A "corrupt" (Lazir's word) mindset exacts an invisible but more lethal toll. Values that make for a humane society are anesthetized. In time, officials mutate into predators. "Anyone who disagrees can be/will be expelled." (Lazir's words in quotation marks.)
"Corruption" (Lazir's word) backers prefer to slink in the shadows. This is understandable. Those who fund, cheer or assent by silence smear blood on their hands too. There's the smell of blood still,” Lady Macbeth wailed after murdering the king. All the perfume in Arabia will not clean this little hand. ("Sashes galore" as rewards? No wonder KOR has an unusually large number of witless and undeserving KGORs in Europe? Was it surprising Plückebaum tried to silence Lazir 02 Feb 2009 and "promptly" got KGOR/sash a few days later, same month? Remember the congratulatory e-mail of Taguiang, addressed to supreme commander upon Moreno's expulsion? - Lazir's words in parenthesis.)
On the day you remain silent about things that matter, you begin to die, Martin Luther King told us.
"Corruption" (Lazir's word) backers prefer to slink in the shadows. This is understandable. Those who fund, cheer or assent by silence smear blood on their hands too. There's the smell of blood still,” Lady Macbeth wailed after murdering the king. All the perfume in Arabia will not clean this little hand. ("Sashes galore" as rewards? No wonder KOR has an unusually large number of witless and undeserving KGORs in Europe? Was it surprising Plückebaum tried to silence Lazir 02 Feb 2009 and "promptly" got KGOR/sash a few days later, same month? Remember the congratulatory e-mail of Taguiang, addressed to supreme commander upon Moreno's expulsion? - Lazir's words in parenthesis.)
On the day you remain silent about things that matter, you begin to die, Martin Luther King told us.
SURREAL SILENCE
By Juan Mercado
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:15:00 04/01/2009
The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) hearings on vigilante executions in Davao City oozed with the surrealism of a Franz Kafka novel.
Mayor Rodrigo Duterte straddled 814 corpses of salvage victims and snapped, “Prove that death squads exist.” He would quit at day’s end “if an iota of evidence” emerged to show he had encouraged, let alone bankrolled, Latin-American style “esquadrones de la muerte” [death squads]. He took umbrage at charges that some victims were kids. “This is eating into my system.”
The mayor’s sound bytes were predictable. They didn’t explain away those 814 corpses in Davao’s graveyards. Nor did they address the issue of minors as victims. Of those “salvaged” in Davao, 16 percent were between 13 to 17 years of age, an earlier United Nations Commission on Human Rights study notes.
Duterte barreled into a bizarre monologue. He would kill the death squad’s chief, if he exists. Then, he would surrender to police and when in the clink throw away the key.
“Amazing,” murmured CHR Chair Leila De Lima.
Davao’s police have not solved a single vigilante killing in over a decade. That’s a stunning record of failure. It ranks Davao alongside Sudan, Zimbabwe and Chile under Augusto Pinochet.
Or is this a surreal record of complicity? If that be the case, this police force should be trashed forthwith, along with the sponsor(s).
Davao bolted, meanwhile, over 135 other Philippine cities into all major studies of human right infractions. That includes analysis from the US State Department, the UN Commission on Human Rights and Amnesty International.
Under Mayor Tomas Osmeña, Cebu City acquired an unsavory “second stringer” reputation to Davao. In copycat fashion, Osmeña dangled P20,000 to any policeman who “permanently disabled any criminal.”
“Philanthropy wasn’t one of Osmeña’s virtues,” Sun Star noted. “Where would these shekels come from?”
Since this bounty was offered, 183 people have been gunned down by motorcycle-riding vigilantes.
Bladder cancer has sidelined Osmeña for now. As in Davao, the Cebu City police haven’t solved any of the 183 murders.
