The greatest heist of all
By Noralyn Mustafa

Advertisement

JOLO, SULU-IT SEEMS THE ONLY THING THAT unites us now in Jolo is our collective grief over the incredibly cruel and incomprehensible death of five of our townmates in the bomb blast that hit our one and only consumers cooperative store. Even as I write this, people are still looking for body parts to bury. One of the victims was just literally blown to smithereens. Nothing could be found of him.

I thought that at this time of my life, after all that I have witnessed in this war-afflicted province, I had become inured to events and sights such as this. I have seen more than my share of bloated bodies, bullet-riddled corpses, popped-out eyes, bloody mess, tissue and bones of what were once human beings; the most unforgettable among them was parents scooping up the brains of the children I had seen at play amid the shelling and strafing when I passed by their place half an hour earlier.

But this latest violence I could not take anymore. Those who fell here were not mere "victims." If there is any citation I could honor them with, it is being the nicest sales staff I had ever dealt with. They were always courteous, never too busy to look for an item you couldn't find on the shelves; one of them would always greet me and ask how I was as she passed on a bit of news about someone or something.

I feel for them a kind of grief too deep for tears.

And in the midst of it all came not a bullet train, but the bulldozer of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo - the so-called "people's initiative" designed to ensure our perpetual bondage to a ruler of very doubtful legitimacy.

By her own admission, she was causing divisiveness in the nation, something which became apparent soon after she assumed the presidency. And for that reason, she promised not to run for president in the elections of 2004.

She made that vow in December 2002. A year later, she changed her mind and, since then, has done everything to divide political parties, the military, Congress, local governments, the judiciary, the clergy and, of course, the people.

And now with the "people's initiative" by which she and her allies would ram a new constitution down our throats-to complete the grand cover-up of all the questions about her legitimacy and the charges of corruption against her and her close associates - we in this town are now divided even as we still have to bury our dead.

We have been waylaid into endless discussions on the legality of using wiretapped conversations as evidence, but not on the use of the military to record the telephone conversations of Virgilio Garcillano. We have twitted Ignacio Bunye for singing "I have two discs, the left and the right," but not his production of those CDs in the first place. We have accepted the fact that some of the best, most honorable and most valiant among our military officers are now jailed and undergoing court martial, but not why they risked their careers by speaking out-of-line in the chain of command. We are questioning the legality of EO 464 and the calibrated preemptive response but not why these were issued.

And now we are questioning the sneakiness and even the funding of the "people's initiative," but not whether it is right that Ms Arroyo should start up the bulldozer's engine or run it herself.

If, in the future, our progeny will see written in our history that we allowed ourselves, as a nation, to be governed by force of a "Constitution" rammed down our throats by a President who was never elected to office, we will certainly deserve the ignominy.

This is the primordial issue. All else - the perceived plunder of millions of fertilizer funds and recovered Marcos money, the massive and widespread corruption, the duplicity - are mere incidentals to this most basic question.

At this point, what has been uncovered so far shows mainly that our sovereign will has been violated twice: the first, in the ouster-through unconstitutional means, of a duly elected President who won the elections with an overwhelming majority, without cheating (after which he was subjected to public humiliation when he was made to undergo fingerprinting and pose for mug shots in full view of millions of TV viewers; yet now, his request for a media coverage of his own testimony has been denied). The second, when our votes were callously stolen from us in the most fraud-fraught Philippine election in memory, perpetrated at our expense, literally.

Finally, we are now being bulldozed into legitimizing all these violations of our rights and freedoms. And as malodorously as the mountain of garbage in Payatas snuffed out a number of miserable lives struggling to survive from its dregs some years back, GMA's proposed Constitution will cover up all questions about her legitimacy and corrupt leadership; and out of this Constitution, we will be reborn as a people suffering from the most insidious kind of amnesia.

We will forget that this is a country that came into being with the blood of heroes like Andres Bonifacio and Jose Rizal, who gave their lives that we may be free. We will forget that there once lived in this country such honorable Filipinos as Manuel Quezon Sr., Sergio Osmeña Sr., Claro M. Recto, Carlos Romulo, Ramon Magsaysay, Lorenzo Tañada, Chino Roces who gave the best years of their lives, the best of their knowledge, the best of their talents to make us a nation worthy of the world's respect.

What we will remember instead is that after all the blood, sweat and tears of these noble men and women who laid or risked their lives so that our people may be forever free, we gave this country on a golden platter to Jose Pidal.

* * *

Comments to rubaiyat19@yahoo.com

Copyright 2006 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.