The Media and Martial Law: Never Again

By Luis V. Teodoro

PRESIDENT RODRIGO Duterte’s declaration of martial law in Mindanao thrusts upon the media several responsibilities. These include closely looking into the reasons for the declaration, monitoring its implementation towards making sure that the rights of  every citizen are not violated, and challenging any attempt to prolong  martial rule in Mindanao and to extend it nationwide.

These imperatives are premised on the lessons every Filipino should have learned from the country’s nightmarish  experience with the 1972-1986 martial law terror regime of Ferdinand Marcos, when some 100,000 men and women were arrested and detained, thousands tortured and/or killed extrajudicially, and hundreds forcibly disappeared.

The first of those lessons is that once released from the constraints of the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights, there is nothing to stop the police and  military from further brutalizing  the citizenry.  Although the Constitution imposes limits on the powers of the Presidency during martial law, on-the-ground realities invest the implementors of those powers — the police and military — the capacity and the encouragement to transcend those limits.

Four days after Proclamation 216, for example, despite its claims that it would respect human rights, the military was already  declaring that it would exercise a so called “right of censure,” which curtails free expression in social media, and was threatening to arrest anyone who posts anything “harmful” online. This alone should have provoked protests from the media, but its significance seems to have been unappreciated, and drowned in the usual chorus of approval from regime partisans.

The suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, meanwhile, invests the military and police with the power to arrest and  detain anyone without charges, providing them the enhanced opportunity to interrogate without counsel and to even torture those in their custody — atrocities that, lest we forget, already occur even without martial law.

Indeed, the second lesson from the Philippine experience with the Marcos dictatorship  is that the dark legacies of that period, among them the flagrant abuse of power, are still resident in the country’s coercive institutions despite  claims that the police and military have become the defenders and protectors of human rights rather than their leading violators.

Military spokespersons dismiss fears of martial rule by claiming that military violations of human rights are all in the past, in an effort to lull the citizenry into forgetting that only in 2016, military units were harassing and killing protesting farmers, that they massacred citizens petitioning the government for food aid in Kidapawan, and that extensive documentation — including the annual human rights reports of  the US State Department — exists which justify fears that human rights violations by the police and military  occurred not only in the past but are still happening in the awful present.

The third lesson is that the vague but seemingly compelling allegation that there are threats to national security that have to be met with extreme measures  is so easily used to conceal less than patriotic aims, among them the greed for pelf and power. Not only at the highest levels of governance do these opportunities exist once martial law is in place. They are present as well in the middle and even lowest levels of the enforcing agencies. During the Marcos kleptocracy, for example, many police and military personnel  used the enhanced powers they had been endowed with for self-aggrandizement at the expense of the citizenry.

When Ferdinand Marcos was finally overthrown through EDSA 1986, the mantra among those who fought and survived martial law was “Never Again,” given  the terrible loss in lives  and talents  that martial rule cost the Filipino people, many of whose best and brightest sons and daughters fell victim to the regime’s killing machine.

While it  makes sense for the media to look into the validity of Proclamation 216, the assumptions of which contain not a small amount of exaggeration, it must be done towards arming the people with the vigilance and sound information that will enable them to closely monitor not only what is happening in Mindanao but also to oppose any step towards imposing authoritarian rule nationwide, including and primarily any attempt to place the entire country under martial rule.

Far from merely accepting regime claims at face value and succumbing to the irresponsible claim that it knows best, the present crisis provides the media the signal opportunity to educate the mass of citizenry on the perils they face and to thereby awaken them to the fundamental responsibility of resisting any attempt to restore authoritarian rule. Never again should they allow what happened then, 45 years ago, to plunge this country into another long night of deceit,  brutality and abuse.