Unnecessary and Dangerous

By the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility
Dec. 8, 2009

The Philippine experience with martial rule has been painful, but has also been instructive. When it was in force, the entire country and the world, as well as its many victims, saw how, in the hands of the Philippine political elite, the power that promised to save the Republic and reform society undermined both while savaging the basic rights of its citizens. Indeed its consequences went beyond 1972-1986. Its poisonous remains include abuse of power, human rights violations, an unreformed police and military that haunt this nation still.

This is the fundamental reason why the Philippine Constitution of 1987 made it a point to specify that martial law may be declared only in periods of invasion and rebellion, limited the time period during which such a declaration of martial law would be in force, and gave Congress and the Supreme Court the power to review it.

At the same time, however, since 1986 a declaration of martial law has been the clear line no President has ever crossed, even in those moments when the presidency itself has been in peril, as in the term of Corazon Aquino.

Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has crossed that line, as she had earlier crossed the line by putting the entire country under a state of emergency in 2006, and two provinces and a city including Maguindanao last November. Having crossed that line despite the absence of any invasion or threat of rebellion, there is no telling how much farther Mrs. Arroyo will go, claiming to solve the country’s problems but actually adding to them and subjecting the long-suffering people of this country to further torment, as Ferdinand Marcos did from 1972 to 1986.

Mrs. Arroyo is pretending to address a problem her government itself created, while at the same time attempting to enlarge her powers as well as that of the military. Several members of the Ampatuan clan have supposedly been arrested, indicted and scheduled for trial for the mass murders of November 23. Previous to the declaration, Mrs. Arroyo’s government was giving the country the impression that it was on top of the situation, that it was heeding the demand for justice for those slain last November 23, and that the normal legal processes were proceeding as they should.

There was thus no need for martial law, if we’re to believe the very same government that has declared it, as well as the evidence of our own senses—except as a recourse that’s part of a design to eventually place selected areas of the country and perhaps the entire country itself under martial rule. It is thus imperative for everyone—ordinary citizens, civil society, the Church, and the media to oppose this declaration as the possible beginning of one more era of repression in a country that has suffered so much from it.

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