Unearthing the truth

The new administration would see no need to set up a Truth Commission if President Aquino trusted the Office of the Ombudsman to do its job.

Setting up the commission buys P-Noy time to deliver on his campaign promise, without relying on the Ombudsman, of investigating those involved in anomalous transactions in the previous administration, starting with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo if warranted.

P-Noy’s other option is to let the Department of Justice conduct an investigation of corruption cases, whether independent of or together with the Office of the Ombudsman, in preparation for the filing of cases in court. But this will require the agreement of the Ombudsman, which seems unlikely to be given.

Merceditas Gutierrez doesn’t look beleaguered enough or sick of her office to quit, so she will be the Ombudsman for two and a half more years.

During that period, the Truth Commission presumably would have made some progress in carrying out its mandate, which we infer from its name is simply to dig up facts and present them to the public.

If it does its job well, the facts unearthed would present such strong cases for corruption that presumably the Ombudsman would be left with no choice but to file the appropriate charges in court, with no room for anyone being cleared on technicalities.

If anyone is convicted by the Sandiganbayan, by the time the case reaches the Supreme Court for a final ruling, several members of the so-called Arroyo court would have retired and been replaced by P-Noy’s appointees. People are presuming that those new appointees would not feel so indebted to the appointing power that they would be ready to compromise their independence from the executive branch.

Already, the Truth Commission, created through P-Noy’s first executive order, is expected to face a legal challenge. Sen. Jinggoy Estrada has also vowed to challenge the credibility of the commission’s chairman, former chief justice Hilario Davide Jr., who had presided over the aborted impeachment trial of Jinggoy’s dad, Joseph Estrada.

Yesterday P-Noy, reacting to what he lamented was premature criticism, told opponents of his move to just file their challenge in court.

*   *   *

The President might have an easier time selling his project to the public if he would explain, in his usual conversational Filipino, exactly what he hopes to achieve in setting up the commission.

He could cite an example, since several other countries particularly in Latin America have also set up truth commissions.

Most of those bodies were created to document human rights violations in previous regimes: torture, extrajudicial killings and the cases of the desaparecidos.

Will the Philippine version of the Truth Commission, which is expected to focus on corruption, also touch on human rights violations attributed to state forces in the previous administration?

Is P-Noy’s model post-apartheid South Africa and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Former South African Ambassador Pieter Vermeulen, one of the few remaining white career officers in his country’s foreign service, told me shortly before he left Manila that the most immediate effect of the TRC hearings was national catharsis. Many of the testimonies at the TRC by apartheid enforcers and victims alike brought South Africans to tears, Vermeulen told me.

Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela and the man he picked to head the TRC, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, both of them black men who suffered under apartheid, led the way in national healing and reconciliation.

South Africa today still has not completely eliminated racial tension, but which country with mixed races has? The country has prospered enough and recovered from the violence of apartheid to be able to successfully host the recent World Cup, with the blaring of the vuvuzela considered the only serious threat to athletes and fans.

The biggest criticism of the TRC was that it focused too much on reconciliation and not enough on justice, with too many perpetrators of apartheid abuses going unpunished. Critics pointed out that justice should be a prerequisite rather than an alternative to reconciliation.

*   *   *

Going by the name of P-Noy’s creation, it doesn’t look like achieving national reconciliation is one of the specified tasks of the Truth Commission.

President Aquino, echoing his late mother after she became president, has said several times that there can be no reconciliation without justice.

So if reconciliation is not part of the mandate of the Truth Commission, will it be after justice? Lawyers in the Senate have warned that the commission could duplicate the functions of the Ombudsman and the Department of Justice.

In several countries, truth commissions conducted hearings to gather information, and then put together the results, including recommendations, in a final report.

This is expected to happen in our version of the Truth Commission. Still unclear is whether all the hearings will be open to the public or at least to limited media coverage.

In some countries, portions of the reports are so controversial they have not been made public to this day, years after the conclusion of the hearings, because of the contents’ potential for further stoking social unrest.

Proponents of our version of the Truth Commission have expressed hope that its work will bring closure to the controversies during the Arroyo administration.

It must be clarified that while the work of the commission will help, closure is best achieved through the courts, after a final ruling.

The truth will set us free. But if the administration wants quicker results, through less controversial routes, it should pursue suspected crooks for tax evasion and money laundering.

This route won’t lead to the whole truth, but guilt and punishment are easier to establish in this area. This can be pursued at the same time that the Truth Commission is doing its work.

Critics are saying the commission is merely set to conduct a witch-hunt. Why is the truth so important to the nation? Is it to make sure that the sins of the past will not be committed again? President Aquino must make his objectives clear.