Killing probe must have Aquino

Since Senator Leila de Lima appears hell-bent on investigating the rash of killings that has become characteristic of the government's hard-fisted campaign against illegal drugs, the challenge should be as hell-bent as well for her not to ignore the fact that the killings started not during the term of President Duterte but during the waning weeks of the Aquino presidency.

Again it must be acknowledged that the probability is high that pronouncements made by Duterte during the campaign may have inspired the police to the jump the gun on his presidency and began killing suspects even before he officially took his oath as the next president. De Lima should be challenged not to overlook the fact that when the killings started, Duterte was not yet the president but her boss Noynoy Aquino was.

Taken in such light, it should not matter who may have inspired the policemen to do what they did, because as it turned out, Duterte was still a private citizen and did not truly matter in police matters. But Aquino did. Not only did he matter but he mattered significantly because as president he was the commander of all the uniformed services, including the police.

So okay, de Lima abhors extra-judicial killings. And who doesn't? Every believer of democracy is a believer of justice. And that means everyone of us. De Lima is not the only person willing to fight for justice. But the justice de Lima is fighting for must be justice that is deserved. More importantly, it must be justice that is true and equitable.

Now, her quest for justice by means of finding the truth about the killings, by way of a Senate investigation that she is so aggressively pushing, cannot be fair, complete, and decent if she looks only into killings that happened within the Duterte presidency. De Lima cannot gloss over the fact that the killings started when Aquino was still president.

If Aquino was still the president when the killings started, then every means must be exerted to have de Lima summon Aquino to testify at the Senate hearing she wants conducted. Aquino must be asked why, if summary executions are as abhorrent as most people feel they are, and certainly de Lima must think similarly as well, he never even once called out to have the killings, if not stopped, at least looked into.

But Aquino never did any of that. He neither issued an order for the police to stop the foolishness nor at least ordered its highest ranking members to either explain or investigate. Maybe he was rendered very busy preparing to leave Malacañang. But that is, of course, no excuse for what happened. Had Aquino intervened, the thing could have been stopped, no matter how temporarily.

But Aquino chose to look the other way. And by doing so, the killings spilled over into the Duterte administration, where they escalated. And yet, at this point, they became so abhorrent they deserved nothing less than an aggressive investigation. The problem is, the body language of de Lima does not seem to indicate a willingness to include Aquino in her investigation.

It appears that she only wants the killings investigated regardless of when the killings happened, whether they happened during Aquino's time or during the time of Duterte. If she does that, then she will never be able to put the killings into context. There is a very crucial factor in her investigation if she found out what Aquino was thinking of the killings and what he did about them before the killings spilled over into Duterte's time.

It matters a lot to know if, by Aquino's silence and non-involvement, the killings may have been inspired to become what they are today under Duterte. It would be interesting to find out if, had Aquino intervened and stopped the killings, they would have resurfaced during Duterte's time. But the only way to find out is to summon Aquino to de Lima's hearing. If de Lima refused to call in Aquino, then her hearing would be nothing but a sham.

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