Category: marcos

Carmen Guerrero Nakpil on the death of Ninoy Aquino

(Around the time of Ninoy’s arrival, Mrs. Nakpil was attending a lunch meeting regarding the Censors Board, which had been called by Mrs. Marcos at the Gloria Maris in the Cultural Center Complex along Manila Bay.)

We had ordered shark’s fin soup and it was just being ladled into our bowls, when a phone rang in the distance. An aide scurried and brought the phone to Mrs. Marcos. She rose to take the call privately, and we continued to attend to the scrumptious soup before us. When she came back to our table, she spoke quickly and tersely, “We’ll have to leave for Malacañang right away. That was General Ver.” J.V. protested, “But the soup! We haven’t even begun!” Mrs. Marcos had already turned her back and was walking to her car at the entrance. We were asked to pile in and we drove to Malacañang at a high speed. Marita Manuel of the Metro Manila Commission, Veronica Veloso Yap and Zenaida Seva of the Times Journal, perhaps sensing a story about the censors’ board or Ninoy’s expected arrival, had earlier turned up at the Gloria Maris, and were sitting at a nearby table. They followed in the other Malacañang vehicles. The air was heavy with dark premonitions. What had happened? No one said a word. Zenaida, who’s a psychic, afterwards said that the hair on the back of her head stood on end all the way to Malacañang.

I remember the arrival of Danding Cojuangco, of Blas Ople and Adrian Cristobal, in rumpled jackets; generals and other army officers; media cameramen, cabinet members, Palace intimates. Everybody was strangely inarticulate, made meaningless remarks, “I just drove down from Baguio,” “I just heard,” essaying smiles that turned into grimaces, asking questions from one another with their eyes, not daring to frame conjectures or elicit information. Everybody was waiting to be told something we desperately needed to know: what had happened? And, what next?

Only J.V. was doing something constructive. He had snatched a page from Marita’s notebook and was calmly, deliberately scribbling, non-stop, one line after another, with no erasures, a simple presidential statement, using neutral words like “assailant” and not “assassin,” “attacked” and not “shot,” a calm statement of facts, assuring swift action and retribution, expressing sorrow, urging calm. Marcos later released the statement exactly as J.V. wrote it, without changing a word.

Sometime during that macabre night, Jolly Riofrir, a cameraman friend of mine who worked under the Information Minister Greg Cendana, approached me, “I saw the shooting,” he said, “I think I have it on film.” Thinking fast, I asked, “Do you have it, the film?” He was trembling, “It’s been taken away from me.” The next time I heard from Riofrir was years later, after Marcos had fallen and Jolly was in San Francisco. He called several times, at long intervals, and it was always to ask me to find someone who would buy and publish the original photos he took on 21 August 1983 at the airport. I never found anyone. Maybe nobody wanted that film, or what was in it.

It was close to dawn when Maria and I decided to leave, found her car on the Malacañang grounds and went home. We had not spoken to one another since we had left the restaurant at noon. We were usually loquacious, tripping over things to discuss and exchange, refute or make fun of. Now we lacked for words. What was there to say? I recollect telling her at last, “Maria, this is the end.” I knew she agreed, but couldn’t even bring herself to say so. Poor Ninoy, I thought. He has had the last word, after all.

Ninoy’s wake and burial were the beginning of the “deluge” which Louis XIV predicted two centuries earlier would be the aftermath of tyranny. In late 20th-century Manila, at the tail end of the Marcos regime, it was more than a storm and an outpouring of rain and lightning (although those literally took place, too). It was like a tsunami, that terrifying phenomenon that afflicts tropical oceans when, after an underwater earthquake, the sea first recedes creating a sinister vacuum on the beaches and then suddenly hurls itself, wave upon catastrophic wave, inland, creating inexorable havoc and destruction.

The killing of Ninoy, the hero Filipinos had learned to love and had waited for desperately, shook the earth beneath their feet. An eerie silence followed at his wake, as people filed in their mute thousands to look at his poor, bloodied body, and when it was placed on the flatbed truck of flowers and carried through the streets, millions rushed in, pressing forward, carried on peaks of sorrow and anger till they came to his grave. The photos of the funeral procession show, not individual people, but one, huge, engulfing sea of humanity, sweeping everything before it.

