All eyes are fixed on the ongoing court proceedings to determine the innocence or guilt of the suspects in the Maguindanao massacre. Once again the justice system itself is on trial, and not just the accused. But the Ampatuans and their grisly reign have also indicted other institutions besides the justice system.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police stand indicted because of their complicity in emboldening the Ampatuans to consider themselves above the law. They stand indicted as enablers, and quite possibly, accomplices, in corruption. Aside from larger questions of military and police corruption enfeebling these institutions, depriving the ranks of quality leadership and adequate equipment, leading to warlords being deputised as surrogate commanders, there is the question of the Ampatuans being raised to paramount status among regional warlords. This was done with support from the top brass as well as the connivance of officials, civilian and military, so that the Ampatuans could amass military equipment.

The police has announced that it intends to file charges against a civilian employee and a former police official. These are small fry by any measure, when many other officials, all the way up to Camps Aguinaldo and Crame, and the Cabinet officials with oversight over the two institutions, should be investigated, too, for acts of commission or omission.

Thus President Gloria Arroyo and the ruling party stand indicted on the same grounds, on the simple principle of command responsibility, as the paramount status of the Ampatuans among the warlords of Mindanao overlaps, exactly, with the period in power of the present administration. If warlordism is an entrenched problem, predating the present dispensation, what set the Ampatuans apart was their closeness to, and their being coddled by, the President and her party.

Still, the bureaucracy—local and national—stands indicted, too, for either aiding or abetting the amassing of colossal wealth by the clan, on a scale and with such conspicuous consumption not just in Maguindanao but elsewhere, such as Davao City, as to make it impossible to explain how the family’s fortune could have been made legally. At the heart of all this lies the blurring of the lines between public and private coffers on the part of the Ampatuans; the obviously weak and corruptible system of military and civilian procurements, and of accounting of national, regional, and provincial funds in the various offices occupied by members of the clan.

The first order of business is, indeed, to secure justice for the victims of the massacre, particularly since the public is unconvinced that the government is really intent on pursuing the case and securing the conviction of the indicted Ampatuans. But if government eventually letting most, if not all, of the Ampatuans off the hook is a reprehensible possibility, so is letting them keep their fortune, political clout, and along the way, permitting our indicted national institutions to get away scot-free too.

For if this were to happen, the only lesson of the Maguindanao Massacre is that the Ampatuans crossed a line: they engaged in a massacre too ambitious in scope to allow them to get off without a slap on the wrist. Unchanged would remain the tangled web of official cooperation and corruption that enabled the Ampatuans to exercise impunity—which opens up the possibility of another clan aspiring to replace them.

As it is, the massacre has led to a scrutiny of Moro warlords but not their Christian counterparts. Only the Ampatuans stand in the dock when all similar bandit-politicians should be undergoing scrutiny and the policies and official behavior that aid and abet them should be in the process of being systematically stamped out.

We are hurtling towards a national political exercise in which the government shows no signs of wanting to forego with the electoral convenience afforded by warlords. The only signal the administration is sending out is that all warlords must toe the line, to avoid too much of a public fuss. This is the wrong message because it is a cynical and self-serving one.