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HEY, JOE
Restoring Zion: The
ex-president who never quit
By Ted
Lerner
MANILA - Just before noon on January 20,
2001, then Philippine senator Raul Roco stood amid a
huge crowd gathered on a staging area at a Manila
religious shrine, looking out over a gathering of
several hundred thousand people. He had come, as had
everyone else in attendance, to witness, in the next few
moments, the swearing in of then vice president Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo to the office of President of the
Republic of the Philippines. It would be the culmination
of several days of political turmoil in the country. The
impeachment trial of president Joseph Estrada on charges
of plunder, graft and corruption, had collapsed when the
prosecutors walked out. The military had withdrawn their
support from the president. And now, abandoned and
alone, Estrada had resigned from the office he won
handily only 18 months prior. Or had he?
Roco
received a call on his mobile phone. It was the British
Broadcasting Corp on the other end. Roco was patched
into a live broadcast being beamed around the world.
"Mr Roco, has president Estrada resigned?" asked
the BBC anchor.
"Yes," Roco said above the din,
"yes, he has resigned."
"How do you know that he
has resigned?" asked the anchor. "Have you seen a
resignation letter?"
"No, no I haven't seen a
resignation letter. But I've been told that he resigned
and that he has submitted his resignation letter."
In the tumult of the moment, it seemed a trivial
matter. Surely something as important as the resignation
of a country's leader would be properly and thoroughly
documented and handled with utmost care and attention.
After all, the world was watching and things would have
to be done right. Sure enough, several moments later
Arroyo was sworn in as the 14th president of the
Republic of the Philippines.
But that seemingly
insignificant detail of an actual resignation letter is
proving, up to this day, to be quite a serious matter.
For Roco, nor any other of Arroyo's supporters, has yet
to see or been able to produce a resignation letter from
Joseph Estrada. That's because one doesn't exist.
So that can lead the rational mind to ponder the
inevitable question: How is it that Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo was sworn into the office of president,
when a vacancy didn't exist? True, Estrada said he was
taking a leave of absence from the office, as his two
letters to Congress at the time indicated. Under law
Arroyo would be only serving as "acting" president, with
Estrada able to return to the office upon the date and
time of his choosing.
But that's not the way it
played out. Two days after swearing in Arroyo, the
Supreme Court produced a letter that was dated January
20, 2001, and purportedly written by then vice president
Arroyo stating, in her words, that president Estrada was
incapacitated and that he was no longer able to carry
out the duties of his office. Thus, she wrote, she
should be sworn in as the next president.
Incapacitation is one of the four legal ways a
president can be replaced, but under Philippine law, it
is the Congress that decides whether the president is
incapacitated. This was never done. Obviously, a vice
president cannot simply declare a sitting president to
be incapacitated, as there is a serious conflict of
interest.
Then, several months later, the
Supreme Court forgot all about the incapacitation
argument and ruled that Estrada had "constructively
resigned". The court completely ignored the two letters
of Estrada and never even bothered to call him in to ask
him whether or not he had resigned. Instead it based its
decision on an unauthenticated diary written by
Estrada's former executive secretary and printed in a
local newspaper - it actually used news clippings - and
claimed that it provided a window into the mind of
Estrada, proving that he had "constructively resigned".
That was that. According to the Supreme Court, Arroyo
was now the de facto president of the republic. Estrada
was finished.
From his air-conditioned suite in
Veteran's Memorial Hospital in Manila, where he has been
detained for more than two years while his trial on
plunder charges continues, Joseph Estrada vehemently
maintains that he never resigned the presidency. The man
who was elected by the largest mandate in Philippine
electoral history, in the cleanest election the country
has ever seen, insists that the chief justice of the
Supreme Court, Hilario Davide, along with several other
justices from the high court, violated the constitution
and broke the law by swearing in Arroyo to fill a
position that was not vacant, and by later reaffirming
her rise to power by claiming - erroneously, Estrada
says - that he had indeed resigned.
Estrada has
always insisted that he never resigned, but now, backed
by some stunning new evidence, he has gone on the
offensive. He has hired a new lawyer and directly
challenged the jurisdiction of the anti-graft court,
claiming that as the legitimate president, he is immune
from suit. More important, his former lawyer and former
senator Rene Saguisag has filed an impeachment complaint
at the House of Representatives against the chief
justice of the Supreme Court and at least six other
justices "for culpable violation of the constitution and
betrayal of public trust for swearing in an illegitimate
successor, for denying Estrada his basic rights and for
prejudging his case".
Even though Arroyo is not
mentioned in the complaint, the grounds cited have a
clear and direct bearing on her legitimacy. For if the
justices erred, that means Arroyo's ascension to the
presidency is null and void and that Estrada remains the
true president of the Philippines.
Predictably,
the presidential Malacanang Palace and its supporters
laughed off the new challenge to their authority. They
have claimed it's a political ploy, a destabilization
plot from the Estrada camp, or just a diversionary
tactic because Estrada's afraid of being convicted in
his plunder case. They've also said that the issue of
Arroyo's legitimacy has been settled long ago by the
Supreme Court.