During the wake, I called Lupita Aquino (later Kashihawara), Ninoy’s sister, who had been my friend for years. But now Ninoy was dead, shot by a still unknown gunman as he descended the plane that brought him home, and we were all sunk in the terror and chaos of that terrible moment. I told Lupita that I felt very bad about Ninoy and that I wanted to go to his wake, but that I was afraid it would be taken amiss, and I’d only be causing trouble. She objected to my defensiveness and insisted that I go to pay my respects. I thought it best to stay away, after all. Some of the Marcos officials who had gone to the wake had been attacked, their cars stoned and rocked by an angry crowd of mourners.

The Marcos police stayed away, too, and although the government TV channel televised the ceremonies at the Santo Domingo church, the print media coverage of the endless funeral procession was ridiculously censored. I watched TV, alone in my bedroom, with deepening despair. A few days later, I was with Mrs. Marcos at the opening of one more of the series of commodity stores she had been sponsoring. Apparently, she had decided to continue to do what she had been doing, despite the abyss at her feet. She had summoned her usual support staff, but only I came. We sat together on the sidewalk in front of the store and I imagined a sniper on one of the nearby rooftops taking aim at us. Imelda did not look at all bothered. She was quiet but showed no apprehension.

I asked her whether she and the President had watched Ninoy’s funeral on TV, and she said, yes, they’d done so, together, in his bedroom. And that they’d been crushed, struck dumb by the enormity of what they were seeing on the video screen. She added that they had felt overwhelmingly humiliated because they had little inkling of the public mood, and that Marcos had said, “So, after all these years, all our efforts, our trying and striving, it has come to this?”

I was aghast. Had their isolation misled them so completely that they never even suspected people hated them with such unnerving passion? They simply could not plumb the depths of the people’s rage, could not accept the evidence of their wrath. How was it, I asked myself, that they did not know?

I am sure EDSA began the day Ninoy was killed. The Marcos’ empire crumbled, not in February 1986 when, disfigured and bedraggled, he fled in that American helicopter out of Malacañang. It happened almost three years earlier when Ninoy Aquino fell dead on the tarmac.

The body in that open coffin beneath the catafalque at the church of Sto. Domingo and, later, on the bed of white and yellow flowers on the truck that moved slowly through the mass of mourners was Ninoy’s. But Ninoy did not die on that sunny Sunday afternoon in August 1983 at the Manila International Airport, for that was when he began to live forever in the hearts of his countrymen. It was Ferdinand Marcos who died that day, and he knew it. The yellow-clad street demonstrations that followed, the gruesome campaign for the Snap Election and the joyous, invincible wave of people on the city’s circumferential highway called EDSA in February 1986, were only the post-mortem.

I had not been seeing the forest for the trees for years. I probably knew less about the facts of the Marcos regime than the outsiders who kept up with gossip, and certainly much less than the bold, ingenious reporters of the “mosquito”-turned-dragon press. The massive outside forces gathering outside were not readily apparent to minor insiders like me. But I sensed the inevitable outcome and, with mixed feelings, I watched it approach. I did not know then that it would take almost three years and that it would come in the shape of a startling spectacle: countless unarmed and disorganized civilians, massing instinctively on a highway to protect 200 soldiers in an army camp, and hovering between tears and laughter, with prayers, tanks and street food, would, without a single shot being fired, expel a tyrant they had come to detest. The world hailed it as a marvelous, new, political invention by Filipinos, who called it EDSA, after Epifanio de los Santos, the turn-of-the-century scholar who had lent his name to the radial highway in Metro Manila. But in August 1983, only God knew that.

Excerpted from “Legends and Adventures,” part of Carmen Guerrero Nakpil’s autobiographical trilogy. Published online by the Presidential Museum and Library with the permission of the author and with the assistance of her daughter Lisa G. Nakpil.

the coco levy loot

so will someone please tell us coco-levy victims how much the Fund is now, kahit approximately lang, given the latest supreme court ruling?  acc to inquirer:

The value of the contested shares was not immediately known, but a former UCPB director said it was a “pittance” compared to the 20 percent of the sequestered shares of stock in San Miguel Corp. (SMC), worth P60 billion, awarded to Cojuangco by the court last year.