In Brazil, Haiti and Colombia, officials wink as esquadrones de la muerte target squatters and street children. A pattern also exists in Davao’s unbridled killings, De Lima noted. “We confront one of the most audacious violations against the right to life in our times,” she told Davaoeños. “Nowhere in the world is the killing of minors acceptable. Tell us the truth... I noticed that you looked at one another.”
A death squad mindset exacts an invisible but more lethal toll. Values that make for a humane society are anesthetized. In time, officials mutate into predators.
We have a current reminder of this mutation. On a Manila street, 22 Presidential Anti-Organized-Crime Task Force policemen kidnapped and then murdered PR man Salvador Dacer and his driver. They covered up the crime.
Will a time come when only a devalued badge, worn from habit, distinguishes law enforcers from Abu Sayyaf kidnappers or Moro Islamic Liberation Front rogue commanders? For our grandchildren’s sake, we hope not.
We ignore at our peril the warning that one of Davao’s most distinguished visitors gave earlier. Those who trifle with life promote a culture of death, Pope John Paul II said. Judgment by the God of history will be severe, he stressed in “Evangelium Vitae.”
The right to life is not only spelled out in the Penal Code and the Constitution. It is also written into the human heart itself. Thus, Thailand’s revered monarch Bhumibol Adulyadej, a Buddhist, assailed over 1,200 executions by death squads unleashed by now ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Here, some businessmen whisper to the press on a “not-for-attribution” basis that they back (with funds) this “murder with a wink” policy.
“Business improved with stability,” Davao businessmen earlier told Reuters-Dow Jones. But no one spoke up at the CHR hearing.
There is a surreal “human propensity to prop up teetering positions of privilege with the pain of vulnerable people,” warned Harvard University’s Harvey Cox .
Thus, some in Davao, Cebu and elsewhere share a willingness to lay down life. The lives of others, of course, not their own. Or their children’s.
The right of ex-convicts or street kids end, they argue sub rosa, where their pocket books begin. Greater love than this no one has than to lay down your neighbor’s life for your bank account.
Vigilante backers prefer to slink in the shadows. This is understandable. Those who fund, cheer or assent by silence smear blood on their hands too. “There’s the smell of blood still,” Lady Macbeth wailed after murdering the king. “All the perfume in Arabia will not clean this little hand.”
Vigilantes corrode trust in institutions. Coddling killers, even for a cause, creates Frankenstein monsters that not even mayors can control.
China’s “Hard Strike” drive against corruption resulted in arbitrary sentences. Most of the 4,367 executed were poor, innocent people.
In the paranoid communist pogrom here, between 1985 and 1990, innocent people were slaughtered. Former rebel leader Robert Francis Garcia documents this in his book, “To Suffer Thy Comrades: How the Revolution Decimated Its Own.”
Under De Lima, the once-spineless CHR is ripping the omerta-like silence that shrouds vigilante killings for too long. This is welcome public service.
“On the day you remain silent about things that matter, you begin to die,” Martin Luther King told us.
By Juan Mercado
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 22:15:00 04/01/2009
The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) hearings on vigilante executions in Davao City oozed with the surrealism of a Franz Kafka novel.
Mayor Rodrigo Duterte straddled 814 corpses of salvage victims and snapped, “Prove that death squads exist.” He would quit at day’s end “if an iota of evidence” emerged to show he had encouraged, let alone bankrolled, Latin-American style “esquadrones de la muerte” [death squads]. He took umbrage at charges that some victims were kids. “This is eating into my system.”
The mayor’s sound bytes were predictable. They didn’t explain away those 814 corpses in Davao’s graveyards. Nor did they address the issue of minors as victims. Of those “salvaged” in Davao, 16 percent were between 13 to 17 years of age, an earlier United Nations Commission on Human Rights study notes.
Duterte barreled into a bizarre monologue. He would kill the death squad’s chief, if he exists. Then, he would surrender to police and when in the clink throw away the key.
“Amazing,” murmured CHR Chair Leila De Lima.
