Category: martial law

Communities of memory

By Randy David

A few days ago, I participated in a forum to explore the purpose and methodology of establishing a “museum of memory” that would contain and preserve memories from the dark period of martial law. The concept behind this is prompted by the strong feeling that today’s young people hardly have an idea of what happened during the 14 years of the Marcos dictatorship. The premise, of course, is that the memory of this period must not be allowed to fade because, if Santayana is correct, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

On the initiative of the Edsa People Power Commission and the National Historical Commission, three specialists from Latin America were invited to share their insights and experiences on the establishment of museums, parks, and monuments commemorating the struggle against dictatorship and state violence in their respective countries. The three guests—Eugenia Ulfe of Peru, Patricia Tappata of Argentina, and Lelia Perez of Chile—spoke with great wisdom about the complex struggle to recover the voices of the countless victims of repression and their sometimes frustrating quest for justice when the dictatorship ended.

The exercise of memory, they said, is but one of the four essential tasks of a post-authoritarian government if it is concerned with healing and reconciling the national community. The other three are: truth, justice, and reparation. Listening to them, one realizes that the main reason we have been poor at remembering is because, in the first place, we failed to document in a sustained and systematic way what happened during that period, particularly in the remote towns and among the less prominent sectors of our society. That failure has left an empty space in our own consciousness.

The idea of setting up a process to hear the victims and to confront the perpetrators of state violence was from the outset rejected as divisive. The successive coup attempts launched against Cory Aquino’s presidency served as stern warnings that the government would be making a big mistake if it started digging up inconvenient truths about martial law.

Without anything approximating a truth commission, the most that could be produced was a list of the victims, and even this was incomplete. Because some of the central figures of martial law were part of the new government, it was difficult to bring any of the military leaders responsible for the tortures, disappearances, and illegal detentions to trial. Later, a general amnesty formalized the self-induced amnesia that set in almost as a precondition to the survival of the new government.

Reparation was one area where something valuable could have been accomplished. Yet even this was denied the victims. When the latter sued the Marcoses before American courts demanding compensation for the victims of human rights violations, judgments in their favor could not be enforced without the consent of the Philippine government that had claimed prior rights over all Marcos properties. To this day, the government has refused to compensate the victims of human rights violations during martial law. Yet, it did not think twice about paying the debts owed to financial institutions that were incurred by the Marcos regime.

The three Latin American guests said that symbolic reparation is often more important to achieving closure than material reparation. This entails giving the victims and their kin the chance to recover their dignity and validate their experiences. This can only be done if their stories are allowed to be freely told, collected, and preserved. These stories must be situated in the broader context of the events that marked that period. Someone’s imprisonment or torture or rape in the hands of military captors must not be treated as a cause for stigma or shame, to be buried as a family secret. Only in this sense can truth be redemptive.

From all this, wrote the Jewish philosopher Avishai Margalit in his thought-provoking work, “The ethics of memory,” we may glean an ethics of remembering that must be distinguished from the politics of memory or the psychology of memory. An ethics of memory implies an obligation to remember and also to forget. It involves complex attitudes and sentiments that come with what he terms “thick” relations—relations that are “moored in shared memory.”

“Thick relations are grounded in attributes such as parent, friend, lover, fellow-countryman.” The operative themes that mark such relationships are those of loyalty and betrayal, gratitude and love. “Thin relations, on the other hand, are backed by the attribute of being human.” These are our relationships to the “stranger and remote.” Here, the operative themes are usually those of respect and humiliation. Margalit says that ethics refers to how we should live with those who are bound to us by shared memory. Morality refers to the rules that govern our relationships to the rest of humanity.

