EJK, DUI, HEMA

WHEN PNP chief Director General Bato decides it’s time to startle the drug industry by reviving Oplan Tokhang without warning, will the police be starting anew, as in clean and fresh and pure? Having weeded out the bad guys – have they? – and recruited “idealistic” and “patriotic” rookies, is PNP now ready to tell us the results of its investigation into the deaths of 7,000 pushers and users?

We have no idea what the acronym DUI, death under investigation, means in terms of “extrajudicial killings” by agents of the law, rubouts between and among crime syndicates with or without the collusion of crooked cops, the collateral damage of victims being at the wrong time in the wrong place, and such. Until we are educated by the investigators, the specter of EJK and massive human rights violations will not go away. The police cannot act like Lady Macbeth telling herself that a little water will clean the blood from her hands.

While the clergy continue to condemn the killings without necessarily saying a prayer for the 40 or more policemen and soldiers who were also casualties of the drug war, the Catholic laity have been busy organizing HEMA, or Holy Eucharist Mass Action(s), as a “nonpartisan and ecumenical response. . . to the spiritual and corporal needs of the families who were victims of EJK.” Three HEMA masses were held last month and last week in different parishes in Metro Manila and in Paris, Papua New Guinea, and other parts of the country, officiated by more than 70 priests.

The lay organizers of HEMA representing People-Prayer-Power Movement “hope to provide the families with counseling, therapy, and possibly financial assistance.” Quoting one of their leaders after the first HEMA event on Feb. 2, “this was the first time families of EJK victims were gathered inside (a) Catholic church.” True enough, the people of God may be relied upon to show their care and solidarity with the bereaved in more ways and more swiftly, efficiently than some of their pastors.