The persistence of impunity

STATE RESPONSIBILITY was writ large in the Ampatuan Massacre when it occurred in 2009. Not only were the immediate suspects members of the ruling dynasty in Maguindanao. They had also prospered because they were the reliable allies of the Arroyo administration, the fingerprints of which were all over the surge in the killing of journalists and activists since 2001.

Campaigning for the Presidency then and until 2010, Benigno S. Aquino III pledged not only to end extrajudicial killings and the killing of journalists; he also vowed to usher in an era of State respect for human rights.

A thousand days after the Massacre, the promised State initiatives to stop the killing of journalists by demonstrating that the killers will be punished is more evident in their absence. The court trying the Ampatuans and the prosecution have allowed the trial to drag on, the former by giving due course to the tsunami of motions and petitions of the defense, and the latter by itself filing motion upon motion in a virtual race for who can top the other in exploiting the many and complex technicalities of the rules of court.

Only some of the accused, not all, have been indicted. While the petition for the dropping of charges against him by a member of the Ampatuan clan has been decided, hearings on the bail petitions of other accused individuals are ongoing. At this late date dozens of those accused of involvement in this brutal crime are still to be arrested. The trial on the merits has yet to resume, while the survivors of the slain lose hope that they will ever see justice done. At least two witnesses for the prosecution have also been murdered.

The trial has not been the model of efficiency and speed one would have expected of proceedings involving a crime of such magnitude. On the contrary. The virtual lack of progress in the trial has demonstrated, more than anything else in living memory, how truly justice delayed is indeed the equivalent of its being denied.

But citizen apathy is as evident as State indifference. One would have thought when it happened nearly three years ago that every Filipino would eventually realize how serious a challenge to Philippine democracy was the Massacre. It was, after all, an assault not only on the freedom of the press to report matters of public concern without fear; it was also an attack on the right of a supposedly free people to choose their leaders.

And yet many who had heard of it then have already tucked it away among their fading memories of other Philippine horrors. It isn’t so much collective amnesia  at work, but  an indication of how violence has become so much a fact of life in these islands it has dulled its people’s capacity for outrage over the incapacity of the State to protect its citizens. It helps explain why, a thousand days later last August 19, only some journalist and media advocacy groups marked the event with calls for the speedy and credible conclusion of the trial of those accused of planning and carrying out the Massacre.

Those who have forgotten, and those who never knew it, need to be reminded and told that thirty-two journalists and media workers were slain on November 23, 2009 in a manner so brutal it defies belief and understanding. Twenty-six men and women including lawyers, political workers, and the relatives of the then candidate, now governor of Maguindanao, were also murdered, and hastily buried in pre-dug pits together with the vehicles that had conveyed them to Ampatuan town on their way to the local office of  the  Commission on Elections where they were filing the gubernatorial candidate’s certificate of candidacy.

Both for its exceptional brutality and what it says about the state of Philippine democracy, the Massacre has become the key to either the persistence or the end of impunity. Unless the Massacre trial is credibly concluded in this lifetime, and the killers and masterminds convicted and sentenced to the prison terms they so richly deserve, the killing of journalists and of human rights workers, political activists, environmental advocates, judges, lawyers, students, farmers and workers will continue. Indeed, the demonstration effect of the failure to speedily penalize the perpetrators has already encouraged the killing of eight other journalists and nearly a hundred activists since 2010.

The journalist and media advocacy groups’ unflagging efforts to keep the Massacre and the trial in the public mind is crucial to engaging the citizenry in the campaign to compel the police to arrest those other accused who are still at large, the Department of Justice to file the necessary charges, and the court trying the case to indict them. But these groups cannot do it alone.

The killing of journalists and those other men and women fighting corruption and abuse and working for change in this country can end only with the active involvement of the press and media as well as the citizenry. But as the lead actor in the process of bringing the perpetrators of the worst crime against the press in history to justice, of even more urgency is government’s pro-active and determined involvement. Only the combined  efforts of journalist and media advocacy groups, the public, and the government can lead to the credible conclusion of the trial of the accused perpetrators of the Ampatuan Massacre. That conclusion is the primary condition for ending the culture of impunity whose cost in lives no country that dares call itself a democracy should countenance.