminals, as it pronounced once before the media, then it should welcome this Senate inquiry. However, even before any Senate Resolution was filed, the Solicitor General and the PNP Chief have already made pronouncements that they will not attend any Senate inquiry, even when invited or summoned. This premature position of some Administration officials is regrettable.

The bloody drug war advocates are fomenting a hate campaign against those in the media, civil society, the religious and private sectors, and the academe. Despite this hate campaign, we have to continue opposing the murder of the innocents as well as that of the suspects. We must call for the accountability of state actors responsible for this terrifying trend in law enforcement, and the investigation of killings perpetrated by the vigilante assassins.

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It is the powerless and the helpless who most need our love and protection, not the powerful.

In the campaign against criminality, we cannot applaud criminal methods merely because we are left unaffected. Life has more value than an accusation written on a piece of cardboard, whether you are rich, or a scum of the earth.

My fellow Senators, that is what we are in power for.

Kaya po tayo binigyan ng kapangyarihan bilang mga Senador, para mahalin ang mga walang kapangyarihan at tulungan sila na sagipin ang kanilang sarili, mula man sa pag-abuso ng droga, o sa pangkalahatang paghihirap sa buhay. Ang ating kapangyarihan ay para sa mga walang kapangyarihan. Ang ating pag-aruga ay para sa mga nangangailangan ng ating tulong at pag-unawa.

Magandang hapon po sa inyong lahat.


[PDI Source: Office of Sen. Leila de Lima.]
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/

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