Harry Rocks!

The typically apathetic public, too focused more on the relatively kitschy details of the heinous murder of Jennifer Laude, seems to now gradually begin to recognize the larger and more profound issues of injustice inflicted not just by foreign forces in our sovereign territory but also injustices that victimize from our insidious self-inflicted shameless cultural subservience – parasitic homegrown virus, deep-seated and feeding from within our little brown dried fish and rice-fed Indio genes.

File Photo. At a protest at the Department of Foreign Affairs on October 15, 2014 at Pasay City, Philippines. AP/Bullit Marquez | Facebook

A little brown brother was violently ravaged, raped and viciously murdered by the white-man boss. It has racial and gender discrimination written all over it. It was likewise a hate crime as much as it was plain vanilla murder. Unfortunately, way above the universal statutes that should govern such crimes, two political entities, two sovereign and purportedly independent governments, have effectively declared that its lopsided political dalliances writ and documented under executive agreements have statutory ascendancy.

Without doubt, the politically progressive Left had initiated the argument with the issue of sovereignty from the very start that a murder had been committed in that hovel haven of degrading subservience sprouted like fungus and bacteria in the outskirts of a foreign military base and its latent waste and remnants that had for too long been an insulting symbol of our feeble and weak Third Worldness. 

Now that warships dock only occasionally and one-night quickies, sexual furloughs, rest & recreation and dalliances are ever more momentary and fleeting than the time it takes to catch AIDS from anal sex and die from it, what simple sleaze we once offered with open legs is now a toxic cocktail of slum, sleaze and premature happy (or unhappy) endings.

At first it seemed simply like political coloring when the anti-American sentiment among one-dimensional nationalists reared its head just as soon as reports trickled out that a musclebound trained-to-kill marine, a GMO corn and beef-fed leatherneck grunt, here on the basis of the controversial Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) had brutally murdered a rice-fed, less-than-able, small-framed, frail-bodied Filipino. Bias is evident. Bigotry more so. It cannot be helped. Red is the color of anger. It was expected that the hues would be red, carrying with it the complete spectrum of implications that a red stain carries and paints on a crime so brazen, incendiary, provoking and angering, and an issue so tailored for the political Reds and all its political shades and variations.

The issues of sovereignty had certainly complicated what might have simply been a brutal killing. Fortunately, it did not divert. Rather it deepened an appreciation of the issues involved and in the hellfire that a simple spark ignited, the raging conflagration engulfed national politics and sucked in a typically slobbering executive whose fatal misunderstanding of the requisites of his office further deepened long-festering wounds, freshened old debates, opened entirely new arguments, and all-around, simply made matters worse.

Rocking us from our comfortable complacency, shaking us awake, albeit ensuring that all the crimson hues that bleed from this issue blended and what colors were drawn, smeared or painted remained within the lines was one of the most brilliant and astute lawyers around. It was fate that had drawn Harry Roque into the fray. A coincidence at first blush but perhaps in the grand design of things that we can never fully fathom, Harry was beckoned by fate and we can only be so fortunate that he accepted the challenge.

Photo via Vera Files.

It was a scant few weeks before the Laude murder that Harry was in the city where the crime was committed, there advocating a not entirely different cause from the same he now pursues. He was in Subic. Perhaps in many ways only the most astute can conjure, Harry was coincidentally in national subservience’s ground zero, the town once a notorious host, or perhaps, a hostess, to national sleaze and subjugation. 

Harry was there involved in a civil society training exercise partly sponsored by the American Bar Association. There is poetic irony in that, but never mind. Some of the other groups involved were a democratic movement and a women’s solidarity group. Again, civil society. Both were natural participants albeit rather than become focal points of irony, the brazenness of the Laude murder in subsequent weeks simply emphasizes deep, festering and petrified hate, cultural bias, bigotry and gender discrimination. Here is where the irony turns bizarre. It is unfortunate that all these emanate from civil servants paid with our taxes all vowed to sovereignty, loyalty and patriotism ranging from the lowliest barricade sentry and foot soldier to the Commander in Chief.

Standing on the opposite end of where our shameless government officials have dug in, it was civil society that provided the first critical witnesses that identified the perpetrator and alerted authorities about the crime leading to the timely investigations. Through their initiatives, Roque filed the criminal compliant trigger the preliminary investigations. These initiatives as well as all else that followed including the latest that introduced the larger issues of our loss of sovereignty when our highest officials sold us out in the brazenly one-sided Expanded Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) signifies both symbolically and legally that the ball is rightfully in the court of the Philippine government.

An astute legal expert in the field of international law, Roque is unsurpassed and he certainly knows what he is doing far more than the Philippine police and military authorities who appear so clueless and confused that their loyalties are all over the place save for the Philippine side. That Harry Roque is fighting not just for justice for the murdered Jennifer Laude but for our national sovereignty constantly under assault each time our dignity is abused in this manner cannot be underestimated. We need Harry. And we need the fire and vigor he brings to these tragic issues. He stated it all so very eloquently when he declared that “…unless we abrogate the VFA and reject the EDCA, more Filipinos will suffer the fate of Jennifer: victimized by bigoted US servicemen and yet denied an adequate domestic remedy”.

Many Filipinos seem to have deliberately forgotten, and among these, Benigno Aquino III and the hierarchy of the Philippine Armed Forces (AFP), that our Philippine laws were brazenly violated and a Filipino was brutally killed in his own country under a legal system constantly abused and insulted not just by one criminal but, ironically, by Filipino institutions that do not know how self-degrading its latent acts of betrayal and subservience are.

Worse, the AFP has discovered even lower depths to sink to when they recently decided to file disbarment proceedings against that one person who rocks them awake to their responsibilities, their accountabilities and their loyalties.

After failing to protect ordinary citizens like Laude from criminality; after failing to ensure a scant modicum of hope that justice might eventually prevail; after treasonously protecting the strong against the weak, the alien against the compatriot, and the murderer against the families of the victim, our armed authorities turn the full force of their misplaced ire, their powder-keg brains and troglodyte logic, pulling back the trigger on their massive arsenal, tax-paid and subsidized by Filipinos, pointing toward, targeting and virtually threatening that one person everyone should support. Indeed, how treasonous is that?

Stock photo from POC. Some rights reserved.