Read in this context, it becomes clear that the project of a museum of memory has to confront the tricky issues posed by the ethics of remembering. This cannot be done by a committee working separately from the communities of memory that alone must decide what to remember and what to forget. The purpose must be neither merely to exhibit the trauma of the past nor to demonize the perpetrators. If it is to succeed, a memory museum cannot have any other purpose than to reawaken the values of loyalty, forgiveness, gratitude, and solidarity that hold us together as a people bound by thick relations.

display imelda’s jewels

the pcgg wants to display the famous imelda jewels in the metropolitan museum, as tourist attraction, preparatory to selling them to the highest bidders.  fun-ny the reactions.  the prez is hemming and hawing, he’s not into jewelry, what if merong fake, nakakahiya, and is this the right time to sell?  tourism sec jimenez is cool to the idea, notoriety is not the best way to attract tourists.  imelda, of course, is claiming the jewels should be returned to her, the rightful owner, and in the next breath agreeing that they deserve to be displayed.  but de quiros takes the cake: his concern is, what will the world say?

You exhibit the jewels in hopes of luring in the curious, the curious will ask about something even more curious: If Imelda is a thief, indeed if Imelda is one very big thief, how come she is still free? How come she is not in jail?

The DOT does what Bautista suggests and it will give new, and not very savory, meanings to “It’s more fun in the Philippines.” Among them, stealing is more fun in the Philippines. Thieves have more fun in the Philippines.

whatever the world will say is something the world has long been saying about us, so what else is new?  and those are valid questions that pcgg chairman andres bautista has answers to:

He said the Office of the Ombudsman could go after fixers in the PCGG. “We have filed cases against them at the Ombudsman and some of them are pending in the Sandiganbayan,” he said.

Bautista also blamed the gridlock in the court cases against the Marcoses for the PCGG’s disappointing performance.

“Most of the cases are being dragged to death in court. The failure of the PCGG in the past is mirrored by the failure of the courts. Our cases are over 20 years old—over 260 of them. The courts should not have been allowed to indefinitely delay these cases. Hopefully, with the new Ombudsman, the new Chief Justice and the secretary of justice, we will have a better output with our cases,” he said.

in fairness, de quiros makes an about-face in the end:

Maybe we need to parade Imelda’s jewels to the public, if not to the tourists, to remind us of what we failed to do. But more than that, we need to build a museum of horrors, if only in the public mind, to remind us, as we approach Friday next week, what of we still need to do.

how about, let’s do it for us, and let’s do it for the tourists.  let’s not sell the jewels just for cash that government would quickly spend, and then it’s gone.  jewels are forever, the value appreciates, notorious or not, and these jewels are special because they are fabulous glittering proof that we didn’t make it up, imelda’s conspicuous ostentatious outrageous consumption using the people’s monies in a time of poverty and terror in the time of ferdinand.  those jewels are for passing on to the next generations as historical artifacts of the conjugal dictatorship.

if we display the jewels, the tourists will come.  and not just foreigners, but filipinos, too, from far and wide, to see for themselves the famous three collections: the 300 or so pieces that were left behind in the palace, the 400 or so that they carried out but lost to u.s. customs officials in hawaii, and the 60 pieces, including a 37-carat diamond, that philippine customs officials confiscated from a greek, demetriou roumeliotes, on his way out of the country soon after EDSA.

that’s more than 750 pieces of tiaras, necklaces, watches, earrings, brooches, bracelets, of rubies, emeralds, jade, pearls, and diamonds, some from gucci, van cleef and arpels, bulgari and philippe patek.  that would be quite a spread and quite a sight to behold.  cleverly curated — throw in the shoes and gowns and soaps and perfumes as well — that would be quite a show, an imeldific extravaganza for the ages, the one, the only, in the world!

*

Jewels of Imelda Marcos, The Story
Imelda’s Jewelry
Imelda’s Amazing Jewelry
Imelda’s ‘crown jewels’ to go under the hammer 2003
Imelda Marcos on Seized Jewelry: It’s All Mine 2005
She’s Baaack! Imelda Marcos Gets $310M Jewels Returned 2009
Arroyo stops auction of Imelda Marcos jewelry 2010

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.”

