Of Dissidents, Déjà vu and the DOJ

There was a forum on the ‘Cuban Five’ held a few days ago at UP Manila sponsored by Amistad, the Philippine-Cuban Friendship society. After rushing around QC the entire morning and afternoon, we figured that we could make it to the activity and went to attend.

I don’t know why, but entering the CAS Building in UP Manila for the first time suddenly filled me with saccharine distaste and dread. Maybe because of its startling nearness to the Department of Justice (both in terms of proximity, architectural structure and design motifs), which certain odious, ethically-unstable and morally-bankrupt mammals are known to inhabit on weekdays, office hours mostly (yuch!).

Maybe all had to do with the architectural history of the Padre Faura compound, where UP Manila, the PGH and the DOJ all are. But it was an eerie perception nonetheless: stepping into the cramped CAS Building and feeling as if I had been transported into the bowels of the Justice Secretary’s fiefdom just a stone’s throw or a bakod away. A few months back, after a picket in front of the DOJ to protest the political harassment against Ka Bel, I spent a few minutes inside the DOJ building to look for an acquaintance, secretly hoping that I wouldn’t come across my favorite character, a certain antiquated loony, there.

Anyway, we managed to make it in time for the forum, catching the first few minutes of a documentary on the five Cuban nationals arrested in Florida in 1998 and convicted by the US federal court in Miami on more than 20 counts, facing life sentences. For monitoring the movements of exiled groups suspected of carrying out US-sponsored terrorist activities which have killed around three thousand Cubans, the Cuban Five were subjected to a year and a half in solitary confinement while the trial was ongoing and are now jailed in total isolation from the world. But in Cuba and in other countries, thousands of people are clamoring for their release and hailing the five men as heroes for their motherland.

The appalling judicial spectacles in the case of the Cuban Five in the US were all too familiar, hit too close to home: after an Appeals Court in Georgia unanimously overturned the Miami court’s ruling convicting the Five, its plenary inexplicably and suddenly issued a reconsideration of its finding August last year. This indefinitely extends the Five’s unjust detention—definitely an unwelcome development since they have already spent around eight years alone in jail to date.

Suddenly, the US court’s flipflop painfully reminded me of Ka Crispin Beltran’s legal quest for liberty under the Arroyo dictatorship, the prospects of gaining a just and prompt resolution seem to be equivalent to winning the Sweepstakes jackpot thrice in a row (in short: asa ka pa!).

Take this: a day after the declaration of a ‘State of Emergency’, Ka Bel is accosted by fully-armed police and ‘invited for questioning’ to the Camp Crame. There, he is arrested and detained using an antiquated and void 21-year old warrant (normally you’d think that such a document would have more historical than utilitarian value). Absolutely absurd! His lawyers prepare to haul him out of jail. Then, in the middle of the night, Ka Bel is brought to a QC court where charges of sedition are to be filed against him. His lawyers patiently point out that Ka Bel as a congressman has immunity from arrest in such cases, so please quit the pathetic charade and set him free. The police don’t, and keep him in solitary detention instead. Then, Ka Bel is ‘invited for a medical check-up at the PNP Hospital’ but is brought to the CIDG instead where this time and against his will, (tadaa!!!) DOJ prosecutors hold another “inquest” where rebellion charges concocted out of thin air are used to further justify his arrest and detention. Given a chance, maybe the DOJ would have also accused Ka Bel of killing Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio.

Mga loko talaga. Kung ako lang ang tatanungin, hindi na dapat sineryoso yang DOJ at ang PNP. If it were only that easy to just snub their existence and simply consign them to the dumping grounds and garbage impactors of history for being such freaks! But the sad reality is that the state is in a position to use coercive force. It’s not a simple case of deciding to ‘make patol’ or not (as GMA would say in her colegiala Tagalog), or saying ‘deeeal’ or ‘no deeeeeal!’ (complete with Kris Aquino’s hand gestures) and walking out of the studio, chin held up high. Ka Bel’s in jail for eight months and counting, his captors from the PNP, DOJ and the Palace aren’t.