Another block of 27 percent of sequestered SMC shares, likewise acquired with the levy money, was awarded by the court in a decision, also finalized last year, to the farmers to be used for their benefit and the development of the coconut industry. It was worth more than P70 billion.

that makes php 130 billion, plus this latest “pittance” from UCPB shares, some “26 B for government,” or so i heard on coco alcuaz’s business news the other night.  that would make 156 B all in all.  but wait, former phil coconut authority chairman jose v. romero says it’s less:

… some P70 billion in financials assets and probably the same amount in fixed assets.

ano ba talaga?  who is keeping count?  will we coconut landowners across the country, who put up the seed money of 96 Billion, collected by marcos and enrile over cllose to ten years of oppression, ever be told, in detail, how much there is in cash and stocks or whatever?  or will it take a freedom of information act, the people’s version?

i’m tending to think, correct me if i’m wrong, that the government does not really want to call too much attention to the coco levy loot — and media, good old mediocre media is being quite obliging, wittingly or un- — because, wow, ang daming pera, di na kailangang mangutang, tamang tama for the aquino admin’s many expenditures like, you know, the pork barrel (for ghost projects), the conditional cash transfer for the pantawid pamilya program (unsustainable), the pambayad daw sa mga coujangco&aquino for hacienda luisita (unjustifiable), and even, pangkampanya daw for the president’s annointed in 2016, sana hindi.

Romero: … the industry is awash with money creating a mad scramble for its use among government entities acting like hungry dogs over a piece of meat. Unless properly managed this could easily produce a moral hazard—defined as the propensity of government to indulge in a spending orgy that will not redound to the interest of the beneficial owners of the fund—the coconut industry.

in truth, my sibs and I are beginning to feel like human rights victims of martial law who have been waiting for justice and compensation like forever.  we weren’t physically detained or tortured, and we’re not impoverished coconut farmers, but like every coconut land-owner, poor and middle-class alike, from 1973 to 1982 we were, like, mentally and emotionally and materially abused, forced to pay the coco levy under false pretenses, the promise of development never materializing then, and it certainly is looking like it’s not going to materialize now.  because, really, nothing has changed.

During the Marcos Regime, a coconut monopoly was set up primarily using coco levy fund collections. From trading to hauling, processing and milling, marketing and export — all these were run by a few privileged business interests identified with Marcos.

Most of the levy was controlled by the PCA, the COCOFED and other organizations controlled by Enrile and Cojuangco. PCA decided that Enrile and Cojuangco could use 10 per cent of the levy for investment purposes. It was this provision that permitted the two to totally integrate the industry vertically23 and complete their monopoly. They created two conglomerates within the coconut industry, the United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB), which concentrated on finance, and the United Coconut Mills (Unicom) which focused on manufacturing and trade. Again the point is that capital was transferred from the coconut production and into non-productive sectors like finance and to a certain degree into manufacturing and trade.

back then, marcos and his top cronies simply took over the money and proceeded to enrich themselves and other big players in the coconut industry, at our expense.  today, the powers-that-be continue to refuse to share the coco levy loot with us coconut landowners who put up the 9.6 Billion seed money.  agriculture sec alcala is pompously adamant:

Instead, the assets should be used to rehabilitate and modernize the industry so the benefits would trickle down to the poorest coconut farmer, he said. 

trickle down.  hello.  bumenta na yan.  discredited na yan.  nothing ever trickles down.  as to why alcala slams the door on any cash distribution to us poor, yes, us poor abused coconut landowners, read this and weep.

Alcala feared the heirs of deceased coconut farmers and the government would end up embroiled in divisive and costly cases in court to determine who among them would be the legal recipients of the share of the levy contributors.

“Most of the levy contributors were already dead. If the government would resort to cash distribution, many of the heirs would file complaints on charges of unequal distributions,” Alcala told reporters in Mulanay, Quezon, on Wednesday on the sideline of the Department of Agrarian Reform land distribution program.

