Battleground - FROM A DISTANCE by Carmen N. Pedrosa

Some friends have expressed their dismay about the anti-Erap protest movement being sucked into the impeachment process. No good will come of it, they say. The trial being conducted in the Senate is a ploy by Erap and his minions. By participating in the impeachment proceedings we have accepted the battleground of their choosing. One implication of acquiescing to the impeachment process, they add, is that we would be bound to accept its judgment, no matter that it is heavily loaded in favor of Erap’s acquittal. In their view, Erap would not have opted for the Senate trial which he said "he wanted finished before Christmas" if he and his advisers did not think the battle was "winnable on the impeachment ground." Erap’s refusal to resign is symptomatic of the essential insincerity of the impeachment process. Resignation is not necessarily an acceptance of guilt, it only means an acceptance that true leadership puts public interest above any other. What seems obvious is that he is using the trial as an escape route rather than as a commitment to the Constitutional process.

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Remember that thanks to legal proceedings the Marcoses have remained scot-free up to this day more than a decade after the February 1986 revolution. In Erap’s impeachment case, the brilliance of the prosecutors or the strength of the evidence presented will not matter as much. Ultimately, it is the numbers game, the vote of the senators-judges. That is the source of the confidence of Erap and his minions. They have the numbers. And they also have the money or the kind to buy the numbers. With the unfolding legal drama, they say, some justification, not necessarily monetary, will be found for the numbers in favor of Erap. It will be said that the prosecution has not proved its case. Or as one constitutionalist has suggested, the case against Erap is not grave enough to impeach a president. But what is enough? There is anxiety that the trial would be so mired in legalese we will have lost track of the original cause of Erap’s impeachment.

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Already the legal tactics displayed on Day One of the trial indicate that Erap’s impeachment will depend less on the unraveling of the Truth than on such details as a failure of nerve of a prosecutor, the battering of a witness, or the legal astuteness of a defense lawyer. For no matter what is said in favor of the impeachment proceedings, details like these, admittedly part and parcel of a trial, are not necessarily about the Truth. Remember that what is legal is not necessarily what is true. And what we are fighting for here is to arrive at the truth because the survival of the nation rests on our ability as citizens to act on that truth. That is what is behind the intransigence of the citizens’ protests in the streets. This is the heart of the problem. If we are back in the streets these days, it is because we cannot trust our democratic institutions. They have been appropriated by politicians.

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It is my opinion that the people are right to continue the protests in the streets. They have to continue protesting in the streets to keep the grand picture in view. The grand picture is about how Filipinos finally mustered the will to assert their sovereignty in the face of the unacceptable corruption and ineptness of the Erap government. The consequence of the success to impeach Erap would be the necessary condition to achieve reform and new politics so ardently desired by the Filipino people. That is the battleground in which the sovereign people can do battle. The problem is that in asserting their sovereignty, short of a revolution, the people have to revert to such institutions, as Congress, and our judicial system, and in this case, the impeachment proceedings, which have been perverted through the years by bad politics and governance.

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For the people, the way out of the ambiguous circumstances of the political crisis is to respond with ambiguity. In this case, they have to continue their street protests at the same time that they are watching over the impeachment proceedings. It is ambiguity, responding to ambiguity. This also partly answers Senator Tatad’s anxiety whether a fair trial can be expected. If the people must contend with the very institutions that they are seeking to reform in order to impeach the President, they must continue to wield the power of their sovereignty at the same time. They have no choice but to continue their protests in the streets even as they allow the Senate trial to proceed. In this sense, Senator Aquilino Pimentel is wrong to ask the protests to stop while the senators-judges deliberate the impeachment case. Pimentel, as a freedom fighter during the Marcos days, should know better than to ask the protests to stop. I am afraid Pimentel’s word or any of the other senators’ word on their impartiality and fairness is not enough. Pimentel cannot escape the fact that he is now in the Establishment and necessarily for the status quo rather than as the reformer and revolutionary that he was. To stop the street protests would be a capitulation.

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From the foregoing, it would seem that the battle is being conducted on two fronts, in the Senate where Erap and his minions have an edge and in the streets, where the people will decide whether their sovereignty has prevailed on the issue of Erap’s impeachment. At the center of this political crisis is the unresolved question on who is sovereign in this country. While the highest elected official, the President pays lip service to that sovereignty, his conduct during his governance shows the contrary and it is precisely the reason why the sovereign people have been forced to bring about the impeachment proceedings. How the battle now being fought on two grounds will be joined and ultimately resolved remains to be seen.

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Carmen N. Pedrosa’s e-mail address: [email protected]