Amnesty

Monday, 18 October 2010 05:58

Written by Neric Acosta

President Noynoy Aquino’s recent Presidential Proclamation 50 giving amnesty to 300 Magdalo officers and enlisted men, sends at the outset the signal that his administration wants a fresh start and desires a more united front of heretofore adversarial sectors and interests – even so-called enemies of the state. The Magdalo group and other soldiers, largely identified with the mutinous military men who took over the Oakwood building in Makati in 2003 and who sought to bring down the government of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, have languished in jail since then.

The most prominent among them is Antonio Trillanes IV, who campaigned from behind bars and was elected to the Senate in 2007, but to date has been barred from performing his functions as a legislator. Trillanes in many ways has been the face of the Magdalo: feisty, intransigent, unbending and alternatively courageous or reckless or impudent. In the May 2007 elections, against a backdrop of public impatience and disgust over widespread corruption and official abuse, Trillanes’ candidacy represented a fresh, if defiant, counterpoint to the Arroyo presidency.

Defiant or bold, in fact, to the point that Trillanes staged another mutinous act in November 2007 by storming into and laying siege to the Manila Peninsula in posh Makati (again) – demanding not only Arroyo’s resignation, but his right to sit in the Senate and attend sessions. The failed putsch drove Trillanes deeper into a hole with the weight of the state bearing on him for “treasonous acts.”

With President Aquino’s grant of amnesty, the Oakwood and Manila Peninsula incidents, as well as the Marines takeover in January 2006, are wiped clean of legal recourse, and the men who sought an overthrow of government start on a fresh slate vis-à-vis the Philippine state. It calls for an “amnestia” – from the old Latin meaning “forgetfulness” – for government to “forget” or at the least set aside the weight of the transgressions against the existing authority structures of the state.

Does this mean, then, that the ends of justice will not be fully served? That acts of treason or rebellion will be go largely unpunished or that those who commit them will not be held accountable? Will this kind of amnesty likely set in motion other like acts of defiance, rebellion or even more military adventurism in the future – and further undermine democracy?

In an interview I conducted for a morning radio show, Senator Greg Honasan, an original member of the Reform Armed Forces Movement (RAM) that staged several coup d’etat attempts against the Corazon Aquino government in 1986 to 1989 and was in turn granted amnesty during the term of President Fidel Ramos, offered a few answers to these questions. Honasan says that like him and his fellow RAM members, Trillanes and others “paid their dues and suffered enough,” and that amnesty, apart from a thrust for reconciliation, also meant that the grievances they sought to air, or the institutional reforms they demanded, “had basis and were also legitimate.”

This appears a sound enough premise to use. That given a “weak state” of institutional deficiencies and widespread corruption – or questions of legitimacy arising from electoral fraud and coercion – elements of the state apparatus like the military find considerable reason to confront or defy government authority. What makes this problematic, dangerous or destabilizing is when these forces violently – and with misplaced messianic ardor – seek the overthrow of constitutional authority and further threaten the tenets of civilian supremacy.

Only when a government with an unquestioned, legitimate democratic mandate, secure in the mantle of public support and trust, can reason that such amnesty will on balance serve the public good and help heal the wounds of society. And that those whom it grants amnestia to will not forget that power emanates from the people who willingly entrust it to their leaders and institutions.

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