But that begs the question. If
there was no vacancy in the presidency, just what were
the justices doing at the swearing-in of Arroyo? Wasn't
that a highly partisan political event? And how can they
later rule on her legitimacy when they themselves were a
party to her ascension to a post that wasn't even
vacant?
Estrada's new-found confidence stems
from a tell-all book written by one of the key players
in his ouster more than two years ago, Supreme Court
Justice Artemio Panganiban. In his book Reforming the
Judiciary, Panganiban takes the reader back to those
days of political turmoil. Estrada's impeachment trial
had collapsed when the prosecution walked out in
frustration; the military had publicly withdrawn its
support from Estrada, the duly elected
commander-in-chief; hundreds of thousands of
anti-Estrada partisans had gathered at the shrine.
Panganiban says it was at that time that the justices
acted to save "the constitutional system from collapse".
He actually states that he and the chief justice decided
to swear in Arroyo even though they knew Estrada had not
resigned.
"Let me articulate my faith that Edsa
II [the name of the event that led to Estrada's ouster]
was indeed a confluence of events planned in heaven," he
writes. "I am still wondering up to now how I had
summoned the courage to propose the oath-taking of Mrs
Arroyo even when President Estrada was still in
Malacanang; and why Chief Justice Davide immediately
agreed to it, even prior to consultation with other
justices."
Perhaps the most amazing passage out
of the book comes when Panganiban talks about "restoring
Zion". He writes that both he and the chief justice have
a daily habit of consulting the Bible. Panganiban has a
certain passage that he reads on particular days.
Davide, though, prefers to cut the Bible at random,
taking inspiration from whatever passage happens to
appear.
Before dawn on the morning of January
20, 2001, Panganiban tells how he called up Davide, who
related that he chanced upon a passage in Isaiah,
Chapter 62, about "restoring Zion". It was then,
Panganiban states, that Davide had his higher calling.
Yes, that was the answer to the turmoil that was
currently besetting the Philippines. The chief justice
would have to "restore Zion".
But for the chief
justice of the Supreme Court, who had been presiding
over the now failed impeachment proceedings, "restoring
Zion" did not, as one might think, entail going on radio
and television and telling the crowds massing at the
religious shrine that the constitution must be protected
at all costs, that they should insist that the
impeachment trial should continue to its conclusion,
that no matter what the military generals had said,
president Estrada was the legitimate and duly elected
leader of the Philippines, that he was elected by the
sovereign will of the electorate in the cleanest
election in Philippine history and that to try and
unseat him in ways other than legal ones would do more
harm than good and merely succeed in turning the country
into a banana republic. Yes, that would have been the
logical meaning of "restoring Zion". But Justice Davide
had a different interpretation.
To him
"restoring Zion" meant swearing in then vice president
Arroyo to the office of president, this despite the fact
that he knew no vacancy existed in the position.
Restoring Zion meant that they would legitimize a
military withdrawal of support of the legal
commander-in-chief, something that the constitution
clearly prohibits. Instead of upholding the constitution
and insisting that the impeachment trial continue, their
actions have, some observers claim, legitimized mob
rule.
"We need a ruling on whether the courts
may rely on the Bible instead of the constitution,"
Saguisag said after filing his impeachment complaint.
"We need a ruling on whether it is all right for
justices to take part in partisan political exercises
and then uphold themselves when obviously they could not
be impartial as judges of their own cause."
"In
my experience," said Estrada's new lawyer, Alan Paguia,
"these [the justices] are just 15 lawyers. Can they
change the will of 10 million voters?" Paguia said the
justices, in voluntarily administering the oath to
Arroyo, violated the "judicial ban against political
partisanship".
As of this moment only a handful
of congressmen have openly supported the impeachment
complaints and, with Congress on a six-week recess, the
matter won't be fully discussed until the beginning of
August. Panganiban's book and Estrada's subsequent
offensive, however, have seemed to generate renewed
interest in the confusing and highly controversial
events that took place back in January 2001. Supporters
of Arroyo, once again on the defensive in the face of
apparently strong legal grounds, have resorted to
extolling the God-given virtues of that murky phenomenon
known as "People Power".
"I could not see any
partisan politics coming from the Supreme Court,"
responded Arroyo's justice secretary. "What took place
[on January 20, 2001] was an event arising from the
sovereign power of the people. All authority emanates
from the people." Even Panganiban, whose book has
suddenly disappeared from the market, claimed they did
right because "the welfare and the will of the people is
the supreme law".
How the "will of the people"
in a democracy is measured in anything other than an
election is anyone's guess. What is certain, though, is
that the filing of an impeachment case against the
Supreme Court justices promises more political fireworks
to come and exposes the deep and gaping wounds that
still afflict the Philippines more than two years on.
If only they could have produced that
resignation letter.
Ted Lerner is the
author of the newly released book of Asian travel
tales, The Traveler and the Gate Checkers, as
well as Hey, Joe - A Slice of the City, an American
in Manila. E-mail ted@hey-joe.net or visit www.hey-joe.net.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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