I’ve started writing a column for a newspaper so I suppose I should post the first one here.
“Get out of the Philippines,” was the suggestion I received from a friend of mine recently. Surprisingly, she was not basing her proposal on the usual economic considerations but was instead, referring to the rampant killings of activists, journalists, and, well, lawyers.
Of course, I did not take her concerns about my personal welfare seriously. After all, even in the most trigger-happy environment, who would bother gunning down a law professor? Apart from disgruntled students, that is.
What I did take seriously, however, was the solution she put forward: Leave the Philippines. She did not suggest seeking succor from the courts or protection from the police; she proposed flight
Of course, the rather extreme notion of fleeing one’s native land only becomes reasonable in the light of one fundamental fact – nobody really trusts the courts, much less the police. Instead, the vast majority have become convinced, despite the bold and extremely laudable initiatives of our Chief Justice, that neither the courts, the police, nor the entire criminal justice system will be able to protect us from becoming victims of crime, whether killings carried out by professional gunmen (or disgruntled students), robberies aboard FX taxis, or the theft of our cellular phones.
This lack of trust in state mechanisms for law enforcement has its roots in the general perception that, in a seemingly overwhelming number of crimes, the agents of the law have failed to bring the perpetrators to justice. In the more spectacular cases involving the murder of activists, the police have rarely, if ever, made any plausible arrests, and the courts have not made any convictions. In the more mundane instances involving cell phone theft, the ordinary citizen, recognizing the futility of filing a police report, will simply write off the loss.
All these are indicative of what is known as a “culture of impunity.”
Impunity, simply put, is freedom from the consequences of one’s acts. In the case of criminal acts, these consequences should ideally involve punishment. A culture of impunity, therefore, arises when criminal acts have gone repeatedly unpunished to the point where this failure has become the norm rather than the exception.
In our case, most of us have gone through outrage at and disappointment with the government, to cold acceptance of its inability to protect us. And like my friend, we have learned to cope with this institutional failure.
The problem with merely coping, though, is that it concedes that government’s failure is inevitable and, more crucially, unchangeable. This is a premise that we cannot afford to accept if we still intend to continue living in the Philippines and generally trying to make things work. We must retreat from acceptance, and once again try to find our outrage, reclaim our collective expectations, and force government to live up to them.
Otherwise, we might as well take my friend’s advice, and join the mad rush to the airport.
