A very jittery world / Abalos replies

It’s a jittery world we live in. As the May 10 presidential elections approach, the protagonists move and maneuver as though they were at armed war with each other, take no prisoners, and not simply contesting the popular vote. Already, former president Joseph Estrada has threatened civil war if opposition presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. should be disqualified by the Supreme Court. Earlier, Raul Roco warned his supporters would march in protest to Malacañang if he would be cheated.

Gen. (ret.) Fortunato Abat, in a brass-knuckled full page and signed by about 26 retired generals and flag officers, sought the immediate dismantling of the present government and the setting up "now" of a transition regime. The GMA administration has thrown the book at Pastor (Boy) Saycon and his Kawal group of six army majors for "defacing the flag" and "inciting to sedition". Economist Ding Lichauco calls on AFP chief of staff Gen. Narciso Abaya to topple GMA and set up a military junta. Mama mia.

In all this, the poor peso huddles and cowers in a corner. There is the possibility Lucio Tan will prove himself a prophet. The peso could swoon to 100 per US dollar by the end of the year. And as the peso withers, thousands more – if not tens of thousands – of Filipinos will flee in search of jobs and sanctuary abroad. As though in obligatto, stocks slumped Monday, the biggest fall in more than two years. Bejesus, what really is happening?

It seems May 10, election day, is to be feared like 9/11/01 when the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC crumpled like a busted accordion under the international terrorist attack. There is no longer rhyme or reason in an electoral campaign constitutionally primed to uplift democracy and raise the nation to higher ground. Everybody, it seems, is going nuts. You hear nervous giggles one second. You hear the roar of a prehistoric monster the next.

All talk or advocacy about national unity has evaporated. How indeed unite a nation where everybody, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, is at war with everybody?

But it’s the threat of civil war posed by Erap Estrada that worries me the most. There is no doubt that by now, Estrada and his cohorts, and that possibly includes the FPJ assault armada, are out to raze the republic if FPJ should be disqualified by the Supreme Court. I understand the evidence for and against FPJ in the raging citizenship (natural-born) issue could go either way. I have talked to some reputable lawyers, including Jose Sison, legal columnist of The Philippine STAR. They tell me the evidence is rather forceful that FPJ, being the illegitimate son of controversial parentage, his mother an American citizen, has absolutely no call to being a "natural born’ Filipino citizen.

That really gives me the shivers.

If the evidence against FPJ should prove strong and overriding, I cannot imagine the Supreme Court buckling to the civil war threat of Erap Estrada. Nor will the government of GMA. Nor will the military establishment sworn to protect the Constitution, the republic. Nor will the bulk of civil society. And if they do not buckle, we shall be a nation under siege, heir to history’s spiral of violent regime change and lust for blood.

I cannot however see the forces of Estrada, FPJ, and the recycled political gorillas of the Marcos dictatorship winning. They represent a past that has had its day. It is a past of massive political burglary and chicanery of the direst sort, a past vomited out by two EDSAs, a past that slunk into a sinkhole, slurped by demons that also had their day.

The future may be murky. But it’s still a future with silver linings, with doors and windows opening up to reform, renovation and rehabilitation. There could be a shedding of blood. But history has always had to pay with blood for the challenging hoops of fire along the way that enabled humanity to leap through for a better day.

* * *

I have here a long, two-page letter sent by Comelec chairman Benjamin Abalos in reply to a past column I wrote titled "This man should fry." It has always been the practice of this columnist to accommodate replies of this sort in the name of journalistic fairness.

But since I cannot publish the letter in full for space reasons, let me just comment on what I consider the essential or substantive parts of his billet-doux.

Initially, the Comelec chairman denies my assertion that he is the most hated and reviled public official in the wake of the Supreme Court decision invalidating the use of computers and automated machines for the May 10 elections. If Abalos is not reviled, I do not know who is. Read that Supreme Court decision again. It is a "j’accuse" pure and simple, Abalos roasting like a pig in the High Court’s ire, vented on him and him alone. If it had been a criminal case for murder and Abalos the accused, it was virtually a High Court sentencing him to death in words graphic enough to curl the hair of Ivan the Terrible.

Chairman Abalos resents the comparison to Ivan the Terrible. This is cute. He says Ivan was "responsible for administrative reforms and territorial expansion in 16th century Russia". He must have been referring to Ivan III, Ivan the Great, who conquered the Great Russian Lands (1462-1505), when he was the grand prince of Moscow. I was referring to another Ivan (Ivan Vasilyevich, 1530-1584), yes, Ivan the Terrible. If you read history, Mr. Abalos, read it well.

This Ivan, also the Grand Prince of Moscow, murdered 3000 people in cold blood in one fell swoop. He did this through his oprichnina, the forerunner of Adolph Hitler’s KGB, as stark brutal and merciless as could be imagined. Under Ivan the Terrible, the oprichnina bathed the country in gore. As a result, many historians were led to the belief that Ivan the Terrible was also Ivan the Insane.

Read this line about Ivan the Terrible, sir: "Many of his acts shocked his contemporaries, particularly the brutality of his public executions, his methods of disposing of those churchmen who displeased him were extremely cruel, as was his decimination of the city of Novgorod the Great." You may not have murdered people, Mr. Chairman. But a great mass of civil society believe you are hacking the limbs of what is left of our democracy. And that is akin to murder.

You accuse me of "glaring lapses in logical thinking." You of all people.

What lapses? That I said the Supreme Court pointed to you as "having struck a deal with Metro Pacific." Of course, the Court did not explicitly say that. But that was the point – however subliminal – the Supreme Court rammed through. I did not, never accused Comelec officials of "pocketing millions in conspiratorial loot". I wrote that with regard to corporate graft in America, the evil misdeeds of Enron, Andersen and Imclone. If you feel alluded to, Mr. Chairman, then you must have a guilty conscience.

You always refer to Justice Dante Tinga, who wrote the dissenting opinion. Do you know, Mr. Chairman, that Tinga’s opinion was the prevailing opinion until dissenters in his division ganged up on him for what they felt was his fallacious misreprentation of the case. Tinga, sir, had to retreat all the way to Caporetto under the lethal criticism and exceptions of his Supreme Court colleagues. Now who has the lapse in logic, sir?

And so in the ultimate analysis, you say the Comelec "is filing a motion for reconsideration. It is our right. And for this we shall not be acused of failing to exhaust remedies. Through this motion, we hope that the Court will decide after settling all factual points, something which we did not enjoy the first time".

And he concludes: "I shall not dwell on your opinion on my integrity. Thank you for your time and I hope that you would have at least the open mind to digest what I communicated and not dismiss my words ‘and so on and so on’ style."

Your integrity, sir, is at the core of this whole stinking mess. If you believe you have integrity, ask the Supreme Court. Ask the first ten persons you meet in the street. After that Supreme Court decision, nobody ever took up the cudgels for you. Your name was mud. I was then dining with a group of mostly lawyers and respected professionals. It was early evening and they all felt like slitting your throat.

But despite all the sound and the fury, the outraged decibels descending on your person, almost the whole of media raking you over the coals, you just flicked a speck on your collar with the hauteur of an unrepentant Bourbon, as if nothing had happened. You should have resigned pronto, if you love this country.

That was the only honorable way out, SIR.