Rep. Teodoro L.

Locsin Jr’s take on Martial Law in Maguindanao

Dec. 10, 2009

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Senate President,

This is how I sum up the government’s case.

It is not without irony that I stand here defending martial law. But I do
defend it. Nowhere and at no other time has it been better justified nor
based more sufficiently on incontrovertible facts.
Facts that call, indeed, cry out for the most extreme exercise of the police
power, which is nothing less than martial law.

Facts, not legal quibbles. Facts, not semantic distinctions of debatable

validity. Look at the bodies, look at the arms stockpiles.

Is rebellion as defined by the Penal Code a necessary condition for the

validity of a proclamation of martial law? Then where is the definition of
invasion in the Penal Code for the validity of martial law in that case?
Since the repeal of the Anti-Subversion Act, ideology is not a component
of rebellion.

I submit that rebellion here is not an exclusive reference to a particular

provision of a particular law; but to a wide yet unmistakable, general but
not indiscriminate allusion to a state of affairs that has deteriorated
beyond lawless violence, beyond a state of emergency, to an obstinate
refusal to discharge properly the functions of civil government in the
area, by, of all people, the duly constituted but now obstructive
authorities therein.

It may be easier to repeat what Justice Potter Stewart said about

pornography than to fix once and for all the meaning of the words
rebellion and invasion, in a swiftly changing world, where both words
can take on myriad realities. He said he couldn’t exactly define
pornography but “I know it when I see it.”

We are seeing Maguindanao and what we see, unless we are morally

blind, cries out for martial law—at least for now.
Here was an obstinate refusal to obey the law and the lawful commands
of the national government, so as to constitute, on the part of the once
duly constituted authorities, an illegal usurpation of the government
offices they once legally held; exercising them now, not for the purposes
of law, nor with the aim of doing justice, but to use the powers and
functions of that same government to frustrate the law, to perpetuate
injustice, to protect the perpetrators of the most horrible crime in
Philippine history, and to preserve the political influence that inspired the
perpetrators with the idea that they could commit such a crime with total
impunity.

This state of affairs calls for nothing less than martial law; however you
quibble with words. It calls for martial law because just calling out the
armed forces was tried and proved wanting to quell lawless violence and
restore civil government. The proclamation of martial law, which was
addressed as much at the armed forces as at Maguindanao, send the signal
to all and sundry: henceforth soldiers are no longer to obey nor to fear the
politicians they were once made to serve and pander to,
in derogation of their professional integrity, in the name of a misguided
strategy of mutual deterrence in the ongoing secessionist conflict.

No, now the soldiers are beholden only to the law and the lawful
institutions like the Executive and Congress in Joint Session Assembled.
Martial Law sends the needed signal to our soldiers and police that now
they need no longer be respecters of special persons but only of the
Constitution, the Bill of Rights, of the civil and criminal laws, of the State
and not the temporary occupants of its public offices.

Thus are soldiers and police emboldened to do their proper duty, to use
their lawful force to the utmost lawful extent, as to achieve the specific
aim of the proclamation; which, in this case, is to arrest with proper
warrants anyone and everyone remotely connected to the massacre. There
is no constitutional immunity from arrest, only from arrest without
warrant and detention without charge.

And then proceed, as I hope they are doing, to destroy the political
infrastructure of one warlord family—though I hope not to favor the other
one—and permanently dismantle their political influence in the province
—though I hope not to establish the political influence of the other
warlord clan. But that is only my hope. It is martial law that shocked and
awed the elements of the Ampatuan army to surrender without a fight.

This is the smallest atonement that the national government and the
Ampatuans can make for the worst crime in Philippine history—the
national government for arming them and the Ampatuans for using those
arms so hideously.

It is asked: If there is martial law to round up the Ampatuans, why not

extend the martial law to contain the MILF and even go after the drug
trade? Willoughby suggests that a proclamation of martial law should
have a specific aim and should not wander from that aim, that that aim
being achieved, the mission should be declared accomplished, and martial
law lifted in the area. Anyway, it can be re-imposed again, and again, and
again, and again—as it can be reviewed by the Congress in Joint Session
as frequently.

To this day, martial law in Maguindanao has not, despite the martial
energy it has imparted to the military and police, occasioned a single
abuse. True, soldiers kicked down the door to Governor Ampatuan’s
hospital room.