When Alcala was reminded that the Coconut Farmers Federation maintained records of the levy contributors, he shrugged his shoulder and replied: “I don’t know.” 

aha.  so there’s a list pala, except that alcala doesn’t deign dignify it.  his beef is that heirs of the dead might also want to be paid.  but why ever not?  it’s not as if we want all 150B, but we do want fair returns-on-investment. and surely the bright boys of the aquino admin can come up with a scheme that will make not only the big players, but us small coco levy victims, happy, too?

but the worst news yet on government’s plans for the dying coconut industry is this: according to charlie manalo in the tribune, “even if a huge chunk” of the coco levy fund actually came from the contribution of the coconut farmers in quezon (where i’m from) and laguna. both provinces are not included in the dept of budget and management’s priority areas that would supposedly benefit from the coconut levy funds.  butch abad’s dept of budget and management memo of april 25

… listed only 12 provinces under the Integrated Coconut Industry and Poverty Reduction Roadmap as “priority areas for program convergence (tenurial reform, agricultural productivity programs, industry development, infrastructure development, social services, and climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and mitigation measures) in the 2014 budget.”

playing politics, obviously.  so what else is new.  if my mother were alive, she’d be saying, “parang si marcos din lang sila, puro magnanakaw [they’re just like marcos, all thieves]!”  senator joker arroyo puts it more kindly re aquino and the marcoses: “birds of the same feather.”  yes.  a plague on both their greedy houses flocks.

*

coco levy blues

‘Strongest testament to Marcos plunder’ 
For coco farmers only
Keep their dirty hands off… 
Coco levy eyed for P10-billion Hacienda Luisita payment 

Getting their due

By Carol Pagaduan-Araullo

The passage of the landmark Marcos human rights victims compensation bill or the “Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013” is a most welcome development even if reservations persist about how it will be implemented, once signed into law by President Benigno Aquino III, to the satisfaction of the victims themselves.

Finally, here is official recognition that the Marcos regime was a brutal and repressive regime imposed upon the Filipino people via the declaration of martial law that was nothing less than a craftily disguised Palace coup d’état.

The principal characters who jointly perpetrated and benefitted from the blood-soaked and kleptocratic regime such as the other half of the Conjugal Dictatorship, Mrs. Imelda Romualdez-Marcos, martial law administrator Juan Ponce-Enrile, and businessman and now Presidential uncle, Danding Cojuangco, wish to wash their hands of their complicity or even try to rewrite history.

To a certain extent they have been able to do just that by virtue of their ill-gotten wealth, their undeserved positions in government, as well as their reinstatement in high society circles after being considered, fleetingly, as social pariahs.

But the existence of tens of thousands of victims subjected to gross violations of their human rights such as extra-judicial killing, forced disappearance, torture and prolonged, unjust detention in subhuman conditions belies any attempt to justify or prettify Marcos’ martial rule.

It is to the credit of these victims, their bona fide organization, SELDA (Samahan ng Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensyon at Aresto) that filed the original class action suit against the Marcos estate in 1986 in the US Federal District Court of Honolulu, Hawaii and won for its 9,539 members an award of $2 Billion in 1995, and the human rights defenders and political activists who refuse to allow the lessons of martial law to be forgotten, that the Marcos compensation bill has come this far.

It has been 41 years and many of the victims are either dead or old and ill, and their families destitute. They are more than deserving of this token reparation and that their names be inscribed in a “Roll of Victims” to be part of the “Memorial/Museum/Library” that will be set up to honor them.

Unfortunately the bill says very little about what else aside from the martial law atrocities and the victims’ heroism that will be memorialized.

Pres. Aquino is reported to have remarked in connection with the compensation bill that the martial law era was an “aberrant period”, “ a nightmare that happened to the Filipino nation” and that it should be written down with formality “so that we can be sure that this would not happen again in the future.”

For their part educators and historians have decried how the martial law era is treated perfunctorily if not sketchily in the textbooks used in our public schools so that its whys and wherefores are lost on the younger generation.

While Marcos’ ambition, cunning, puppetry and greed were among the main ingredients in the setting up of the dictatorship, this did not take place in a vacuum. Rather, Marcos imposed martial rule in the midst of an acute crisis in a chronically crisis-ridden social system weighed down by poverty, maldevelopment, social injustice and neocolonial domination.

It was his scheme to tamp down the crisis by eliminating all opposition and thus monopolize the spoils of elite rule and perpetuate himself in power with the blessings of the US. How many know about the complex reasons behind the political imprimatur and economic backing provided by the United States government to Marcos’ one-man rule, only to drop the favored dictator like a hot potato and embrace his successor, Mrs. Corazon Aquino, some 14 years later.

