‘Breaking the law to defend the nation’

Adam Gopnik, writing a review of the trial of Alfred Dreyfus for the New Yorker Magazine wrote those words. The complete quote is “Breaking the law to defend the nation ends up breaking the nation.” The trial of Alfred Dreyfus was a classic in jurisprudence and continues to be cited as a model on how principled men and women fought against an establishment that used the nation’s resources against one man unjustly. They thought they could get away with it with French newspapers of that time supporting the unjust trial. It is happening in the Philippines today under the Aquino administration.

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I found the article revisiting the Dreyfus trial quite by chance during the Corona impeachment and saw striking similarities. The PDAF and DAP corruption in the Aquino government had not quite unraveled then.

But we did hear of rumors of a payola for the senators’ votes  in the Corona impeachment. Indeed Corona’s lawyers led by Judd Roy called a press conference in Club Filipino to say that this was no gossip but information that came from an unimpeachable source.

Who would pay to get Corona impeached and removed from his post? It could only be a high government official who had access to moneys in the hundreds of millions of pesos and the power to use it for his purpose.

As far as I remember there was no follow-up of that expose nor did mainstream media made much of it. All I know was that the trial was resumed as if there was no unresolved issue of corruption through bribery of the trial against Corona.

But even then I thought of the quote about a celebrated French trial riddled with corruption and how it aptly describes what is happening to the Philippines today. With mainstream media, big business, and the so-called yellow crowd cheering Aquino’s fight against corruption, the general opinion was against the former chief justice. After all, Corona was an appointee of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo who was demonized during her entire administration.  He had to be destroyed through whatever means.

Aquino and his allies defended their corrupt acts in the service of his crusade that “if there is no corruption, there will be no poverty.” Meaning corruption by their enemies but not those committed by them. Corona would be removed by hook or crook. Aquino was a ‘saint like his mother’ according to these partisans and could do no wrong. He was the president who would eradicate poverty by punishing those he thought were corrupt and would use every means even if he had to break the law. We are discovering only now that he was other than people thought him to be.

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By coincidence again, I was in the house of Senator Loren Legarda when the senators called her to plan a dinner at which they would forge a bloc vote against Corona. Legarda was right in front of me while she was talking to Enrile and I remembered her saying that apart from the senators, Gigi Reyes would be there. 

We were eating gourmet Japanese food then that she ordered from a famous restaurant in Makati. She said she would serve the same food to the senators. She also talked to Sen. Jinggoy Estrada and explained to me after that they always look to her to organize such meetings. I asked why? Ewan ko. They trust me, she said.

 That was a Friday and the dinner being planned was for Sunday, the day before the Senate would vote on Corona’s impeachment and removal from office. Apparently, more than an agreement on a bloc vote of eight senators was going to happen that night.

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The Dreyfus affair has become the standard for unjust trials that were righted by individuals who believe in the rule of law. Although it happened in France it is not surprising that it should be happening to the Philippines.

As Gopnik says “Sometimes long stories have short morals.” The struggle to right the injustice to Dreyfus took years and Emile Zola had to go on exile when the public sentiment went against him and his friends for his crusade. Without him, Dreyfus had no chance but as Zola said what they saved was France.  They fought that it be founded on the rule of law and justice for all. The Dreyfus case is a long story and those who want it in detail can look for it the Internet. I have returned again and again to it since the PDAF and DAP scandals broke out.

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The Philippine version of using corruption to correct a nation, bribing senator-jurors to impeach and remove the former chief justice from office is no different from the Dreyfus trial. It follows the pattern of how laws are broken in pursuit of what is “good”.

“There were many interpretations of the case but as Gopnik says the “the sanest still seems to be the  reading of the French socialists and liberals, almost none of them Jewish, who first took it up passionately: an innocent man had been railroaded by villains, who took advantage of ethnic prejudice in a Catholic country.

It was done in defiance of the plain rules and traditions and procedures of the country’s own military order and judicial system, and had to be remedied by them. After some time, though with less clarity than one would have liked, and with more fudge around the edges than was ideal, this was done.

The lesson to be learned was the lesson that Clemenceau (the prime minister of France then) had tried to teach the jury at Zola’s trial. The urge to protect the nation from its enemies by going around the corner to get them is natural, but what you get is usually not the enemies, and, going around the corner, you bump into something worse. Breaking the law to defend the nation ends up breaking the nation. Sometimes long stories have short morals.“

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As I write this column, the agitation to abolish Congress is mounting with arrest warrants for three senators. Filipinos are not pausing to think that if you abolish Congress now and leave the Executive to take charge, then we have a dictatorship.

That is unjust because it was the Executive in the first place that made the corruption possible through PDAF and DAP. The ‘matuwid na daan’ of selective justice in defiance of the rule of law will not cure the country of its corruption and ills.