Kidapawan Senate probe rushed for political mileage

By Alfredo C. Garvida, Jr.

Contributor

People treat the first day of April as April Fool’s Day—where you are empowered by tradition to pull somebody's leg with some untruthful news or story on a friend or someone else. This was not the case in Kidapawan, North Cotabato on this day of this year however, when the shocking news of the violent and deadly dispersal by the police, aided by the military, of protesting residents of this place filled the nation's airwaves. Three people were killed and 200 protesters injured in what appears to be an overkill by government troops upon peaceful citizens who were merely asking the government for assistance as they were suffering from extreme hunger done by their inability to farm their land because of the El Nino phenomenon.

This horrible incident is flashing images of the massacred peasants in Mendiola during President Corazon Aquino's time. They were just protesting for justice, yet were violently dispersed by Cory's police for no reason but plain and simple police brutality. One observer I overheard while I was dining in a fast food restaurant in Quezon City wryly commented that the mother and son presidents, i.e., Cory and PNoy, must be carrying some curse on their backs that their respective presidencies are notoriously defined by deaths and injuries of citizens when they assemble to air their grievances to or against the government. 

The trigger-happy policemen in Kidapawan are symbolic of the government's apathetic response to hunger and poverty that preside over most people's lives in our country yet these days, especially in that downtrodden area of Mindanao. The protesters were Lumads, the perennial victims of police brutality in Mayor Duterte's domain. They were in famine but instead of receiving rice from the government, they were given bullets by the latter, resulting thus to their deaths and serious injuries.

What is so convulsing the spirit and conscience of the Philippine citizenry is the fact that when the protesters sought refuge in a church, they were guarded as prisoners by the police-military cabal assigned by the government to control the protesting peasants. Anyone, including normal churchgoers, were ordered to log in or out in a log book, reminiscent of the Japanese Kempetai's subjugating tactics during the Japanese occupation. If this is not a clear violation of our rights to religion and liberty, I don't know how we should characterize it otherwise. 

Eighty-one of them are still incarcerated for direct assault upon government authorities. 3 of them are pregnant women and many are senior citizens. The police said they were arrested on suspicion that they were throwing rocks against them. Any normal thinking mind would not suppose that any woman who is pregnant would be throwing rocks at the police which necessitates that she should position herself in the front line to execute her act, in utter jeopardy to the baby she was carrying in her womb. The government prosecutor who did the inquest on them did not consider this impossibility that he just went ahead and indict them on the faith of the police account. Prosecutors are bound to prosecute criminal suspects disinterestedly on probable cause, but when in the course of normal reason, the probability of the suspect's not doing the crime alleged is flagrantly evident, as what the conditions of those three women were suggesting, there is no other way for them to go but dismiss the case.

The biggest turn-off showcased by the government about the Kidapawan carnage nonetheless is the sleekness of certain politicians to use this extremely distressing incident to register some mileage during this crucial stage of the political campaign. Vice presidential candidate Sen. Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, has filed a resolution with the senate to investigate the incident. His resolution was not acted upon by the senate, which would have readily referred the same to the concerned committee. Conversely, the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel, III, on his own convened a senate hearing by his committee to hear the grievance of the oppressed Lumad protesters right in Mindanao. The hearing started on April 7, attended with him by two senators who are currently running for elective offices: Sen. Allan Peter Cayetano, the vice presidential candidate of the PDP Party whose president is Senator Koko Pimentel himself, and Sen. Teofisto Guingona, Jr., who is running for re-election. 

Senator Pimentel's convening his committee moto propio to investigate the carnage violates the senate rules, as no committee hearing, except that of the Blue Ribbon Committee, can be held without prior resolution by any member duly submitted to the senate. Sen. Pimentel, a bar topnotcher (number 1), argued that senate rules can be disregarded when the citizens are crying for immediate dispensation of justice, as what the Kidapawan incident would epitomize. This column has no quarrel with that. But what about the resolution of Sen. Marcos? The Ilocos Norte senator merely wanted to go through the legal process and it could have taken the senate to act on it within hours but Pimentel beat him to the draw. So, he had his personal vice presidential candidate, who is badly lagging behind in the polls, attend the investigation and made him the star of the show. The question is: why were Senators Trillanes, Honasan and Marcos, Cayetano's rivals for vice president, not in the hearing like him? Sleek politicking, is it? But Pimentel did not pull a fast one without the electors' easy discernment of what he tried to pull on them.

The Kidapawan investigation should not be made to advance people's political interest but should be used to attain objective purposes in the name of justice. The victims deserve justice. Above all, like other hungry, impoverished suffering Filipinos all over the country, they deserve to be heard and have their grievances addressed forthrightly. These are the less privileged citizens of the nation, who deserve to have more in law, as President Magsaysay once argued. Therefore, if the Senate Judiciary Committee must live up to its chairman's declared purpose to dispense justice to the carnage victims, let justice be dispensed as well unto the political spectrum by giving fair and equal treatment to other candidates than Sen. Cayetano.