Category: marcos

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

Horror story, too

By Conrado de Quiros

IT COULDN’T have come at a better time—that is, the decision of a US Court of Appeals to cite the Marcoses for contempt for their contemptuous attitude toward an earlier judgment forbidding them from dissipating their assets. Imelda and Bongbong were found to have been trying to repatriate precious artworks, deemed part of the Marcos estate, and to have agreed with the previous Philippine administration to split their estate with it, with them retaining 25 percent of it tax-free.

The contempt judgment carries a hefty fine: $353.6 million. It will be added to the $2 billion a US district court awarded to the human rights victims in 1995 as compensation. “Human rights victims” sounds almost benign, referring as it does to the nearly 10,000 Filipinos who were tortured, “salvaged,” and made to disappear during martial law, who filed a class suit against the Marcoses shortly after 1986.

It couldn’t have come at a better time. It reminds us forcefully, and forcibly, of a couple of things.

At the very least, the scale of pillage the Marcoses wrought upon this land. The original class suit sought $10 billion in compensation from the Marcoses, already a gross undervaluation of the amount of loot they had amassed. The $2 billion that was actually awarded to the litigants is an astonishing amount, as is the $353.6 million. Our failure to appreciate the mind-boggling plunder this represents comes from the very mind-boggling-ness of the amounts. Their size gives them an air of unreality, an air of abstraction. In a thoroughly impoverished country like ours, where kids are seen lying on the pavement, sleeping the sleep not of the just but of the drugged, those amounts become almost ungraspable.

What helps to grasp it are things like the poster on malnutrition that came out during martial law. The poster showed a child in an utterly emaciated state, wasting away from lack of food, and a bauble-d Imelda representing the initiator of a nutrition program. The poster was meant to show how government cared for the poorest of the poor, but it had the unintended effect of showing instead why we had hungry kids. There, people said, pointing at the poster, was cause and effect: Imelda was the cause, the emaciated child was the effect. The poster disappeared from the city’s walls faster than you could say “the true, the good, and the beautiful.”

But the question that arises from all this talk of millions or indeed billions of dollars is how the Marcoses managed to acquire all that. Ferdinand was just a small-time politician—or hood; he was accused of shooting Julio Nalundasan, his father’s political rival, with a sniper’s rifle while the guy was brushing his teeth—and Imelda a poor cousin of the Romualdezes when they began. To have created an estate—what gentile airs that connotes!—worth that much, it makes the phrase “stealing the country blind” sound like a euphemism. That is not their estate, that is ours. That is not their wealth, that is ours. They have no right to use it as they please. Hell, they have no right to it.

At the very most, it reminds us of the horrors of martial law, and prevents the kind of revisionist rewriting of history Juan Ponce Enrile has begun. Etta Rosales is right, the contempt judgment is worth far more than the money it entails. “The contempt ruling means that the US courts are taking seriously the disrespect shown by the Marcoses. More than the heavy fines, this is a big embarrassment to the family who has shown no remorse for the deeds they have done.”

My own hope is that it goes more than embarrassing them to stopping them from carrying out the kind of political laundering Enrile has. Of course Enrile has also been the beneficiary of exceptional luck, quite apart from an exceptional share of the spoils as custodian of martial law, being there at the camps when the people arose against the regime he helped build and defend, and being the Senate president when the impeachment of the first Filipino chief justice took place. The Marcoses have not enjoyed the same breaks. But you never know, stranger things have happened in this country. This should help to stop things from getting even stranger.

Indeed, I hope that the victims of torture and the kin of the “salvaged” and disappeared take it upon themselves to publicize the accounts that are contained in the class suit. I attended one of the collective dredging of memory in the course of that suit in the 1990s, and some of the recollections there were truly harrowing. No horror story beats the capacity of human beings to inflict pain and harm on other human beings.

