Editorial
The populist regime’s delayed, militaristic, and shameless response to the pandemic set our nation ablaze. But even if the coronavirus is finally defeated, we will remain in the line of fire. Today, President Duterte signed the Anti-Terror Bill into law which grants his forces immense corruptible power to stifle dissent.
This law is written vaguely enough to enable the state to define terrorism and terrorists on its own terms. What’s more, it allows detention — without charges or judicial warrants — of suspected terrorists for far longer than in Martial Law.
This rightly ignites both fear and fury. Even before the Anti-Terror Law, the state has already attacked all sorts of individuals from ordinary citizens to senators and a Chief Justice — and in between, national minorities, journalists, nuns and teachers, to name a few.
Just last week, twenty LGBTQ+ Pride protesters were arrested without warrant or explanation and were held in detention for four nights. If the state forces were to pull this stunt following its implementation, those four nights could have become twenty-four days.
What more can we expect now that the regime has this power and especially when it has appointees in all branches of government?
Facing everlasting red-tagging, activist and human rights watchdog groups will probably be in the state’s crosshairs. Meanwhile, the media might face the same fate considering that journalists have been red-tagged too and have appeared in the palace’s infamous “ouster matrix.”
Once the government wrests the meaning of terrorism, the frontliners of democracy and accountability will be silenced and the rest of society will be subjugated, ironically, to a terrorist state. There is nothing but horror to expect out of this law.
But that is the worst that could happen. We are a few steps away from that scenario, but we are not there yet. In this crucial time we are in, when activists are already illegally arrested and laws are bent to repress press freedom, we must only intensify our calls. We cannot surrender our democracy.
Amid the terror, we must stand our ground in the line of fire. Junk the terror law!
