Technicalities seldom withstand moral grievance. So it is with Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte's justification for allowing the remains of a reviled dictator to be buried at Libingan ng mga Bayani — the Heroes' Cemetery.
Duterte has offered to relinquish his post if people were able to deny that Ferdinand Marcos had been a president and a soldier. These apparently suffice for inclusion among the honoured dead. He is not wrong on either point, technically.
When the Supreme Court junked a consolidated petition against the burial (voting 9-5, one abstention), it affirmed executive powers over who could be buried at the cemetery. It also noted that Marcos had never been convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude.
In effect, the court overrode the 1992 repatriation agreement between the then-Ramos government and the Marcos family, which carried the explicit condition that the remains be interred in Ferdinand's northern hometown.
These are all technicalities. The response to the burial shows just how brittle they can be, and how tenuous the relationship between the law and justice.
When news broke out that the deed was done, students at high schools and universities walked out and organised a 'noise barrage' in the streets. People converged at various points in metropolitan Manila through the night. There is a protest on 25 November, dubbed 'Black Friday', which is expected to draw even larger crowds across the country.
The ambivalence toward (or even tacit approval of) the Duterte administration, amid the high murder toll associated with his drug war, has momentarily dissipated. The reasons are interesting, and may be somewhat encouraging in these times.
People don't like being duped, even if it is just a feeling. The president ran on an anti-corruption platform and voters believed him. Many did not take seriously the prospect of Marcos' remains being transferred to the Heroes' Cemetery.
"Filipinos had always taken pride in the 1986 revolution; 'people power' was a historical contribution to democratic ideas. This was a sneaky burial, undertaken without their consent."
But Duterte had been barely inaugurated when he gave instructions for the army to make ceremonial arrangements for the burial. The Supreme Court found no constitutional impediments months later, on 8 November. A mere ten days after that, with no public notice, Imelda and her children laid the patriarch at the cemetery. They never wavered from the conviction that there is nothing to atone. Malacañan Palace claimed no prior knowledge of the details of the burial, even as