Davao’s police have not solved a single vigilante killing in over a decade. That’s a stunning record of failure. It ranks Davao alongside Sudan, Zimbabwe and Chile under Augusto Pinochet.
Or is this a surreal record of complicity? If that be the case, this police force should be trashed forthwith, along with the sponsor(s).
Davao bolted, meanwhile, over 135 other Philippine cities into all major studies of human right infractions. That includes analysis from the US State Department, the UN Commission on Human Rights and Amnesty International.
Under Mayor Tomas Osmeña, Cebu City acquired an unsavory “second stringer” reputation to Davao. In copycat fashion, Osmeña dangled P20,000 to any policeman who “permanently disabled any criminal.”
“Philanthropy wasn’t one of Osmeña’s virtues,” Sun Star noted. “Where would these shekels come from?”
Since this bounty was offered, 183 people have been gunned down by motorcycle-riding vigilantes.
Bladder cancer has sidelined Osmeña for now. As in Davao, the Cebu City police haven’t solved any of the 183 murders.
In Brazil, Haiti and Colombia, officials wink as esquadrones de la muerte target squatters and street children. A pattern also exists in Davao’s unbridled killings, De Lima noted. “We confront one of the most audacious violations against the right to life in our times,” she told Davaoeños. “Nowhere in the world is the killing of minors acceptable. Tell us the truth... I noticed that you looked at one another.”
A death squad mindset exacts an invisible but more lethal toll. Values that make for a humane society are anesthetized. In time, officials mutate into predators.
We have a current reminder of this mutation. On a Manila street, 22 Presidential Anti-Organized-Crime Task Force policemen kidnapped and then murdered PR man Salvador Dacer and his driver. They covered up the crime.
Will a time come when only a devalued badge, worn from habit, distinguishes law enforcers from Abu Sayyaf kidnappers or Moro Islamic Liberation Front rogue commanders? For our grandchildren’s sake, we hope not.
We ignore at our peril the warning that one of Davao’s most distinguished visitors gave earlier. Those who trifle with life promote a culture of death, Pope John Paul II said. Judgment by the God of history will be severe, he stressed in “Evangelium Vitae.”
The right to life is not only spelled out in the Penal Code and the Constitution. It is also written into the human heart itself. Thus, Thailand’s revered monarch Bhumibol Adulyadej, a Buddhist, assailed over 1,200 executions by death squads unleashed by now ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Here, some businessmen whisper to the press on a “not-for-attribution” basis that they back (with funds) this “murder with a wink” policy.
“Business improved with stability,” Davao businessmen earlier told Reuters-Dow Jones. But no one spoke up at the CHR hearing.
There is a surreal “human propensity to prop up teetering positions of privilege with the pain of vulnerable people,” warned Harvard University’s Harvey Cox .
Thus, some in Davao, Cebu and elsewhere share a willingness to lay down life. The lives of others, of course, not their own. Or their children’s.
The right of ex-convicts or street kids end, they argue sub rosa, where their pocket books begin. Greater love than this no one has than to lay down your neighbor’s life for your bank account.
Vigilante backers prefer to slink in the shadows. This is understandable. Those who fund, cheer or assent by silence smear blood on their hands too. “There’s the smell of blood still,” Lady Macbeth wailed after murdering the king. “All the perfume in Arabia will not clean this little hand.”
Vigilantes corrode trust in institutions. Coddling killers, even for a cause, creates Frankenstein monsters that not even mayors can control.
China’s “Hard Strike” drive against corruption resulted in arbitrary sentences. Most of the 4,367 executed were poor, innocent people.
In the paranoid communist pogrom here, between 1985 and 1990, innocent people were slaughtered. Former rebel leader Robert Francis Garcia documents this in his book, “To Suffer Thy Comrades: How the Revolution Decimated Its Own.”
Under De Lima, the once-spineless CHR is ripping the omerta-like silence that shrouds vigilante killings for too long. This is welcome public service.
“On the day you remain silent about things that matter, you begin to die,” Martin Luther King told us.
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