OVER the last five days, thousands of protesters from the Iglesia ni Cristo clogged key points of the city’s main highway and surrounded the head office of the Justice Department, demanding that its chief, Secretary Leila de Lima, resign over her decision to investigate an illegal detention complaint filed by an ousted minister against church officials.
The influential church and the politicians who sought to curry its favor spoke of freedom of religion and free speech, but when protesters stopped De Lima’s vehicle from leaving the Justice Department compound Thursday, it was clear that the line between free expression and anarchy had been crossed. The same line was crossed again when other protesters went on to briefly occupy the Edsa Shrine, then various portions of Edsa without a permit to rally, creating traffic snarls that ensnared tens of thousands of commuters and motorists.
Back in the Justice Department, the secretary was forced to flee through a back entrance that went through the Supreme Court building next door, and would not return to work at her barricaded office building the next day, ostensibly because she had a meeting at the Palace.
Nobody with any authority in the national government said he was in charge, and that the disregard for the law must end.
The man in charge of the police, Interior Secretary Manuel Roxas II, perhaps still hoping the church would back his run for the presidency next year, issued a limp-wristed appeal to the protesters not to block the roads. The appeal fell on deaf ears, however, and commuters and motorists, whose numbers far exceeded those of the protesters, were made to suffer until Monday morning, when church leaders said they had reached an understanding with the government and were calling off their protests.
The swiftness with which the protests ended fueled speculation that the administration had caved in to the INC demand that De Lima resign and that the case against them be dropped. Others suspected that the government had compromised in some manner to allow the case to move forward for now, only to have it quietly dismissed when the public had turned its attention to other matters.
Almost immediately, the Palace denied that any accommodation had been reached with the INC to end the protests. Instead, a Palace spokesman not known for tact crowed about the virtues of using diplomacy to avoid “unintended consequences.”
The Palace denial of a deal was dubious in the face of an emergency meeting Sunday night between the President and his Cabinet secretaries that stretched past midnight. What were they discussing, if there was no deal to be made? On the other hand, the Palace spokesman’s remark about diplomacy was laughable. We never knew that “diplomacy” could be defined as doing nothing in the face of a four-day crisis, then caving in on the fifth day.