A tale of two massacres (Updated)

EXACTLY THREE years ago today a convoy was hijacked in a town in Maguindanao province and forced off the road to a pre-dug mass grave about two kilometers away. That stopped a woman from filing for her husband a certificate of candidacy that would challenge the dynastic domination of the province by a family for whom the town itself has been named—Ampatuan. That also stopped 57 people, 32 of them from the news media, from witnessing a democratic process unfold in a most dramatic way.

Indeed, that stopped all 58 of them in thedemocracy convoy—stopped dead, massacred.

Soon enough an Ampatuan father and son were arrested as prime suspects, along with some of their lieutenants and soldiers, clamped in jail, and, after a strong enough case against them had been established to warrant it, detained without the benefit of bail and put on trial.

In fact in keeping with the normally slow and not always even grind of Philippine justice, all this has proved nothing. Not only has nothingbeen further gained since; what little gain made has been lost—thanks to the Supreme Court.

Yes, the Supreme Court. By reversing itself and disallowing a live-coverage of the trial, the court has sent outfrightening signals:

One, it can change its mind as it wishes;

Two, it has done so in fact to favor men whose part in the massacre may have been, strictly speaking, simply alleged, but whose notoriety needs no proving, for here are men known and actually observed to flaunt their wealth, armory, and official power; and

Three, it has thus implicitly ruled against the orphans of the massacre victims and the public at large whose wish for as public a trial as possible is precisely justified by the warlord habits and character of the accused.

Speculations have it that the case has become a merely handy incidental in the politics inside the court; that, actually, the odious ruling has been intended to embarrass the newly appointed but not wholly acceptable chief justice. If that were the case, the chief justice presumably did not concur with the ruling—the individual vote has not been made public, not really strange in itself considering the shame of it.

In any case, the ruling by itself betrays enough of the sort of mind at work in the land’s highest court, and it seems the sort of mind that in more than one sense matches the one behind the massacre: both conceived and committed wholesale murder—one against people, the other against justice—and both appear to have done so for political gain.