Read on…

miriam eyeballs, gloria blinks, ermita fumbles

interesting, the sudden lifting of martial law in maguindanao effective saturday 9pm.   what a relief, yes, but also what a surprise.   with hostage situations erupting in basilan and agusan del sur while congress was holding that joint session to vote on proc1959, all the signs pointed to a set-up to systematically desensitize first the people of mindanao, then maybe of the visayas and luzon, to military rule for the sake of peace and order in the run-up to the may 2010 elections.   and with gloria checking into st. luke’s for a check-up over the weekend, no one was expecting any kind of change in the new status quo.

so what are we to think?   are we to believe gma’s cohorts that suddenly it came to pass that the objectives of military rule were attained, mission accomplished, time to lift martial law, everybody happy?   parang fairy tale, if you ask me.    just yesterday, friday, press secretary cerge remonde was being nasty, accusing anti-martial law people in congress and in the streets of sympathizing with andal ampatuan jr. and warning that if the supreme court listened to them and ruled proc1959 unconstitutional, it would make the ampatuans very happy indeed.

UNFORTUNATELY, a vocal minority in the combined chambers of Congress have joined agitators outside the Batasang Pambansa Complex, in condemnation of the President. The crisis in Maguindanao, for them, has become fresh fodder for their political agenda.

Are they now shedding copious tears in sympathy with Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr., others in the clan, and some 160 individuals who have been arrested or are about to be arrested for planning or for participating in the gruesome massacre?

It is understandable that the Ampatuan clan should petition the Supreme Court to declare the Maguindanao martial law unconstitutional. Their awesome power to defy lawful authority is slipping away, and their ability to evade criminal responsibility is in jeopardy. But what are we to make of the politicians who have taken the side of this powerful family?

They do not say it out loud, but a Supreme Court decision favorable to their cause could nullify the arrest of the suspects and may render the evidence against them inadmissible.

i wonder what it was like for gloria, having to leave st. luke’s for a couple of hours or so just to preside over that national security council meeting and act upon the recommendation to lift martial law.   she must have asked (if i were president i would have asked), why can’t it wait til monday?

why not indeed.   i think because the order came from obama on high, no less.   i think that miriam’s conspiracy theory, involving the notorious CIA, hit too close to home.

“This is part of a script. Who are orchestrating the events? It is obvious there is a conspiracy, a meeting of the minds. I have reason to believe that this (conspiracy) is not a random development. They’re not just happening. One, the timing is suspicious, second, there is no such pattern of one after the other in the history of this province,’’ she said.

…In a briefing for Senate reporters after attending the budget hearing of the Upper Chamber, Santiago said the conspiracy could consist of the beleaguered Ampatuan clan; the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); a cabal of a criminal group that would benefit the secretaries of the Department of National Defense (DND) or Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG); and the military establishment.

… Santiago said the Ampatuans, one of the two strong tribal clans fighting for supremacy in Maguindanao, could be working out a deal where in they would prefer to be charged with the crime of rebellion rather than multiple murder. Rebellion is difficult to prove and carries a lighter penalty. In case of conviction on rebellion charges, Santiago said the Ampatuans could be given parole or pardon.

She said the CIA could become a plain pawn in the Mindanao game “so they could do what the Philippine government is preventing them from doing so.”

and i’m not alone in thinking that obama had something to do with the lifting of martial law.   just saw this tweet by manolo:

mlq3 Billy Esposo thinks Madame had votes in SC and Congress to OK martial law, it’s Washington that made her revoke it.

and no doubt secretary ermita wasn’t too happy about it ’cause, well, he fumbled the announcement.    after his pasakalye, that things were returning to normal in maguindanao, the criminal justice system is now working, local government in place, armm governor replaced, he asked na for questions from the press, haha, someone had to remind him that he had forgotten “the most important item”: that gloria had agreed to lift martial law.   ano ‘yon, senior moment?   lol.    more like a freudian slip of the tongue, but in reverse, like selective forgetting?   a sign of subconscious, if fleeting, resistance, at the very least.

just goes to show what puppets gloria and her gang are, dancing to the beat of washington, ora mismo, like it or not.