Home > Op-ed | To bottom

Remembering not just slain journalists

By LYN V. RAMO, GUEST COLUMNIST

What an activity we had that fateful evening! Lighting candles for slain journalists... 79 since 1986, 42 or majority of these killings were during the term of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Baguio-Benguet’s National Union of Journalists of the Philippines Chair Junjun Dumlao said the numbers speak for themselves. Need we say more?

Atty. Pablito Sanidad of the Free Legal Assistance Group was quite sad, and so we were, and said, there should be no more eulogies like that one we did this evening in front of the Baguio City Cathedral. The killing of journalists, he said, should not frighten us in the media sector. It should not discourage those who are still entering the profession - the campus journalists, whose rights are also being curtailed in the campuses. We said so be it.

Thirty-five or so of us in the Baguio mass media community were not the only ones courageous enough to brave the times of the bullets that made our colleagues fall. Our colleagues from different parts of the country simultaneously lighted candles at 7:00 P.M. on May 31. But 35 of us braved the rains and thunderstorm, literally, that we were literally braving it all, come rain or scorching sun. But my goodness, how could thirty-five of us brave an assassin’s bullet?

Only the people’s rage over the killings could stop the hand that pulls the trigger. Our pens shall record history of a victorious people if we remain vigilant in guarding press freedom from where all freedoms shall emanate.

With us was Bishop Carlito Cenzon of the Roman Catholic Church. Shall he continue to pray for all victims of political killings, not only those from the media but also from other sectors? Again, we say, so be it.

We lighted candles amid raindrops on our scalp, again, literally, not just for the sake of those slain colleagues, but more so, for the sake of our still living colleagues who also covered the activity to get a living. All of us did cover our activity, who else is going to cover us but us?

Beyond all these, we know we will make sense. Atty. Sanidad is right, we should not be in the same activity for another slain journalist, nor another peasant nor a worker, student, church worker, and ordinary citizen.

The killings should stop. It should really stop. The hand that pulls the trigger must remember that one killed journalist is not the death of press freedom. The one who ordered the killings must think about it. #

Post your comments, reactions to this article

Home > Op-ed | Back to top