Standby regime
President Rodrigo Duterte has denied ordering the arrest of “istambay” (the plural form of Filipino nouns is not formed with an “s”) despite the Philippine National Police’s detention of over 7,000 mostly young people, and the death, most likely through a police beating, of at least one individual who had stepped shirtless out of his home to get a cellphone “load” only to be arrested and jailed.
Those arrested have included a 24-hour convenience store customer, a young man standing in front of his own home, and others whose illegal detention once more demonstrates how easily the police can abuse the people they’re supposed to serve and protect. The two-week-long campaign is turning into another orgy of arbitrary arrests and detention, the denial of due process, and quite possibly of the right to life itself.
The human rights abuses that have been and are likely to be committed and the lawlessness of the campaign are more than evident. What are not are the drive’s problematic definition of
istambay as do-nothings who’re potential and actual criminals, and the tenuous assumptions behind it that have led to this latest assault on a large segment of the urban population.
The Filipino word istambay or “tambay” is derived from the English “stand by,” one of those quaint outcomes of the encounter between two languages and cultures in the course of the Philippine experience with US colonialism and imperialism.
Like certain other words and phrases in English — such as “sanction,” which can mean to approve of, as well as to punish — the phrase “stand by” can have two conflicting meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. One is to support, as in “The newspaper stands by its reporter’s story.” The other is to do nothing or to ignore, as in (and it really happened) “The police were standing by while the partisans of the president drove a vehicle into the protesters’ ranks.”
The word istambay as it has evolved in Filipino is generally assumed to mean to do nothing if a verb, or to refer to someone who isn’t doing anything, if a noun. Hence nakatambay lang usually means not doing anything, while
istambay lang refers to an idler. Both are disparaging terms.
These popular meanings notwithstanding, the istambay as a Philippine phenomenon is more complex than it appears, and has been the subject of sociological studies. It has obviously escaped Mr. Duterte’s and his brilliant covey of advisers’ grasp. But it is obviously due to the persistence of unemployment and poverty in Philippine society. Unable to find work, the istambay whiles away his days and even nights in the streets and the local corner store. His fellow istambay could include those who prefer indolence as a way of life. But an individual’s being an istambay doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not looking for a job, only that he can’t find one. He may also be between jobs in
this country of endless “endo,” or labor contracting — a system of job insecurity in which one could have been gainfully employed the previous week only to be jobless today.
Why istambay are in the streets or at the corner store rather than at home sociologists have attributed to the poverty that afflicts them, among the consequences of which is poor, even primitive housing in which space and ventilation are at such a premium the streets, no matter how mean and dangerous they often are, at least offer enough room to breathe and move around in. The brutal heat of the Philippines’ tropical climate also explains why many of them go shirtless in the streets and in their homes.
Mr. Duterte and his police look at istambay as potential troublemakers or as actual criminals. This is at best only partly accurate. Some do linger in an area in