Keeping the fires burning

It used to be said that nothing could happen in Maguindanao, including people breathing and fornicating, without the blessings of Andal Ampatuan, patriarch of the Ampatuan clan. A view Andal himself encouraged. This same person now says he had nothing to do with the mayhem in Maguindanao, a massacre of such scale and ferocity it shocked a world that had seen enough of blood and gore. That was what he indicated last week when he pleaded not guilty to it.

When he did, the court erupted into jeers and sneers. Or the relatives of the dead and their sympathizers who had gone there to see justice done did. While the plea did not come as a surprise, it still had the effect of a slap, or spit, in the faces of the monstrously aggrieved. And thus their reaction: swift, spontaneous, intense.

Judge Jocelyn Solis Reyes had to warn the crowd to pipe down or she would eject them from her court. Andal’s lawyer, Sigfrid Fortun, asked that relatives of the massacred be prevented from attending the proceedings, but Judge Reyes was adamant. They would be allowed in so long as they behaved themselves.

Of course I too would rather see the relatives unburden themselves of their oppression, which continues to this day in the form of a trial dragging out till kingdom come, outside court rather than in it. They could always camp out in front of the courthouse, waving placards that bid the world remember. But I do not particularly mind their boisterous display of anger and disgust last week in reception of Andal’s plea however it was done inside the court. In fact I applaud it.

At the very least, it is perfectly understandable. You need only contrast the fates of Andal and his son, Zaldy—the latter by the way is named Rizaldy, an ironic commentary on where the spirit of Rizal has gone—with that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn halfway across the globe to appreciate the depths of the massacre victims’ frustration.

Strauss-Kahn’s crime was “only” rape—“only” in relation to that of the Ampatuans. He is one of the most powerful men in the world, the chief of the IMF, an institution known to rape and pillage the world, and his accuser is a lowly maid, but that did not prevent the New York authorities from clamping handcuffs on him and throwing his ass in jail as soon as the crime was reported. Of course he has been released on bail and is under house arrest, but he is due to appear in court later this month, and if convicted—as most everyone expects him to be— he faces 25 years in jail.

That is justice. It is swift, it is blind to rich and poor, it has a sense of proportion.

The Ampatuans’ crime is something that leaves you groping for words to describe. The Ampatuans may be powerful but they are nowhere comparable to the chief of the IMF. Yet it took the shrieking Furies in the form of national and international outrage to get Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the Frankenstein who created the monster, to get them escorted to jail. Where they have since enjoyed its comforts in lieu of pining in it while awaiting trial. That trial has taken a year and a half to begin, and will probably take a decade and a half to finish to go by its current pace.

That is injustice. It is slow, it is partial to the powerful, it has no sense of proportion.

At the very most, the outburst over Andal Ampatuan’s plea is perfectly laudable.

More than any other country, it’s to ours that the idea that justice delayed is justice denied applies. That is so because the longer a trial takes, the bolder the accused becomes, the more fearful the witnesses become, the more expensive the litigation becomes. That is so particularly where the accused is rich and powerful.

But more important than that, the longer the trial takes, the more the case recedes from memory. That is what the accused in heinous crimes, particularly where the case against them is ironclad, bank on. That the crime will be remembered only vaguely, if not completely forgotten, or that the emotions that went with it, the shock, the fury, the clamor for retribution, if not for blood, will dissipate in time. Drowned by the tumbling waters of fresh bloodletting, buried under by a mountain of new atrocity.

You cannot have a more heinous crime than the one the Ampatuans wrought, “crime” itself paling before it. And you cannot have a more ironclad case than the one against them: They, and only they, had the motive, means and opportunity to commit it. And there are witnesses aplenty to say they did it. Yet given time, even that will ebb out of memory like a river emptying out into the sea, or it will be remembered only without the gut-wrenching horror that accompanied it in its time. In a country where the moral guardians themselves like to exhort the public to “move on,” that may happen faster than we think. In fact, it is happening even now, the trial sounding like an addendum to yesterday’s news. Which poses the gravest perils to its outcome.

That’s what makes the outburst of the kin of the victims of the Maguindanao massacre welcome, a drop of kalamansi on a wound to keep the prince from falling into the vapors of sleep. What advances the cause of justice is memory, and what advances the cause of memory is emotion. Without emotion, it is hard to remember. Without remembering, it is hard to find justice. I don’t know that we can completely hold on to the sorrow and grief, the bitterness and anger, that accompany horrific events as we move through time, but we can always harbor smoldering embers of them. And with the aid of those directly affected by them ready to stoke them to a flame. That’s what the kin of the victims of the Maguindanao massacre do for us with their vigilance, with their weeping and gnashing of teeth.

They keep the fires burning.