Marcos was overthrown but the reactionary system still exploits and oppresses the Filipino people. State fascism and concomitant human rights violations are not mere aberrations but are well entrenched in this system so that impunity for human rights violations still reigns.

Glossy, coffee table books on the EDSA “people power“ uprising give more than ample coverage of the roles of Senator Ninoy Aquino’s widow “Cory”, Cardinal Sin, General Fidel Ramos and Juan Ponce-Enrile and other personalities in toppling the dictatorship but they provide only snapshots, at biased angles, and not a continuing account of the people’s history of resistance as it unfolded from the moment Marcos declared martial law in 1972.

The defiant call “Never again (to martial law)!” can easily be rendered meaningless when the complete context – socio-economic and political – as well as the specific historical facts and circumstances that gave rise to and propped up Marcos’ authoritarian rule are not rigorously documented and objectively analyzed.

Indeed, the untold stories of how the Filipino people, especially the masses of peasants, workers and other urban poor, struggled against the dictatorship must be collected and retold in such a way that the martial law era will be remembered as one of resistance and not submission or even “victimization”.

There should not be any discrimination against those who took the path of armed revolutionary struggle against the fascist dictatorship since this form of struggle contributed significantly to its weakening and eventual overthrow not to mention that most of these revolutionaries paid the ultimate sacrifice of their lives in the process.

In the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CAHRIHL) inked between the GRP (Government of the Republic of the Philippines) and the NDFP (National Democratic Front of the Philippines), Articles 4 and 5, provide for indemnification to victims of human rights violations, citing in particular the need to compensate victims under the Marcos regime. In the many sessions of the GRP-NDFP peace talks (both formal and informal) the NDFP peace panel had consistently and persistently raised the issue with their GRP counterpart.

The GRP appeared to have acknowledged the justness of this demand by eventually signing CARHRIHL that provides for it. But the actual indemnification did not materialize evidently due to the Arroyo regime’s machinations. Now it remains to be seen, assuming Pres. Aquino will sign the bill into law, whether the martial law human rights victims will finally get what is due them. #

 

mindanao, marcos, aquino

sharing a rare angle on mindanao through the lens of a soldier’s wife.

At the Libingan ng mga Bayani 
By Amelia H.C. Ylagan

ANCIENT ACACIAS stretch their limbs to the skies in the exuberant yawns of their leafy canopies. Filigrees of light and shadow from leaves trembling in the slight breeze speckle the grass — while on the horizon, visible waves of steely white heat vibrate silent reverence. Someone up there quietly peers through the acacias in perpetual care of those buried under the mute white crosses at the Libingan ng mga Bayani — the national cemetery for heroes.

Alas, that the sacred silence would be intermittently violated by the crass zoom of low-flying jumbo aircraft landing at the international airport nearby. Maybe the juxtaposition of sound and silence at the Libingan has some meaning: for the majority of those lying under the white stone crosses were soldiers killed in action — in World War II, in Korea, Vietnam and in troubled Mindanao since the Libingan ng mga Bayani was first established in 1947. Somehow the boom from those descending commercial aircraft sounds terrifyingly like whistling war bombs or the thunder of monstrous artillery.

“Killed in action” (KIA) seems incongruous a classification for a dead soldier in a post-war democracy, specially for those who were killed in Mindanao. Initial tally of KIA was said to be at 13,000 in the first four to five years of the 14-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos that started in 1972. In a University of the Philippines study of the Mindanao conflict it was said that “from 1972-1982(?) the 30,000-strong MNLF funded by Malaysia and Libya tied down 70-80% of the Philippine military, inflicting an average of 100 casualties per month.

The United Nations (UN)-inspired Norwegian International Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) places the post-World War start of conventional warfare in Mindanao as 1970, when then President Ferdinand Marcos declared an all-out military anti-insurgency campaign, perhaps then conjuring a preamble to martial law. This was after the horrible 1968 Jabidah massacre off the northeastern seacoast, when Muslim Filipino fighters were killed by Marcos operatives, after the Muslim mercenaries discovered that they had been deceitfully hired to infiltrate and kill fellow — Muslim insurgents.