Enrile has been challenging the leftists to show proof of his guilt and of their innocence, claiming to have the documents that prove the complete opposite. All the victims have to do is bring up their personal accounts in the class suit to the public gaze to disprove him. What Enrile’s documents are, only he can say. What the victims’ documents are have been scrutinized by the American courts, from Manuel Real’s Honolulu court, which ruled in their favor, to the higher courts that continued to rule in their favor after various appeals by the Marcoses. Those documents, not quite incidentally, often mention Enrile as the one who signed the victims’ ASSOs (arrest, seizure and search orders). He may not have directly ordered their torture or “salvaging,” or disappearance, but neither did Marcos. And Judge Real, as well as the other American judges, who heard the class suit found him guilty anyway by command responsibility, or by creating the conditions, policies, and premises that made them possible.

That is one horror story for Undas, too, Marcos, Enrile, and the others who never had to wear masks to horrify the country for so long.

The Day Manila Fell Silent

By Ninotchka Rosca

Ironically, the most quiet day in Manila of contemporary times began with noise: a loud pounding on the glass door of a penthouse apartment I was using at the time. The friend who was hollering and shouting and bruising his knuckles on the glass, blurted out, as soon I slid the door open, “martial law na…[martial law already]” A split second of silence; then I pivoted and clicked on the radio. Nothing but white noise. Turned on the TV. Nothing but a white screen and static. Distraught friend said, “no TV, no radio station… everything’s closed down.” We eyeballed each other. The previous night’s last news item on TV flashed into my mind: a still photo of a car, its roof collapsed, windshield shattered; a male voice saying that the car of the Secretary of National Defense had been attacked but he had not been in it… It was truncated news; I thought, “what? An empty car was bombed?” As I was going to bed, I noticed that the government building behind our apartment building was all lit up: floor after floor, from top to bottom, blazing with lights. I said then, “something’s happening; and it’s happening all over the city.”

Now this friend stuttering about martial law triggered an avalanche of images in my brain.  This would become a habit with me ever after, this going into mental hyperdrive, correlating incidents and data, during crisis.  The cascade stopped with the face of a smiling Senator Benigno Aquino, as he said to me,  while we stood in the red carpeted foyer of the old Senate, “Marcos will not catch me lying down.”  I’d asked about Oplan Sagittarius, rumored to be the secret blueprint for martial law.  We’d all assumed that if ever, it would go into effect in November-December.  So I just teased the senator, calling him President Aquino.  It would be my last face-to-face with him.  In 1983, when he was assassinated, I muttered to myself, “I’d better fix my papers; Marcos will fall.”  I was in New York City by then.  I had filed for political asylum but it was just in stasis.

What is the point of this recollection?  It is to stress that martial law was personal… PERSONAL.  Everyone felt it, was affected by it, had an opinion, a thought, a feeling, about it.  The day it was declared, with a friend standing there, his hair practically on end, I remembered how, a week before, a minor journalist on the military beat had generously offered to check if my name and address were on an arrest order.  Young though I was, I wasn’t exactly naïve.  I gave him an old address.  Sure enough, the place was raided.

We moved quickly.  I had to find a secure telephone so I could find out what had happened, was happening.  Outside, it was so quiet, so quiet…  Manila had always been a noisy city:  music blaring from car and jeepney radios, from juke boxes;  television noises;  people yelling.  But this day, it was so very, very quiet.  Aboard a jeepney, there was only desultory human voices:  para, mama;  sa kanto lang…  No music; no talking; and we avoided one another’s eyes.  We were all beginning to be locked within; imprisoned as it were.  When the jeepney passed a newspaper building with its front doors barred by rolls of concertina wire, we all took a sidelong glance and averted our eyes.  We did not want to seem overly interested.  We were beginning to learn NOT to call attention to ourselves – a very strange thing for Filipinos who, to this day, love to strut and crow and flap wings.

Being a journalist, my first impulse was to call the National Press Club.  I asked for Tony Zumel, who was NPC president at the time.  The secretary — she was called Baby, if memory serves me right — upon hearing my name, switched to this unusually saccharine vocal inflexion :  “haaaay, hello, how are you…long time no hear” – which nobody but nobody used with me at the NPC.   I asked for Tumel, our nickname for Zumel; and she sang out, “Oooooh, he’s not here.  I don’t know where he is.”  Pause.  I asked, “military there?”  And she said, “Yessss…”  Nothing left but to say thanks, goodbye.

