ISAGANI YAMBOT COULD BARELY GET PAST the first lines of his statement. He choked on his words as he held back his tears. He had been a journalist for most of his life and the publisher of the Philippine Daily Inquirer for a good deal of it. In that capacity, he had laughed with journalists, cried with journalists, and grieved over journalists on the occasions they had died or been murdered.

The last Gani has had much cause to do over the last several years, given the wholesale slaughter of journalists in the provinces. Nothing, however, had prepared him for what happened several weeks ago, which was the massacre of 57 people, most of them journalists, by a bunch of cutthroats who believed themselves above the law. Indeed who believed themselves past the reach of public fury. The depiction of the act as the worst single atrocity ever to have happened to journalists in the history of humankind did not quite catch the enormity of it. The loss of so many lives in so unspeakable a way did not quite pin down the reality of it.

Gani choked on his words, but collected himself and soldiered on. While candlelight flickered in the gathering dusk, Gani expressed the deepest solidarity with fallen comrades in the name of a community utterly depleted by its loss, and vowed justice for them in the name of a community they had served so courageously and well.

This was at the Inquirer last week, where journalists flocked to add their voices to the swirling vortex of public reprehension over the atrocity. I understood the tumult in Gani?s heart perfectly. It is not just that I am a journalist and my daughter is a journalist and it takes very little imagination to put yourself in the shoes of the victims, particularly in their hour of absolute terror, when they realized that nothing, not their names, not their organizations, not their God, whoever or whatever (s)he is, could stay the hand of their executioners. And when you realize it might have been you.

It is also that I have always thought journalists deserved justice in more ways than one. It?s bad enough that they are paid badly, the ones outside Metro Manila particularly who are forced to moonlight like vampires to augment petty incomes. It?s bad enough that they are not greatly appreciated; it?s the businessmen and politicians who command (or demand) respect for their ability to make money and take money respectively. It?s bad enough that they are being murdered right and left, with government justifying their murder as solicited by their being corrupt and abusive, forgetting that if being corrupt and abusive justifies being murdered, public officials should stand first in line.

But to have something like this happen to them, you will really choke on your words if your tongue is at all able to form enough of them to express the revulsion that you feel. The only thing that?s worse than the slaughter of innocents is the slaughter of the scribes. It is only fitting that the world, the journalist organizations above all, should call on the wrath of God and man, the Koran and the courts, to fall swiftly, inexorably, and heavily on its wreakers. The candlelight that has flickered across the world with the extinguishing of the lives of those who brought light upon the world will not expire so easily.

Having said this, however, I must also say that we would do well to spare more than a thought for the other victims of the Maguindanao massacre. The reason I say this is that in many of the activities I?ve been to lately, the murdered non-journalists tend to be mentioned in passing, almost as an addendum or afterthought. It is not that they are not noted, it is that they are not given the weight they deserve, if only because of the gruesomeness of their deaths, if only because of the courage of their lives, if only because they were human beings.

Doubtless the fact that these activities were carried out by journalist groups meant the emphasis would be on journalists. But my worry is not just that thrusting a blinding light on journalists, which casts everything else in shadow, encourages the mentality, not unlike that harbored by cops, of ?taking care of our own.? My worry is that it encourages the unstated belief that the other victims of the culture of impunity, quite unlike journalists who are neutral, are at least partisan and at most combatant, which is why the culture of impunity thrives in the first place. Compared to journalists, political activists have been murdered tenfold since GMA came to power, yet compared to journalists, they have been little mourned, or violently protested. Not all of this is the product of negligence. A great deal of it is also the product of giving their killers the benefit of the doubt.

Today is International Human Rights Day, a day we?ve almost forgotten. Gone are the halcyon years of the human rights lawyers who fought against dictatorship and oppression and so resurrected freedom and democracy from the grave.

Well, the Ampatuans have just reminded us of the consequences of that disappearance. The Ampatuans have just reminded us that human rights are not amenities of life, things we can always dispense with, like book and bell, there are more important things to think about, like guns and bullets. The Ampatuans have just reminded us that human rights do not just apply to journalists and lawyers, they apply to everyone, and when you forget that, you end up like the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoeller who, after not speaking out for others when the Nazis came for them because they were not one of his own, ended up having no one to speak for him when the Nazis came for him. The Ampatuans have just reminded us of the ineluctable essence of human rights:

They are human, and they are right.