Unfinished business

PINOY KASI


Unfinished business
By Michael Tan
Inquirer

Last updated 00:13am (Mla time) 02/21/2007

AS I write this column, Congress will be convening for the second day of a special session in an attempt to pass a few more bills. This Congress will probably go down in history as one of the most unproductive, given how much time it wasted on political maneuverings. It doesn’t help that it’s now using the special session to ram through some of the administration’s controversial priority bills.

One of these bills was the antiterrorism bill, which was approved on Monday. Its passage prompted Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye to heap praises on Congress, saying the bill was part of the country’s commitment to the international community as well as an “imperative for a society of law and order that can sustain economic growth and posterity.”

Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan -- New Nationalist Alliance] and other militant groups were less enthusiastic. Bayan has already announced it will go to the Supreme Court once the bill is signed into law by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Fear’s clouds

The fear many human rights groups have is that the bill has too wide a definition of “terrorism” and that this might be used indiscriminately. Terrorism is described in the bill as “sowing and creating a condition of widespread and extraordinary fear and panic among the populace in order to coerce the government to give in to an unlawful demand.” The bill allows authorities to detain suspects for three days without a court warrant or the filing of formal charges. It also authorizes surveillance through wiretapping, examination of bank records and a ban on organizations seen as terrorist.

In fairness to Congress, it did modify the original version, which would have allowed up to a month of detention without warrant. There are also provisions for compensation of people who are “wrongly arrested.”

The days of the dictatorship may be over, but there’s still good reason to be worried about the bill, given the current administration’s flirtation with authoritarianism. Political assassinations of leaders of militant organizations, often labeled as “terrorist” by officials of the Arroyo administration, continue unabated. The day the antiterrorism bill was passed, another journalist was killed in Cotabato province, the 110th since democracy was restored to the Philippines in 1986.

It hasn’t helped that the President and her spokesmen have been so cavalier about these killings. Initially, they issued outright denials of any government complicity. Then when international pressure began, the President created an investigative committee headed by retired Supreme Court Justice Jose Melo. The Melo report is out now, but the administration refuses to release it to the public.

All this takes us back to the reservations about the antiterrorism bill. Put briefly, the fear of the bill is a fear of state terrorism.

Discipline

The administration rightly calculated that the bill would pass without too much public opposition. Our culture emphasizes authority, even the use of force in the name of discipline. Remember Ferdinand Marcos and martial law, and his slogan, “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan” ["For national prosperity, discipline is necessary]? It seems to have a taken a new life with Bunye’s pronouncements on the antiterrorism bill sustaining prosperity.

But we’ve seen, too, what happens when the disciplinarians can’t discipline themselves, and end up abusing their power.

Think now of how terrorism already permeates our daily lives, even if in subtle ways. How many of you have found yourself driving, and skipping a heartbeat when a policeman, or a traffic aide, raises his or her arm, only to sigh with relief when you realize you’re not being flagged down? But we respond that way because so many of us have in fact have been flagged down even when we didn’t violate any traffic rule. Some of us may be fortunate in being able to defend ourselves but your average citizen, innocent or guilty, will just pay up to be able to get on with his life.

Ah, but that’s extortion, you may argue. But then isn’t state terrorism extortion? Kidnappings and disappearances, arrests and detentions, torture and salvaging -- all these are extortion, too, in the way they intimidate people, telling us that there is no rule of law except that of state power, that of national security.

I’ve seen such terrorism in urban slums and rural areas, with checkpoints and raids. I wrote, some months back, about a hapless man who was picked up by the police, without a warrant, in his home in one of Quezon City’s many slum areas, supposedly for vandalizing someone’s car. It turned out the accuser just had a grudge against him, and connived with the police to have him roughed up and, hopefully, to extort some money. Relatives approached me and we were able to get advice from the University of the Philippines Legal Office. As soon as the police realized legal advice was coming in, they retreated.

But I feel uncomfortable when I have to intervene this way, because it reduces justice to power play. I know, too, that ultimately, all the connections one has will not match the vindictiveness of state terrorists. The University of the Philippines itself has lost students to state terrorism, the most recent incident taking place only a few months ago when two activist students disappeared while doing field work.

International covenant

The passage of the antiterrorism bill leaves us with unfinished business in the months ahead, whether through challenges before the Supreme Court, as well as more human rights education so citizens can better protect themselves.

And even as the specter of the new law is upon us, we should be giving attention to still another “To Do”: tackling a new International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

Article 2 of the new convention reads: “For the purposes of this Convention, ‘enforced disappearance’ is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the state or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the state, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.”

The convention criminalizes the practice of enforced disappearances, whether during times of war or peace. It also seeks to prevent these disappearances by prohibiting secret places of detention and recognizing the right to reparation and disclosure for victims and their families.

The international convention reminds us we need to be protected as well from state terrorism. Last Feb. 6, 57 countries acceded to the new international agreement. Most of these countries will still need to get their legislative bodies to ratify the treaty. Once 20 countries do this, the international agreement will come into force.

Conspicuously absent from among the initial signatories were several developed countries, particularly the United States, which has come under fire for its lack of transparency about detention of suspected Islamists. Also absent was the Philippines.