Years later, in 1986, with Marcos still in power, I’d be in the same building, looking for Tony Nieva’s office which was at the back of the NPC.  A young cigarette vendor asked what I was looking for;  I inadvertently said, “the office of Tony Zumel.”  His eyes glazed and he looked far, far, far away, seemingly at a caravan crossing the desert, and answered, softly, “ay, matagal na pong wala iyon…matagal na. [He’s been gone a long time. A long, long time.]”  I looked at him with wonder, a kid with an unbreakable connection to history.

It was personal.  It was not just a piece of paper with a signature, not just a voice making the announcement;  it wasn’t even the orders barked at rows of khaki- or fatigue-uniformed men.  It was an absolute threat, a palpable danger, a loss of self-power and security.  It endangered the usual, the common, the ordinary details of daily life.  Years later, Rodolfo Salas, then chair of the Communist Party of the Philippines, would tell me of how about 200 students ran for their Central Luzon guerrilla base, throwing his group into a tizzy — though it’s hard to imagine Bilog, as we called him, even slightly nervous.  “We had to feed them,” he said smiling, “and used up in one day our month’s supply.”  Bilog then instructed his unit to interview each student.  Those not under direct threat would return to town or city to help in the resistance.  Those with “serious threats” would be given the choice of moving elsewhere:  northern, southern Luzon;  the Visayas;  Mindanao.  He said that some who were not under direct threat chose to be sent elsewhere, willing to take on the very difficult task of opening new guerrilla fronts.

Romantic in the telling, it wasn’t, in reality.  The half-joke then was that if one survived for a year in the countryside, one was already a veteran.  Still, many chose this manner of struggle.  Because martial law was personal.

A lexicon grew for clandestine work, so that information could be imparted without naming the information.  Sunog meant raid, capture.  Nanununog meant someone was talking.  Nasunog meant someone had been betrayed.  And of course, at the end of every meeting, INGAT, which recently is translated as “take care.”  No nothing as innocuous as that.  It meant “be careful” out there.  And as if to underscore the intellectual underpinnings of the budding movement, the Communist Party was the Q, following the symbolic logic formula, if p then q.

Thus the struggle against martial law would begin – quietly, carefully, slowly, in a process of learning,, unlearning and refinement as it went along.  It was fought not only with guns, since even guerrillas could not survive without supplies and there were no deep bases as yet.  Supply teams were set up in Manila for various regions, because while there was food of a sort in the countryside, there was little by way of cash.  Certain things just had to be bought.  I recall at the time that the request for supplies for the Cordillera region, then called Montanosa, came to a measly 800 pesos a month.  For as long as I could, I gave all of it.

One early coup de plume would cheer the city of Manila, at least.  A poem, well written, was published by a magazine controlled by Marcos’s cronies.  Just a little poem but all the letters starting each line, when scanned downward, read:  Marcos, Hitler, Diktador, Tuta…  Via the grapevine, we learned almost instantly it had been done by Pete Lacaba.  The owners tried to have all the copies recalled but one was delivered to my residence, so I was fortunate enough to have seen it with my own eyes.  This kind of daring would set the tone for the struggle’s propaganda.

The first issue of Liberation came out in 1975, I believe.  The making of it had its comedic moments.   Since the cover had to be photo-stenciled, one young man went to a Makati Gestetner store, pretended to be buying a machine, and when the sales agent was distracted by a phone call, loaded the designed front page into the machine.  Remember that one had to apply for a license to even have a mimeograph machine.  Distribution of copies was done by a Volkswagen so old its driver door kept swinging open every 350 meters, as it were, revealing all the newsletter stacks on the backseat.  But by 1986, I was assured that copies were being inserted into Marcos’s election propaganda, distributed by his party for the election.  It was no longer the mimeographed version I was familiar with; it was printed, likely by the same printing presses doing Marcos’s propaganda and equally likely, paid for by the same budget appropriation.

The struggle learned how to struggle and in that learning were many, many stories – of rage and laughter, of loss and gains.  The death of Puri Pedro, murdered by a military officer, was a palpable pain over our neighborhood.  The escape of political prisoners, on the other hand, brought an almost carnival mood.  It is my hope that one day, all stories will be told, affirming that those who were imprisoned — 100,000 by the then Secretary of Defense own admission – can be named; that those who were murdered – 3,000 plus have been documented but more died in so-called “encounters” – can be named;  and those who disappeared – 759 documented, though there were more – can be named.

