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Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Malilong: Frankenstein
By Frank Malilong
The Other Side
Friends are asking why Cebu has been placed under a state of emergency along with the rest of the country when the situation here is different. Doesn’t President Arroyo come to Cebu for comfort every time her critics turn on the heat against her in Manila?
My guess is that it is because the Constitution does not give her any choice.
While it empowers her to choose which part of the country to place under martial law or to suspend the writ of the privilege of habeas corpus, it does not give her that option in the case of a declaration of a state of emergency.
I have read and re-read Proclamation No. 1017 and General Order No. 5, which the President issued on Feb. 24, and still could not find anything in either document that allows the Armed Forces or the police to make warrantless arrests or searches and seizures.
In fact, the only provision I found really disturbing was the reference to “decrees” in the third to the last paragraph of Proclamation 1017, which commands the Armed Forces “to enforce obedience to all the laws and decrees, orders and regulations promulgated by me personally or upon my direction.”
Remember that Ferdinand Marcos governed by decrees after he declared martial law and abolished Congress in 1972. “This is chilling,” Rep. Eduardo Gullas, who was a member of the Congress that Marcos dismissed, told me on the phone yesterday. “Is this any indication that Congress will be in rigor mortis pretty soon?”
I hope and think not. Unless she is willing to run roughshod over the Constitution, there is no way the President can abolish Congress. The framers of the Constitution, drawing their lesson from the Marcos experience, have expressly provided that even a state of martial law will not supplant the functioning of the civil courts or legislative assemblies.
The President should, however, clarify, if she wants to quiet our apprehension, that she has no intention to govern by decree like Marcos and that the inclusion of that dreaded word in her proclamation was an honest mistake.
She can do even better by heeding the request of many sectors, including her own economic advisers, to lift the declaration. It is not because the proclamation is bad, per se, but because it seems to have given the wrong impression to some of her people that it authorizes them to censor the media, arrest anyone who catches their fancy and curtail our sacred civil liberties.
The President must have given the matter much thought and consideration before she signed Proclamation 1017 and General Order No. 5. She must have been convinced that a state of national emergency did exist and it was necessary for her to officially declare it and to summon the Armed Forces and the police to help address it.
She may not have abused her discretion when she made that judgment call. But later events show a tendency by her lieutenants to abuse theirs. I’m sure she has read about Frankenstein.
(fmmalilong@yahoo.com)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (March 1, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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