The Duterte trial as a cleansing ritual
The forthcoming trial of former president Rodrigo Duterte in the International Criminal Court (ICC) will become a long-running soap opera for our country. Every Filipino will be glued to livestreamed court hearings, and the daily trial will be closely analyzed and hotly debated in every business meeting, family gathering, drinking session, and street corner “maritesan.” This reason alone should compel our government to rejoin the ICC because we will have more than 100 million Filipinos who will become self-styled “experts” on the ICC.
Duterte’s lawyer has given advance notice of his plan to try to have the case dismissed outright and prevent the case from reaching the stage where our people will hear the testimonies of witnesses. With the kind of evidence that the ICC prosecutor has divulged, however, there is little doubt that the case will go to a full trial, and our nation will hear the evidence against Duterte. The ensuing trial is expected to be a blockbuster real-life show that will surpass the viewership of any drama series, with no commercial breaks to boot. Because of the seven-hour time difference between the Netherlands and the Philippines, many of our countrymen will endure sleepless nights.
The trial will be closely followed by both supporters and critics of the former president. Unlike in the long-running debate between pro- and anti-Duterte groups in the public sphere, where each group brought its own set of facts, Filipinos will be confronted with the same set of facts that will be presented during the ICC trial. Pro and anti-groups will have to base their opinion on the facts offered in the trial and not on hypothetical or unverified events.
With 30,000 casualties of the drug war, the number of Filipinos who were directly affected by the killings is extensive. There are 30,000 widowed spouses; 60,000 fathers and mothers who lost an offspring; and a minimum of 60,000 children who lost a parent (on the assumption of a family with two children). That’s a total of 150,000 Filipinos who will be widely interested in the search for justice through the ICC trial. This is not to mention siblings, grandparents, and extended family members who lost their loved ones.
For sure, among the witnesses who will be presented by the prosecution are confessed Davao Death Squad hit men, namely Edgar Matobato and Arturo Lascañas. Their identities are clear from the enumeration of the Davao City killings described in the ICC order approving the issuance of an arrest warrant against Duterte. The narration of killings and other shocking crimes admitted to have been committed by Matobato and Lascañas upon orders from Duterte have been made available to the public by various media sources in the recent past. Reading their accounts, one has to be subhuman not to be revolted by the blood, gore, and pure evil that attended the planning and execution of those crimes.
We will also learn how our national police force was turned into one big criminal organization that went on a murdering spree for promotion, rewards, fear of demotion, or dread of losing their jobs. Hopefully, there will also be witnesses who will provide details that will unmask the motorcycle-riding assassins as direct hires of the police organization.
I will risk foretelling that when our people hear and learn about the details of how horrible the masterminds were when they created a devious plan to systematically murder ordinary people who were merely suspected of petty crimes, the throng of their blind supporters will thin out substantially. It will be no different from how Nazi supporters recoiled in shame when details of the horrific killings came out from concentration camps in Germany and other places in Europe.
The forthcoming trial of Duterte and his fellow masterminds will be a crucial occasion for our country to mend our people’s heavily damaged sense of right and wrong. It is a chance for our nation to repair our broken morality. It’s an opportunity for our country to climb back up from our precipitous fall to barbarism when it became acceptable to resort to the brazen murder of our countrymen who had gone (or were suspected to have gone) astray. The Duterte trial will give our country a big mirror to hold onto itself, making us see the kind of people that we have become after we applauded or stood silently by as tens of thousands of our fellow Filipinos were mass murdered on the pretext that their deaths were necessary to secure our safety.
The Duterte trial will be a cleansing ritual that will purge our collective guilt and purify our communal memory of one of the bloodiest episodes in our history when “peace” was bequeathed to us under the piercing wails of widows, mothers, and orphans.
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