For on the day Manila fell quiet, it was not only noise, music, talk, chatter, the hum of a vibrant life, that martial law sought to take away from us.  Martial law sought to reduce the millions of names in the archipelago to the handful of the Marcos clan and cronies, denying millions the right to be, to exist, to be named.  Martial law reduced the entire population of the archipelago to the Marcos clan and cronies;  nobody else was of significance;  no one else’s desire, wishes, goals and dreams mattered.  Martial law sought to erase all of us, rendering us merely props on the stage where the supposed magnificent destiny of clan and cronies would unfold.  Martial law dehumanized us, rendered us NAMELESS.  We were all rendered non-persons.  The response was to take martial law as personal and to work for both an individual and collective democracy fascism couldn’t break.  This was done in the interfaces of life which couldn’t be policed, away from surveillance, in the days most quiet need.  From time to time, the little noises would break out into a huge yell – a noise barrage protesting the fraudulent Manila election; students banging on the door bars and window rails quickly installed at university campuses.

Forty years later, here we are, in a re-collection of those times, at a cool basement gallery, in a neighborhood of a city so different from the terrain where what we have re-collected occurred.  We are on the other side of the globe, though I’m pleased to remember the first reading ever honoring the murdered poet Emman Lacaba (at the Bowery church) and the first reading honoring murdered and imprisoned Filipino poets (sponsored by PEN American Center for which it was excoriated by the head of PEN Philippines) took place in this city – two events I was fortunate to help set up.

In our own fashion, in the Philippines, in the US and wherever we were, we dealt with martial law and the continued usurpation of the archipelago by the Marcos Clan and Cronies.  We learned as we went along, as martial law was a very new thing, we had no models of resistance to it.  But we learned, making as much noise as possible as we learned, and we learned very well indeed.

Which is why the national (official) reluctance to deal with martial law, to name it for what it was,  to extract justice for the damage it inflicted upon people and the islands – this reluctance has been so distressing.  The revision of history began almost at once, and it took the form immediately of denying the power of the people in the overthrow of the Marcos Dictatorship.  Instead, the overthrow has been ascribed to a few names – “heroes” – and supernatural elements.  Hell, if people hadn’t taken their courage in hand, all the “heroes” would have died under tank fire.  But so it goes;  the rich and powerful preserve their own construct.   Victims of human rights violations remain bereft of justice; those who imprisoned, murdered, raped, still walk untrammeled and often in power;  those who shared in the division of loot and turf continue to hold on to what they had stolen – even as the people, yes, the people, were being reduced to metaphorical observers in the narrative of the struggle against martial law.

Because of this national (official) reluctance,  the legacy of martial law continues:  the impunity of assassinations, murder and relentless violence, warlordism and turfism, the perverse view that public money is the private treasury of those in authority and the idea that the people are unthinking lumps of matter entitled only to lies and trickery.  How steadily amnesia has taken over minds and hearts – with those who should be in disrepute elevated to pedestals of respect.  Marcos Clan and Cronies are finger-painting daisies on a curtain being drawn over the putrid night of the martial law years.  Their egos, swollen with the unlimited self-indulgence of the martial law years, have not shrunk to proper proportions.  Only truth can do that;  only justice can do that.

Forty years after Manila fell silent, let us push away the cacophony of lies and sink ourselves once more into the quiet truth of that day.  Because as martial law was personal then, it is still personal now.

As they seek to perpetuate the legacy of martial law, we must perpetuate the legacy of those who fought it.  What can we, who live so far from the hard heat of a Philippine summer, the cool of monsoon rains, what can we do – we who are on the other side of the globe, in a strange city, in a strange neighborhood and who are now gathered today in a cool basement gallery, so very different from the terrain visited by martial law?

Many of you weren’t even born yet when Marcos was overthrown, much less when martial law was declared.  And yet here we all are, fighting NOT to be nameless in this neighborhood, this city, this state, this country, in the intricate workings of capital.

