Stop the madness

The part that particularly moved and angered me was 20-year-old Jester Angelo Olea saying tearfully that his father would not be there to attend his graduation from college. Something his father had worked so hard for, something his father would have been proud of. His father, Romeo Olea, 49, would not be there because he had been gunned down by motorcycle-riding assassins in Iriga, Camarines Sur, while he rode on his own motorcycle to his place of work, radio station dxEB, last week.

Olea was a radio commentator who had been denouncing local officials in Nabua for corruption. He is the second broadcaster from the same station who was murdered in less than a year. In July last year, Miguel Belen, 48, was shot seven times also by motorcycle-riding assassins as he went to work. He survived the attack briefly, dying in a hospital one month later.

Olea is the sixth journalist killed since the new administration came to power. That is unacceptable.

Powerlessness is no better than toleration or tacit encouragement – certainly not from the point of view of the victims and their loved ones. You expected the culture of impunity to flourish and riot during Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s time. The example it set of murdering en masse the people it didn’t like, or didn’t like it, under the excuse of fighting insurgency was bound to be imitated by like-minded cutthroats. And you do not expect a government expressly dedicated to telling lies to care particularly for the disappearance of a tribe expressly dedicated, or at least sworn, to telling the truth.

But you do not expect that to continue during P-Noy’s time. You can make excuses for the new government the first or second time around: it had just come to power and cultures, including that of impunity, do not come to a halt with the mere promise, or threat, of change. But you may not excuse it for six cases of journalists murdered, four coming this year alone. That is inexcusable.

About time it did something about it. Two things it can, and should do.

The first is to fire the police chiefs in the area where the murders happen if they cannot catch the murderers – which means not just the triggermen but the masterminds – in record time. I agree with our editorial on this. I have been advocating the same thing myself for a long time. Catching criminals in this country has never really been a matter of wit, it has always been a matter of will. In most cases, motive, means and opportunity are clear and abundantly in evidence, the criminals relying mainly on their ability to keep the law enforcers deaf and blind to, well, wreak the crime with impunity. Firing the superiors for inaction, or for uselessness, should help to cure impairments in hearing and vision among those tasked to possess both with particular acuity.

The second is for the newly appointed anti-crime czar, Executive Secretary Jojo Ochoa, to make this his number one priority. Catching other criminals can wait, catching the murderers of the journalists cannot. And the one is probably related to the other like hand and glove. The masterminds of the murders, if not the hired guns, are the very drug lords, gambling lords, and lords of the manor in the form of the public officials who coddle them or have their own rackets in illegal mining and logging that the more crusading among the slain had been taking to task. You catch the one, you’ll catch the other. Or at least you’ll decimate their ranks substantially.

Getting a good batting average in solving the murders, if not a hundred percent success rate in them, is the only thing that will put the fear of God and government in future contemplators of the deed. That should be the key criterion for the success or failure of the new anticrime czar. The murder of journalists has gone on long enough. Forget that it embarrasses us before the world and makes our boast of having freedom of the press a hollow one. Mind only the sheer injustice of the deed, the snuffing out of lives dedicated to making this country more livable.

The third is not something for government to do, it is something for journalists to do, which is vital as well for dispelling the ease with which journalists particularly outside Metro Manila are murdered.

That is for the more self-respecting among them to rail against the organizations purporting to represent them not just for failing to move heaven and earth to seek redress for fallen comrades but for succeeding in falling into the quagmire of shady doings themselves. The latter lifts the aura of respectability from journalists, making it all the easier for their enemies to do them harm, suspicion can always be cast upon them by innuendo or pure invention about not really being the crusaders they professed to be.

Apart from the National Union of Journalists in the Philippines, which has been nothing short of heroic in documenting and fulminating against the murders – and not quite incidentally vigilant in monitoring the Ampatuan case – those organizations might as well not exist. They do more harm than good. Chief of them the National Press Club which has become a grave embarrassment to Philippine journalism, bastardizing its illustrious precedents, a thundering example of everything young journalists in particular ought to avoid. No respectable journalist now comes within a mile of the building in Intramuros that houses it and bears its name, the place being known only to have a deep, and completely negotiable, respect for heroes of the printed kind. The bullet just finishes off the job, this begins it, putting one foot of the journalist in the grave by dispelling his credibility, his indestructibleness, his invincibility.

It’s time we woke up to the madness, and stopped it.