Maguindanao: A continuing perversion of justice

ESMAIL ENOG has gone missing for three months now. Indeed, he is thought dead even if no final word has come or body has turned up to confirm that. It’s been simply too long for anyone who finds himself in the circumstances he did to have been gone and stayed healthy, let alone alive.

The place alone, Maguindanao province, is notorious enough. It’s warlord country, a standout in fact in its own class for the quality of its executions—medievally brutal, yet done with an industrial touch and efficiency: the executed are left a jigsaw—chainsawed.

I remember Congressman Neri Colmenares’s own story about the place, where he once found himself for a human-rights inquiry. Alone outside for a cigarette break from the proceedings, he was joined in the dark by a man who made the night positively chillier by breathing into his ear something vague yet intimidatingly clear—about “chainsaw justice for interlopers.”

Enog is (I like to continue hoping, even against hope, for life in his case, critical as it is to the dispensation of proper justice) no interloper; he has lived there, worked there, although it’s precisely his relative nativeness that has marked him for execution.

By the perverse sense of justice of the place, he has been tagged a betrayer, for agreeing to testify for the prosecution in the massacre of 58 people, more than half of them journalists, in Ampatuan town on November 23, 2009. The 58 had been in a convoy driving to town for the filing of a certificate of gubernatorial candidacy in opposition to the long-ruling warlord family, for whom the town in fact has been named. They were hijacked and herded off the road two kilometers away into a waiting mass grave. There they were massacred—shot, hacked—and buried with the use of a backhoe.

Accused principally and detained, along with seven members of his family, is Andal Ampatuan Sr., Maguindanao governor until he was defeated in the election two years ago by the man whose wife had died leading the convoy to file his certificate of candidacy.

Esmail Enog worked for a relative of the Ampatuans, an Ampatuan himself in fact. Partly privy to the massacre plotting, according to Enog, and courted as a witness for the state, Alijol Ampatuan was preemptively assassinated. Enog, for his part, has been enlisted to identify the men at the checkpoint where the convoy was hijacked. He may have been killed, police reckon, at about the same time as Alijol.

Four other people—another prospective witness and two relatives plus a supporter of other witnesses—have been murdered. Nearly two hundred have been charged, although fewer than a hundred have been arrested. Does anyone yet doubt the enormity of risks those people run? Given the plodding pace at which justice—normal justice—grinds in the country, the assassins of Maguindanao have all the time to act on their depraved disposition—with a chainsaw.

No initiative of any commensurate worth, meanwhile, seems coming from the national government: the department of justice, the police, even Malacañang all seem only too fastidious not to stain their hands with Maguindanao blood. They are now, for instance, making a distinction between those under the witness-protection program—itself a not-too-secure place—and those who are not, as if law and order and justice come in various kinds, sizes, and prices.

But even granting that, is the Maguindanao case not brutal enough or large enough or costly enough to deserve special state attention?