Through the years I have seen and been engaged in many big and small movements, artistic and political and often both; they waxed and waned, surged and ebbed, and petered out, even as our numbers increased.  Many poets, many writers, many painters, many sculptors of  Filipino descent worked and struggled in this country, trying to bring an awareness of what has transpired, is transpiring, in 7,000 islands on the other side of the globe.  And like a Sisyphean  task, we have seen the words we wrote, images we drew, figures we shaped, shatter and fade even as we continued to write, to draw, to sculpt.

There is a need for permanence to our work, a deep-rootedness, to mark it as of this place though prism-ed by events elsewhere.  We need to affirm that we are of this place and of this time, though our lineage may be elsewhere.  We need affirm our right to be here – to be visible and engaged in this country, to be as a branch of the banyan tree which, even as it issues forth from the mother trunk, seeks to sink its own roots into the alien loam.  By affirming our right to be here, our right to fashion a life and a destiny for ourselves here, by affirming our right and duty to make history in the time and place of our lives, by affirming our right to have a name, as it were, here, we defeat the original intent of martial law.  In the process, we also help create a genuine democracy for ourselves, our communities, our brothers and sisters of different colors and different ethnicities.   And that, as we did learn in the years following the day Manila fell silent, is the path to victory.

Thank you and, because dangers continue, INGAT– #

burying marcos

in the matter of the marcos burial, i don’t know na whom or what to believe.  did vp binay really recommend to the president that marcos be buried in ilocos with full military honors?

philstar‘s marichu villanueva is all the way in las vegas but her inside info on the reported binay proposal gives me pause.

If we are to believe reports from Manila, Binay allegedly recommended to P-Noy that Marcos’ remains be interred in his hometown in Batac, Ilocos Norte. There, Marcos will be given instead full military honors for his service as a soldier during World War II despite questions on the medals awarded to him for bravery and heroism.

…Binay’s spokesman Joey Salgado immediately issued an official disclaimer on the contents of the OVP report. Salgado noted that talks on a possible military burial for Marcos originated from the Palace and not from Binay, and neither from any OVP officials involved in the study.

can’t wait to hear from the vp himself what’s what.  can’t wait for some investigative journalist to find out exactly what’s going on.   if the military burial is a palace idea, bakit hindi aminin?  just testing the waters?  makes me think that the unnamed sources are actually from the three-headed hydra.  hello?  hello?  hello?  and what does that say about the president’s “bias” against an honorable burial for marcos?  that it’s not non-negotiable pala?  he’s willing to be overruled kuno?  ano ba yan.  ito man lang, di niya kayang panindigan?

needless to say i agree with senator rene saguisag who was on strictly politics the other night and who is vehemently against a burial for the dictator with any kind of honors.  marcos may have done some good during his long unconstitutional reign but he did a lot more bad.  and for pro-marcos forces to continue to try and re-write martial law and EDSA history and whitewash the marcos image in aid of son bongbong’s presidential ambitions (he should stop denying it dahil obvious naman) is just an insult, plain and simple, to the intelligence of straight thinking filipinos.

which brings me to peter wallace, the australian businessman who has a column in the manila standard, whose take on the marcos burial drew a critical rejoinder from no less than senate president juan ponce enrile.

this is what wallace wrote, may 27:

As to Ferdinand Marcos, I cannot for the life of me understand why there’s any discussion at all about where to bury Marcos. The man was a despot, a mass murderer and torturer, a plunderer, a philanderer (Dovie Beams), and I don’t know what else. If he was a war hero, and recent evidence seems to strongly debunk this, it is completely negated by his subsequent actions.

President Aquino, if he’s truly the moral, honest man he claims (and I certainly believe is) has a no-brainer here. You don’t pass it to anyone else to decide. It’s a simple presidential decision: NO.

googled but couldn’t find enrile’s response — apparently sent to manila standard — except as tweeted by bongbong chum bong daza, and quoted/cited by fellow standard columnist emil jurado on may 31:

…Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, reacting to the comments of Wallace, said:

“President Marcos is dead. He cannot defend himself against scurrilous attacks against him. I have not known him to have sent people to a Siberian concentration camp like Stalin, or to extermination camps such as Auschwitz like Hitler, or to killing fields like Pol Pot, or to mass graves like Saddam Hussein.