That is not an offense in law. Lese majeste is not a crime in a democracy.

That is not even an offense against the door, because a door has no legal
standing to complain of being kicked even before the Supreme Court.
Remember, soldiers kicked the door and not the governor.
And it was a hospital door. The hospital can seek damages, if it dares,
after harboring a fugitive.

Our soldiers have not violated a single fundamental right, not even of the
perpetrators of this hideous crime. Far from it, our soldiers have secured
the fundamental rights of the ordinary people of Maguindanao from the
depredations of the Ampatuan family and its goons, whether in their
lingering terror of this family they admit it or not. This is known as the
Stockholm Syndrome.

So here, by whatever name you choose to call it, is a situation comprising

an obstinate, querulous, snarling, vicious, refusal to obey the laws and the
lawful orders of the government, on the part of a now renegade
government and escalating from stubborn resistance to threatening
posture, so as to constitute in the mind of the Executive a threat so certain
that its actuality could only be established beyond cavil by the senseless
sacrifice of soldiers to prove the threat real and not just looming or
imminent.

This state of affairs includes what the Penal Code calls sedition and a host
of other felonies and offenses; but which, regardless of which definition
you prefer, constitutes for any reasonable person a state of conflict.
What Willoughby said, referring to martial law enforcers, ironically
applies not to our soldiers but to their targets, the Ampatuans and their
henchmen. “No man in this country is so high that he is above the law” as
the Ampatuans believed. “No officer of the law may set that law at
defiance with impunity.”

The Ampatuans were the first to impose martial law in Maguindanao

without any basis but their undying thirst for power, which could only be
slaked by the blood of anyone they disliked.

To the martial law of the Ampatuans, the only adequate response was
martial law by the government, which is the exercise of the inherent
police power to secure the public safety through the armed forces.

True, the courts were functioning when martial law was proclaimed,
And true all government offices were open for business—but it was only
for monkey business, for the benefit only of the Ampatuans, and against
the lawful requirements of the State.

The civil registrar refused to issue death certificates for the victims of the
Maguindanao Massacre, I guess because he could not put mass suicide as
the cause of death. It has been suggested in this House that, while the
Maguindanao Massacre allegedly happened, it was not the perpetrators
who did it. I guess it was suicide.

In military doctrine, Mr. Senate President and former Defense Minister

Enrile, capability amounts to intent. That this fully documented capability
and inclination to mount armed mayhem came from the legally
constituted provincial government of Maguindanao only compounded the
gravity of the situation and brought it within the ambit of the historical
precedents that have so wisely informed the jurisprudence of martial law
as I vividly recall from 1972. It is, as Secretary Puno aptly compared, as
though regular battalions of the AFP had gone renegade.
Was the danger so substantial as to warrant martial law?
How many really are the loyalists of the Ampatuans? A thousand, two,
three?

I would answer, 50 is already a lot because from newspaper accounts

over the years, encounters between AFP units and MILF forces of that
size but superior weaponry usually result in—what?—25 percent
casualties among our troops?

Is it proposed that we should have sacrificed our soldiers, by leaving

them as sitting ducks, until the Ampatuans drew first blood, just to banish
baseless not to mention insincere fears that this martial law is legally
flawed?
I have heard it said that the biggest danger of this martial law is that, if it
succeeds, will have a demonstration effect convincing the general public
that perhaps the Army, like the French with regard to sex, just do it better
when it comes to securing the public safety.
Well, what of it?

Is it proposed that we let the public suffer, that we leave a community

terrorized and paralyzed by monsters, just so we can stop the Army from
proving that they can do some things better?
Why this instinctive suspicion and contempt of our soldiers? These are
not soldiers of Marcos’s martial law, some of whom, let us not forget
where critical to the toppling of the dictatorship.

Far from violating any fundamental rights, our soldiers are securing those
rights for everyone in Maguindanao against the depredations of this
warlord clan. Why this instinctive mistrust of the armed forces without
whose sacrifices our country would be smaller by one third?

And for their sacrifices, what is the soldier’s pay? Piddling. What are the
soldiers’ rations? A can of sardines and a small reused plastic bag of old
rice. And what is their recompense? Ingratitude and suspicion. I say leave
this martial law to complete its mission. It shouldn’t take long.

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