EDITORIAL - Amnesty for healing

If Malacañang doesn’t watch out, it could soon find President Arroyo increasingly accused of cheap political gimmickry. The President, in her brief trip to the Middle East last Sunday, told an Arab audience that she was mulling a general amnesty for all rebels and political prisoners, presumably including Muslim separatists, communist rebels and their sympathizers.

Back in Manila, the President said yesterday that she wanted the amnesty, embodied in a draft bill tentatively called the National Healing and Reconciliation Act of 2003, to cover even individuals and groups involved in "political clashes" with her administration.

Opponents of this administration who are in detention are well known. There is ousted President Joseph Estrada, who is being held without bail for plunder. Then there are the young military officers who staged a mutiny last July 27 in Makati. Was the President referring to these detainees? If there’s any national healing and reconciliation to be made by this administration, surely it has to be with the EDSA III and Oakwood mutiny crowds. Even the President, however, isn’t sure. She said she would leave it to Congress to decide whether the general amnesty should include Estrada, the mutineers, or even the Marcoses and their cronies.

The administration will also have to decide who among the convicts serving their sentences are classified as prisoners of conscience, since the Philippine government has maintained for many years that all political prisoners were freed after the collapse of the Marcos dictatorship.

Someone may also want to remind the President that amnesty can be granted only to convicts. That leaves out Estrada, the Oakwood mutineers and even the Marcoses.

Perhaps the President can use another word for her dream of forgi-ving, forgetting and reconciling. Does she want all communist rebels and members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front to join the social mainstream without fear of arrest and prosecution? Does she want the government to drop charges against the mutineers and even against Estrada, whose mass base the President appears to be courting assiduously?

Unless the President can tell the nation exactly what she has in mind, and what her idea of healing will cost the nation, her amnesty proposal will be seen as nothing but another cheap political gimmick, bereft of substance, that mushrooms each time elections approach.