A massacre in the Philippines

[tangaroa]

The Philippine province of Maguindanao on Mindanao island was this November the place of a horrific act of terrorism, and by all accounts it had nothing to do with the well-known terrorist groups in Mindanao.

A saying goes that all politics is local, and here we have an extreme form of that. The Philippines are a republic, but in Maguindanao the true form of government was a dictatorship of the Ampatuan family. Esmael Mangudadatu, a member of another family, had sought to challenge an Ampatuan for the post of Governor in the upcoming elections. As Mangudadatu's relatives drove into the town of Ampatuan -- the name is not a coincidence -- to submit his papers to run for the post, Ampatuan soldiers stopped their cars and killed everybody: relatives, lawyers, over 20 journalists covering the campaign, and another carful of people that were just passing by.

One of the striking aspects of the case is the close involvement of the official Maguindanao government in executing the massacre. Reports have stated the presence of uniformed police, and government equipment and employees were used to dig a ditch to hide the victims and their vehicles. A large number of people knew what was happening and went along with it regardless of any personal reservations they may have had.

The Phillipines government has responded by declaring martial law in Maguindanao and moving people in to replace the local government. As bad as martial law is, martial law under a republic is better than living under the rule of despotism. The situation can be improved from there, and hopefully will be. Without Manila's actions to seize control of the area, it is highly unlikely that the attackers would ever meet justice, especially as the attackers were the local authorities.

We can take a few warnings from this incident, mostly rewordings of old wisdom. We see that the concentration of wealth and power in a single entity, in this case the Ampatuan family, can allow that entity to become more powerful than the official law and order, to the point that its laws are the ones people are made to follow and not the official ones. Without popular vigilance and respect for the rule of law, not men, restraints on a government's power can disappear; and this can happen at any level of government, even if other parts of the government are healthy; and when there is such a concentration of power, the difference between the government and a private party may vanish.

We should also be aware that this was not the year's worst terrorist attack. There have been deadlier attacks in Iraq and Pakistan.