“And so, as one who served in his regime for many years and as his secretary, later minister of national defense for almost 16 years, I would like to seek Wallace’s clarification about what he said about Marcos being a mass murderer and torturer.”

…I respect Wallace’s opinion on the issue, but I agree with Enrile who said “I hope Wallace will agree with me that we have to be fair to President Marcos no matter what our individual opinion might be. We also have to be fair to his readers.”

so far wallace hasn’t responded, as jurado points out, rather happily? in yesterday’s column.  na-intimidate kaya?  o ayaw lang pumatol?

but because silence would give pro-marcos forces the impression that the senate prez is right, let me pitch in my two cents.

take note that enrile challenges only the part about marcos being a “mass murderer and torturer.”  so the despot, plunderer, philanderer, dubious war hero accusations stand, and do not need substantiating here.  as for the murder and torture, they were not  on the same scale as those perpetrated by stalin, hitler, the khmer rouge, and hussein but they were nonetheless criminally condemnably iniquitous.

i happen to have access to the  historian alfred w. mccoy‘s latest book on the philippines: POLICING AMERICA’S EMPIRE: The United States, The Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009) yet unavailable in our bookstores.  in the chapter “Martial Law Terror” subheading “State Terror” page 403, he writes:

Initially, Marcos’s military had relied on the legal formalities of arrest and detention to suppress dissent. In issuing Proclamation 1081 to declare martial law in September 1972, Marcos had invoked Article VII of the 1935 Constitution providing that the president “in case of invasion, insurrection, or rebellion . . . may suspend the privileges of the writ of habeas corpus, or place the Philippines . . . under martial law.” In his next paragraph Marcos issued a sweeping order that all suspects arrested from crimes against public order “be kept under detention until otherwise ordered released by me.” (1) In the weeks following this declaration, the regime rounded up some fifty thousand alleged subversives. Although the number of those officially detained fell to six thousand by May 1975, the police continued to make arrests without warrants. Armed with a blanket Arrest Search and Seizure Order (ASSO) or Presidential Commitment Order (PCO), they routinely confined suspects in extralegal “safe houses” for “tactical interrogations”. (2)

During the last years of Marcos’s rule, the police grew increasingly brutal, making torture and salvaging standard procedure against both poltiical dissidents and petty criminals. Recent graduates of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) who joined the constabulary were socialized into a permissive ethos of torture, corruption, and impunity. With unchecked legal authority, limitless funds, and immersion in both psychological and physical torture, a cohort of privileged police commanders formed in the upper ranks of the elite PC anti-subversion squads, the Metrocom Intelligence Service Group (MISG) and Fifth Constabulary Security Unit (CSU). Over time martial law transformed the top police into an empowered elite engaged in systemic human rights abuses and syndicated gambling, drugs, or smuggling. Under Marcos military murder was the apex of a pyramid of terror with 3,257 killed, an estimated 35,000 tortured, and some 70,000 arrested. To subdue the population with terror, some 2,520 victims, an overwhelming 77 percent of Filipinos who died, were salvaged, that is, tortured and killed with the scarred remains dumped for display. (3)

mccoy goes into detail further on, but duties call.  maybe later…

sources:

(1) Joseph Ralston Hayden, The Philippines: A Study in National Development (New York, 1955) 833; Republic of the Philippines, Supreme Court, Martial Law and the New Society in the Philippines (Manila, 1977), 1878-79.

(2) Amnesty International, Report of an Amnesty International Mission to the Republic of the Philippines, 11-28 November 1981 (London, 1982), 1-9, 56-66.

(3) New York Times, 11/10/86; Richard J. Kessler, Rebellion and Repression in the Philippines (New Haven, 1989), 137. To reach the figure 3,527 killed under Marcos, Kessler’s enumeration for 1975-85 is supplemented by adding 93 more “extrajudicial killings” in 1984 from data in Rev. La Verne D. Mercado and Sr. Mariani Dimaranan’s Philippines: Testimonies on Human Rights Violations (Geneva, 1986), 89.