Find a pattern then look for the motive

After I finished writing this column, I was told that the Supreme Court will decide and reject the motion for consideration on Tuesday. Who is in a race to beat the date of the retirement of Justice Panganiban? Who delivered the decision personally to Sigaw ng Bayan instead of mailing as is normally done? Please, Mr. Joker, do not make accusations you are as guilty of. This unseemly rush of the Supreme Court has been expected. It merely formalizes what has been said all along that it is wrong to call motions for reconsideration if the Supreme Court does not reconsider. We should have called it as I had earlier written a motion for inconsideration.

It is time to question whether we are served by the tyranny and intransigence of a group of unelected men and women. What are the avenues of redress? For the moment there is none. The only consolation perhaps is that we have been proven right and that our future efforts must be directed towards how such a state of affairs can be changed in another battlefield.

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We can better appreciate what is happening to the country today if we look at other countries with failed presidential systems. Most of these are South American countries where US has special economic and political interests. Like the Philippines these also were formerly Spanish colonies and a long history of colonialism.

Curiously, according to political analysts most of these countries were almost simultaneously working hard at rewriting their constitutions in the 1990s when it became clear that the US exported presidential system did not work on their soil. Interestingly, at the same time that this rewriting was being done these countries were also developing "direct democracy" mechanisms. So it is not by accident that the people’s initiative was included in the 1987 People Power Constitution of the Philippines.

It is my opinion that direct democracy was seen as a way of addressing the failure of representative democratic institutions in these countries and at the same time to address the threat of communism. The challenge was to bring in the ‘traditionally excluded political interests’ into the mainstream. Elections of representatives merely reinforced the monopoly of elites.

That is what makes a people’s initiative, admittedly new and flawed in the Philippines, such a formidable challenge. This is a country of oligarchs and power brokers. The inclusion of a people’s initiative may have been seen as a way forward to help develop a future direct democracy. Given this background, most progressive thinkers look to a con-con as the only way to rewrite a constitution because they say it is more ‘representative’ whatever that means. It may be good in theory but not in practice. A con-con as it has already been said is the equivalent of keeping the kind of representation we now have in power. The alternative was to have nationwide consultations with the people.

That was the whole point of President GMA’s creation of a constitutional commission. It tackled three broad topics – shift to parliamentary government, shift to federalism and economic liberalization. Then a working partnership was forged with local authorities, ULAP which had the means to get the message to the people and Sigaw ng Bayan which was created as the vehicle to bring the message to the masses. This process ensured participation of the masses in constitution making and not just a ministerial ratification in a plebiscite. The proposed Charter changes were the most widely debated in constitution writing in Philippine history. The trouble is that the proponents did not reckon with a Senate and a Supreme Court which were against any dilution of their power in the status quo.

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It may seem baffling that the Makati Business Club and the Communist Party of the Philippines are allies against Charter change. But a closer look will show both are against a more liberalized investment climate. The oligarchy, because it fears competition from foreign investors, and the extreme left, because progress would push back the long awaited revolutionary situation to seize power.

The Makati Business Club says the "prospects for the Philippine economy have now become brighter, with stronger optimism pervading in corporate board rooms and financial market" so there is no reason for Charter change. Yeh? The good prospects are no thanks to them for trying to put down the Arroyo government. They like the good things she is doing but they do not want her to get the credit for it. At the same time they do not want any change that will disturb the status quo and their role as power brokers come election time.

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Of course, we condemn killings, any killing. So the London-based Amnesty International has quite rightly condemned what it called ‘political’ killings, 51 in all in the first six months of this year, compared with 66 for all of 2005.

But it is also true that there may be other motives behind the publicity attending Amnesty’s accusations. One telling sign is the continuous attacks on the Philippine government not just for the killings but also against government attempts at efforts to nail down the perpetrators. We should be just as concerned if a responsible body, like the Melo Commission is pilloried even before it has begun its work. Do they want to solve the killings or do they just want to accuse the government? We should equally look into cases reported by some militant groups as ‘political’ killings, without facts and witnesses and included anyway in alarming statistics. No solution can be found if legal processes are not invoked in punishing the culprits. It is disturbing when allegations are made and the parties making the allegations do not bother to pursue their accusations.

Amnesty International which won the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize is a London-based group which rallies public support to pressure government officials to recognize fundamental human rights. They do their work through public education, demonstrations, letter-writing campaigns, fundraising events, and news conferences. They were the allies of political exiles during the struggle against the Marcos regime in the ’70s and ’80s.

Having established a commendable reputation, its statements cannot be impugned and considered the scourge of abusive governments. But then it is not politically invulnerable.

Being a group of human beings, it is bound to have differing political loyalties. It can also be used by parties with a specific agenda to bring down governments or public officials not to their liking. One reliable report on the group said that in the late 1960s Amnesty International was criticized for accepting funds from government organizations and for publishing biased reports about human rights abuses. More ominous is the accusation published widely in newspapers in England and other countries that AI’s reports were not always nonpartisan with some of its members openly supporting certain political parties.

Some critics claimed that MacBride, a former officer of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), prevented the organization from investigating allegations of human rights abuses in Northern Ireland. It was also widely talked about that Amnesty International received funding from the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

AI was also criticized when it did not campaign for the release of Nelson Mandela who fought apartheid, the South African government’s official policy of racial segregation. He was given a life sentence in 1964 for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy to overthrow the government. But the organization did not "adopt" Mandela as a prisoner of conscience. It claimed that he had advocated the use of violence against the South African government. But it later objected to the poor treatment of Mandela in prison and worked to provide him with a fair trial.

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My e-mail is [email protected]