If it were only that easy to say that Ka Bel’s illegal arrest and arbitrary detention will eventually be vindicated by the courts. The legal battle for Ka Bel’s freedom, unfortunately, only showcases how dysfunctional the Philippine justice system can get under the Arroyo (or any other anti-people) administration. Some notes during the past eight months of Ka Bel’s continuing ordeal: The first judge junks the rebellion charge against the Batasan 5 and allows Ka Bel’s much-needed transfer to a hospital, and is suspiciously asked by the DOJ to inhibit herself from the case. The case is raffled off to a second judge who, in a three-sentence order and in undue haste, affirms that there is probable cause in Ka Bel’s case and issues the equivalent of a retroactive warrant of arrest—then suddenly inhibits from the case when Ka Bel’s lawyers indignantly protest the ruling. The third judge reverses first judge’s decision and consolidates Ka Bel’s case with that of the Batasan 6. The fourth judge only adds another rubber stamp to Ka Bel’s detention by denying the Motion for Reconsideration on second judge’s decision on probable cause.

Ka Bel’s lawyers are now planning to bring the case up to the Supreme Court. Ka Bel also recently filed a case at the Ombudsman against his captors, but I’m not getting my hopes high in the aftermath of the Ombudswoman’s lutong macao ruling on the controversial Mega-Pacific deal.

All throughout these developments, the DOJ and its prosecutors have done absolutely nothing to ensure the dispensation of due process, or even humanitarian consideration. It has adjudged Ka Bel guilty even in the presence of incontrovertible evidence proving otherwise. It has filed charge after charge, no matter how fabricated, just to ensure that Ka Bel stays in jail. It has called for a “speedy trial”, at a time when the Batasan 6 have appealed to suspend the hearings, as the Supreme Court said. It has even coldly opposed Ka Bel’s appeal to be transferred to a REAL hospital (the PNP Hospital being nothing but a glorified first aid kit) for urgent medical treatment.

The details of their detention and their legal struggles for liberty are sordid and appalling enough, but this has not, in any way, broken the morale or the fighting spirits of political prisoners such as the Cuban Five and of Ka Bel. They may be on different sides of the globe, but they share the same dream that another world is possible: a world where imperialist domination shall cease to be, where resources and services may be more equitably distributed among the people and among countries, where people will be able to live out their full potential as human beings and not be tied down to problems as basic as hunger and survival. They have a clear perspective of what they are struggling for, and will not easily bow to the repressive mechanisms of the colluding powers-that-be.

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Speaking of Cuba, Granma International recently published a short article by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (yes, of the One Hundred Years of Solitude fame) entitled The Fidel Castro Whom I Know. By all means, log on now to Granma’s site and do read the work, it’s an extraordinary, awe-inspiring and intimate profile of the Fidel Castro whom you and I on this side of the impoverished world do not know.

Some excerpts:

“HIS devotion to the word. His power of seduction. He goes to seek out problems where they are. The impetus of inspiration is very much part of his style. Books reflect the breadth of his tastes very well. He stopped smoking to have the moral authority to combat tobacco addiction. He likes to prepare food recipes with a kind of scientific fervor. He keeps himself in excellent physical condition with various hours of gymnastics daily and frequent swimming. Invincible patience. Ironclad discipline. The force of his imagination stretches him to the unforeseen. As important as learning to work is to learn how to rest…”

“…He has the habit of firing rapid questions….[that] he makes in instantaneous bursts until discovering the whys and wherefores of the whys and wherefores of the final whys and wherefores. When a visitor from Latin America gave him a hasty figure on the rice consumption of his compatriots, he made his mental calculations and said: “How odd, each person eats four pounds of rice per day.” His masterly tactic is to ask about things that he knows, to confirm his information. And in certain cases to measure the caliber of his interlocutor, and deal with him/her accordingly…”

“…When he talks with people in the street, his conversation regains the expressiveness and crude frankness of genuine affection. They call him: Fidel. They surround him without risks, they address him informally, they argue with him, they contradict him, they claim him, with a channel of immediate transmission from which the truth gushes forth. It is then that one discovers the unusual human being that the reflection of his own image does not let us see. This is the Fidel Castro that I believe I know. A man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, with an old-fashioned formal education of cautious words and subdued tones and incapable of conceiving any idea that is not colossal…

“…He dreams that his scientists will find the final cure for cancer and has created a foreign policy of world reach in an island that is 84 times smaller than that of his principal enemy. He has the conviction that the greatest achievement of human beings is the solid training of their conscience and that moral incentives, more than material ones, are capable of changing the world and driving history.”