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Neanderthal Brutality
By Juan L. Mercado
November 27,2009

“Vodoo? Drugs? Or what?”, asked our daughter, a United Nations communication officer in Jerusalem. She read dispatches on the Maguindanao massacre and phoned just before Advent. “Murdering 42 civilians --including women and journalists, --is ‘Neanderthal brutality’ indeed.”.

“No. Fifty seven bodies were recovered,” we updated her. “And 27 were journalists. The five-man staff of the weekly Periodico Ini was wiped out. Two newsmen are still missing,”

Salvaging journalists hits this girl hard. She grew up in a newspaper-cluttered home. He schedules partly hewed to deadlines and the old man’s. reporting trips. After graduating from Boston College, she signed up as a reporter for Gannet newspapers in New York. Her husband is an Agence France Presse staffer.

Successive governments’ tolerance for rubout contracts on journalists spawned a culture of impunity. Inevitably, that metastasized into the Ampatuan town bloodbath. “This is the single deadliest event for journalists in history” notes the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Under the Marcos dictatorship, no one dared expose killing of journalists. Primitivo Mijares of the Manila Chronicle testified before the US Congress on “New Society abuses. Tibo was salvaged in Guam. So was his son.

Corazon Aquino restored freedom of the press with People Power. “Counting from the 1986 post-Marcos era, a total of 60 journalists had been killed in the line of duty,” the Center for Media Freedom reports. “Of these 48 percent were killed under the Arroyo administration”.

After 2006, the total bolted to over 70 today. No mastermind has been convicted, despite Ms Arroyo’s pledges or ex-Speaker Jose de Venecia’s offer of bounty.

Victims were individual reporters, usually exposing sleaze. These include, among others: Edgar Dalamerio of Zamboanga Scribe, Marlene Esperat of Midland Review in Tacurong, Roger Mariano of dzJC Aksyon Radyo in Laoag.

“When journalists get killed, the citizen’s right to to freedom of information is threatened,” notes the CMFR study: “Journalist Killings Under the Arroyo Administration (2001-2006)

The result is a cruel paradox, “A country, which was once perceived as having the freest media in Asia, had become the ‘world’s most dangerous place for journalists’ outside a war zone,’ CMFR adds.

Individual killings here clone the murder, in Moscow, of the prominent investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The 48-year old Novaya Gazeta reporter documented, in Chechnya, torture, mass executions and kidnapping, She exposed the sale by, Russian soldiers of Chechen, corpses to their families for proper Islamic burial.

She was gunned down in an elevator in 2006. A Makarov 9-mm pistol had been dumped at her side. Like murders of Filipino journalists, no one has been held accountable for Ms Politkovskaya’s slaying. That sends a very clear message: You can kill –and get away with it.

In Russia 16 journalists have been rubbed out because of their work since 2000, the Committee to Protect Journalists reveals. Only one has been convicted, And none of those who organized the killings has been nailed. Just like the Philippines “There can be no free speech in a country where the best journalists are afraid for their lives for doing their jobs,” saysa European Union official.

TV network Al Jazeera, meanwhile, aired an interview with a witness who claimed: Datu Andal Ampatuan Jr “ordered that reporters accompanying the convoy also be killed. That would cover-up what happened.”.

That’s crass but standard covering of the ass. But do political warlords here understand the press’ role in a free society. “There are Three Estates in Parliament;’ Edmund Burke once said. “But, in the Reporters' gallery yonder, sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”

Death tolls, in other massacres, have been higher. In 2008, for example, terrorists slaughtered 173 hotel guests in Mumbai and wounded 308. Massacres, within Kosovo, in 1999, saw Serb police and military murder Albanians. Death tolls ranged from 206 males killed at Velika Krisav and 70 at Dubrava prison. But in none of these were journalists singled out.

The Maguindanao massacre occurred just before Muslim and Christian festivals: Muslims around the world celebrated, starting Thursday, the Eid ul Adha. This 'Festival of Sacrifice' commemorates the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his son Ismael as an act of obedience to God.

Christians marked Sunday as the start of Advent. The Latin word “adventus” –coming--is the translation of the Greek parousia. It is a season of expectant joy for Nativity, overhang this year by self-made hell that is the Ampatuan bloodletting.

At Advent, come, we say, and rescue us from all the harm and ruin of our own making” –or Neanderthal brutality’, theologian Catalino Arevalo wrote. We believe that He comes in answer to our asking. Yet (as Maguindanao shows) it seems things have become worse)

But He has come…to be Emmanuel: God with us. He wants to be with us, no matter what, no matter where.To all our perplexity, despair and fears, there is a God who who loves us, and gives only one answer. One only. Look. “Behold my Son is born.”
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