In less than two months from now, we will be marking one year of the COVID-19 lockdown. It is certainly not worth commemorating, but it is helpful to look back to it to assess where we are, vis-à-vis the national government’s response to the pandemic.
Some parts of the world started to raise the specter of a looming pandemic during the first months of 2020. At that time, the national government just nonchalantly brushed it off, with President Duterte making pronouncements that the virus will just “die a natural death” and that “there’s nothing to be scared of that coronavirus thing.” He made these statements even after the first COVID-19-related death was reported in the country—a 44-year-old man who came from Wuhan, China, where the virus has been widely known to have originated.
Even as Mr. Duterte cursed the coronavirus in a speech on Feb. 10, 2020, in Pasay City, he insisted that there was nothing to worry as the virus will just go away and that the national government was very much prepared to handle the crisis. The following month, just a few days after he called on all Filipinos to be very careful about this dreaded virus, he continued to claim that the national government was ready to handle any emergency situation arising from the spread of the disease. At that time, there were only 24 COVID-19 cases in the country.
But such claims of being able to handle the emergency situation brought about by the pandemic fell flat on their faces. The military-led Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases tasked to control the spread of the virus responded in their usual “security- type” strategies. Even the language of the health protocols—like lockdowns—was typical of military tactics of containing enemies and their movements. But the virus is invisible, unlike criminals and rebels. As an aside, it can be argued that government security forces have not even totally licked visible enemies so how can they control invisible ones like COVID-19?
The pandemic is certainly a public health issue that needs to be addressed through medical and social approaches. Yet, in the language of young Filipino sociologist Nicole Curato, it has become a “securitized” social issue, in the same way the war on drugs has been treated. Curato is associate professor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance-Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra, Australia.
In a paper published as part of the Democracy in Asia series of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, Curato noted that the securitization of public health issues like substance abuse, and now the pandemic, has magnified the role of security forces like the police and the military. This process of securitization has highlighted coercion as the mode of choice in the government’s response to COVID-19. In this coercive process, significant institutions of our democracy are rendered weak and fragile, making them vulnerable to the excesses of security forces. For example, news reports about people being apprehended for violating health protocols like physical distancing and localized lockdowns included violations of human rights among those who were apprehended (like putting some male violators in dog cages). Some members of the barangay peace action team have also been cited in some reports for allegedly raping young women apprehended during curfews and border lockdowns.
This year, we hope to be getting vaccines for COVID-19. And we are seeing once again the securitization in the process involved in acquiring these antidotes, with former military generals at the helm. For me, this is securitization that does not guarantee community security at all.
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