EDITORIAL – A crime without a criminal

The price of one Michelangelo painting can provide decent housing for millions of Filipinos who are classified as extremely poor. Add to the Michelangelo Madonna and Child original paintings by Pablo Picasso, Francisco de Goya, Paul Gauguin and Joan Miro, and you wonder how a poorly paid president of a developing country like the Philippines could have had the funds to buy even one of those precious artworks.

Surely not from the fabled treasure of Tomoyuki Yamashita, which Ferdinand Marcos claims to have found many years after the Japanese World War II general was executed in the Philippines. Yesterday, law enforcement authorities began carrying out an order of the Sandiganbayan to seize eight of the artworks from houses maintained by the Marcos family. As of last night, authorities had not yet found the eight paintings, which the Sandiganbayan deemed to be part of ill-gotten wealth.

The artworks were just the latest assets confiscated from the Marcoses for being amassed illegally. Since the 1986 people power revolt brought down the Marcos dictatorship, the government has seized in the Philippines and other countries buildings, houses, tons of jewelry, artworks and millions of dollars in bank deposits believed to be owned by the Marcoses and their cronies. Curiously, however, no one has been sent to prison for looting of such colossal magnitude from public coffers.

Wealth was stolen. Why isn’t anyone behind bars for doing the stealing? And considering the current lifestyles of those who might have done the stealing, there’s more where those priceless assets came from.

Forfeiture of stolen assets is not enough. Someone has to account for the looting. A heinous crime has been committed against the people of the Philippines. Someone has to be convicted of the crime and locked up behind bars. That this has not happened is a national failure, and one of the reasons for the weakness of the republic.