During an election-related law seminar sponsored in 2004 by the Lawyers For Reform (a movement of lawyers also called Lawyers For Roco which supported the presidential candidacy of the late Sen. Raul Roco, of which I was a co-convenor), I had the occasion to meet Atty. Leila de Lima.
She is now the brave and visionary Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of the Republic of the Philippines.
At that time, she was known as an election law expert and practitioner.
I found her to be soft-spoken, warm, friendly, modest, humble, articulate, and intelligent. (Her law school should be proud of her [San Beda College of Law]).
I am glad that CHR Chairperson Leila de Lima is courageously performing her constitutional duty and mandate to defend Human Rights in the country, particularly in cities in Mindanao where death squads and vigilantes operate with the subtle and implied but effective support of criminal-minded local political leaders and police and military officers.
The once beautiful City of Davao has now become fearsome, its serene image splashed with the blood of victims of extrajudicial killings and numbed by the tears of their bereaved families.
The City of Davao is led by a war-freak and trigger-happy mayor, Rodrigo Duterte.
He is a former public prosecutor and a member of the Philippine Bar whose sense of the rule of law and administration of justice is perverted and despicable.
I am ashamed to have Duterte as a brother in the noble legal profession.
His public pronouncements during media interviews sicken me, as they sicken all sane and intelligent Filipinos who love and cherish democracy and freedom in the country.
His words speak of war, death, violence, blood, hate, anger, dictatorship, and the conceit of a deluded person intoxicated by political power and by the smell of gun powder.
They are the very same unconscionable attributes of his equally deluded political idol and protector, the illegitimate Philippine President Gloria Arroyo.
Below is a recent editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer on the matter.
Editorial
Enabling Duterte
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:31:00 04/03/2009
The key to understanding Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, the self-proclaimed herald of peace and order in the country’s most sprawling city, is not to distinguish between what he says and what he does. That would make him merely an ordinary politician, swimming in the waters of hypocrisy. The trick is to understand that he means exactly what he says; he is soaked in sincerity. There is no difference between his person and his public persona.
When he says, as he did at a city assembly last February, that criminals ought to be assassinated, his constituents know that he isn’t merely paying lip service to the organizing principle of the tough-on-crime set. “If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination.”
A legitimate target of assassination — he sounds almost like a covert operative, discussing the failings of foreign heads of state. But in fact he is the head of government in Davao City, explaining the rationale for the gangland-style “rubout” of criminals preying on innocent people.
To drive the point home, Duterte at the February forum also warned those resisting arrest that he would order the police to “shoot you and aim for your head to make sure that you are dead.”
Here’s the thing: The citizens of Davao take him at his word. Is it any wonder that it is “his” city that suffers the highest number of unsolved gangland-style murders in the country? The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) this week started an investigation into what CHR Chair Leila de Lima called “the most audacious spate of localized criminal violations against the right to life in our times.” This killing spree, laid by many (even by some of those who approve of the executions) at the door of the so-called Davao Death Squad, has claimed 814 lives since 1998—33 in February 2009 alone.
Duterte and other city officials have denied any involvement in the killings. Indeed, we can almost say that the official communication policy of the shield-the-mayor-from-any-liability gang is to claim that he is in fact a liar, that when he warns criminals that they are legitimate targets of assassination he is merely playing to the gallery. Entertaining the public?
Without a hint of irony, Duterte and other city officials say the hundreds of killings were caused by gang wars and the like. But if this were even remotely true, it would make Davao a hot zone of instability, instead of the beacon of peace and order Duterte claims it to be.
“What I want is to instill fear,” President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s former adviser on peace and order said at that February assembly. “If it will send the wrong signals, then I am sorry. But what wrong did I commit?”
But that’s precisely the point. He is sending exactly the right signals. The criminals know it; the vigilantes know it; the citizens of Davao City know it.
At the start of the CHR probe, De Lima challenged the city’s citizens to come forward saying, “I know that it is impossible for all of you not to know anything at all about the rash of vigilante killings that have remained the outstanding quality of Davao City.” (Sometimes, a little sarcasm goes a long way.)
De Lima’s placing of the burden — of evidence or of exoneration, of explaining the vigilante killings away or stopping them altogether — on the citizenry is severe, but it is the right tack to take.
In her courageous opening statement, De Lima asked whether the “peace and order” Davao is said to enjoy was worth the price of hundreds of summary killings: “What peace, what order does the local government gift to the people of Davao City at the expense of the same rights that are granted to law-abiding persons?”
She ended with a challenge: “I dare, yet again, say that even here in Davao City there are those who believe it [the spree of vigilante killings] is shockingly intolerable. Among yourselves, government officials and private citizens alike, there are those who believe that this is intolerable. What peace, what order, do we gift to the people of Davao City if no one is free to speak their intolerance for vigilante killings for fear for their own lives?”
That silence allows Duterte to speak his mind.
See:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/editorial/view/20090403-197633/Enabling-Duterte