There was no democracy then, in those years of the antithetical dictatorship. Soldiers were marionettes to keep alive a puppeteer’s story of a need to protect the country from threatening powers here and abroad. Sadly, dying was very real, and not play-acting for the soldier. Nor was he aware and in control of any options, aside from the baffling dilemma of renegading towards equally mind-bending communism. Those were the days of cadaver bags quietly ferried from Mindanao to Manila in rattling World War II-vintage C-47 aircraft. On the widows and orphaned families was imposed the vow of silence about their painful, unexplainable loss — to “unduly stir unrest” among the unknowing other citizens would be “subversive.”

And of course there were no obituaries to announce those KIA, for none of the government-controlled newspapers would print them. But the news spread quickly and efficiently by word of mouth, and wakes overflowed with sympathizers silently shaking their heads as they hugged condolences without alluding to the war in Mindanao, exacerbated by the strongman’s political bungling with “peace mediator” Libya. Yet no government stoolie would tell on sincere friends and grieving relatives walking behind the horse-drawn caisson at the funeral of a fallen soldier. No eye would be dry at the plaintive call of the bugle to the soldier’s “Taps” breaking the painful silence at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

The peace problem in Mindanao has always been how to distinguish between the mercenary brigands, warring clans and foreign-fed terrorists of Southern Philippines on one end, and on the other, those thinking, principled Muslim Filipinos who are fighting for recognition and deep-rooted culturally identified property rights of since five decades ago. Unfortunately, the soldiers who died in Mindanao, Sulu and Palawan had no time, in the face of ambushes, snipers and massacres, but to fight aggressive, often suicidal terrorists. These foreign-backed rebels brag of superior weaponry contrasted to government soldiers’ failing ammunition and obsolete weaponry.

Perhaps the biggest treachery in history of Muslim Filipino rebels against brother-Filipino Christian soldiers was the massacre of Brig. Gen. Teodulfo Bautista with 34 of his men (including five colonels) in Patikul on Jolo island, in October 1977. Bautista came trustingly for peace talks with Osman Salleh, a rebel leader of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), who promised that 150 of his men would switch to the government side.

KEY QUESTIONS

Today, Bautista’s son, Brig. Gen. Emmanuel Bautista, is commanding general of the Philippine Army. Though he had reportedly repeatedly asked to be assigned to Jolo and other hotbeds in Mindanao in his more junior years, it was probably thought by prudent superiors that a murdered general’s son would be perverted target for perverted rebels in those areas. But does not Bautista, the son, being in his father’s vulnerable shoes today, 35 years gone, beg the key questions that must be answered for peace in Mindanao?

Who is fighting whom, and with whom should the government talk peace? In the five or so “peace agreements” in the post-war government efforts to settle the conflict in Southern Philippines, the internal rivalries, lack of unity and leadership on the Muslim Filipino side held back the implementation of such attempts at peace. “Bangsamoro” (unity of “Moros,” a Spanish name for Muslims) was the goal of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF, led by Nur Misuari) when the MNLF and the government were discussing peace for Mindanao. Misuari shed separatist ambitions and participated and won in national local elections for the ARMM (Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao).

While the MNLF suffered Misuari’s vainglory and alleged corruption, the splinter group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), gained respect and wrested political dominance. So, negotiations for peace were then with the reformed, re-engineered MILF, representing the “thinking” side that soon embraced the October 2012 peace agreement with the government of President Benigno Simeon Aquino III — the “Bangsamoro Peace Accord,” to be implemented over four years, coterminus with Aquino’s term.

But now Nur Misuari, resurrected hero of the MNLF, is belly-aching why he was not involved in the Bangsamoro Peace Accord, when Bangsamoro was his battle cry for the earlier, likewise properly agreed talks. Some analysts suggest that the convolution of political changes abroad, like the political fall of Egypt, the liquidation of Libya’s Moammar Khadaffy (said to be supporting MNLF/MILF at some point or other), the suspected ties to terrorist al Qaeda, even to the terrorist of the US 9/11 attack, have had bearings on the shifting power structures in Muslim Mindanao, and on several attempts at peace accords.

So, will this latest peace accord succeed, a Mindanao State University (MSU) anthropology professor, (a Muslim Filipino) was asked at a recent history conference? His cryptic reply: Come to visit me… at your own risk, he added with misplaced mischief. Have you ever been to Jolo, he challenged.

Yes, I have been to Jolo. I brought my husband home to the Libingan ng mga Bayani, many unchanging decades ago.

ahcylagan@yahoo.com