Jovy’s sunset
The news is not so much that a warrant of arrest was served on statesman Jovito “Jovy” R. Salonga and his son, Steve, as that the 92-year-old, who actively served the public even in retirement, is now bedridden.
But let us review the peculiar circumstances that dragged back to the headlines the name of the distinguished former president of the Senate.
Dr. Restituto Buenviaje earlier sued Salonga for estafa, claiming that the latter induced him 15 years ago to buy a condominium unit in Tagaytay City that has yet to materialize.
On Monday, officers of the Eastern Police District, accompanied by a sheriff of the Regional Trial Court, swooped down on Salonga’s Pasig City home and tried to arrest him.
Police discovered, however, that Salonga, the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay awardee for government service, is bound to his sickbed, unable to speak, intravenously fed and suffering Alzheimer’s disease.
How come Judge Danilo Buemio ordered Salonga’s arrest notwithstanding a 2011 neuropsychological report to the RTC from Dr. Lourdes Ledesma of Medical City attesting that he could not stand trial?
How come the Eastern Police District proceeded with the arrest try only to realize belatedly that Steve posted a P40,000 bail for his father and himself and that the judge issued a release order for them Feb. 14?
How come this case hounds Salonga in his sunset days when, according to Steve, a civil case about the same issue was dismissed years ago by the Office of the President, Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) and Supreme Court?
The Office of the President and HLURB told Dr. Buenviaje in 1997 to go after the developer who himself still owes the Salongas money, Steve said.
Salonga’s current situation echoes former president Corazon Aquino’s in 2009, when while she was ravaged by colon cancer, Malacañang, then under Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, pulled out the democracy icon’s longtime security detail.
Now, four years after Salonga began to manifest symptoms of dementia—two after his wife Lydia died and he in a lucid interval found strength to bade his family goodbye—he needs, if anything, a nation to pray for him, not gawk at him as a police and court spectacle.
This was the man whom Japan’s Military Police captured and tortured in the presence of his father, incarcerated and sentenced to hard labor for anti-Japanese activities in the runup to World War II.
This was the man who did the country proud by earning the Ambrose Gherini Prize for writing the best paper in international law when he completed his doctorate in Yale University in 1949.
This was the man who was unjustly arrested for principled resistance to Ferdinand Marcos’ strongman rule and who was left to lug more than a hundred pieces of shrapnel lodged in his body after he survived the 1971 Plaza Miranda bombing.
This was the man who at the helm of the Presidential Commission on Good Government in 1986 filed and perfected our claim to Marcos’ ill-gotten Swiss deposits, as Senate President led the rejection of our Bases Treaty with the United States in 1991 and as a private citizen led the filing of an impeachment complaint against disgraced tanodbayan Merceditas Gutierrez in 2009.
In his hour of agony, Salonga, who consecrated his life to this land, deserves far more than amateurish, ungrateful treatment from law enforcers and the court.
