Category: martial law

writing in a “climate of fear”

Speech delivered by National Artist Nick Joaquin at the Philippine PEN Conference, July 1983.

Let me show you fear in a handful of dust—or rather of press releases.

A PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Novelists) member took a handful of press releases to the newspaper offices. The press releases were about this conference we’re having today. But one look at the press releases and the editors froze. They had read the title of this conference.

Another look and the editors shuddered. They had read the list of speakers at this conference: names like professor Gonzales and Senator Diokno and Letty Magsanoc.

Needless to say, it was hard work distributing those press releases. They had generated fear in the offices of the principal newspapers of this country.

But why should such a fear be strongest and most prevalent among those who are, so to put it, on the side of the angels? Those on the opposite side, you would think, have more reasons to be afraid.

But it’s the oppositionists who display a most enjoyable recklessness. Ah, but even if they do not share that fear, they too must live in the climate of fear created by those who have to be oh so careful about what they write and what they publish.

Nervous is the word

This is the climate being created today by the press in the Philippines—not the press of the opposition but the conformist press. The conforming press is so powerful it should be fearless—and yet it doesn’t even sound comfortable.

Nervous would be the word for the principal newspapers today. They’re nervous about what they print and they’re nervous about what they don’t print. They’re nervous about what their columnists may say and they’re nervous about what their columnists don’t say.

And this general nervousness communicates itself to you when you try to visit any of the big newspaper offices: It’s like trying to break into an armed camp.

Now the so-called creative writer may ask what had he got to do with the conditions under which the newspaper writer must perform.

But if it’s the press that creates the cultural climate today, and that climate is one of fear, then even the creative writer, however independent he may think himself to be, is actually also suffering from the conditions that make the newspaper writer so nervous.

Neither safe nor free

The proposition that literature is automatically free, because written in the light of eternity, while journalism is necessarily enslaved to the concerns of the moment—that proposition is false. And even if not false, still indefensible.

No more than other republics can the Republic of Letters exist half-slave and half-free. While his brothers in journalism are in thrall, the creative writer is himself not whole, not safe and not free.

Dear Juan Ponce Enrile

By Sylvia Estrada-Claudio

I hope that after your conviction, all those you intimidated and harmed before, during, and after martial law will find the courage to tell their stories. I hope that you live to hear those stories. 

Last year, the 41st the anniversary of the declaration of martial law, I wrote a long post about you ending with, “Old as you are, you may never be brought to justice. And I doubt your conscience bothers you, enamored as you seem by unearned wealth and the pomp of your dishonorably gained positions. But I remember and will remember, with the hope that history will, like me, condemn.”

How much has changed in less than a year.

And now, as you, a 90-year-old, are confined to a hospital under arrest, let me charge you with what has been in my heart all these years. Because I do accuse you. And not just with the plunder charges the government has filed against you.

I accuse

I accuse you of torture and murder. Not just of people unknown to me, but also of my friends. I accuse you of having committed the crime of plunder long before you stole your PDAF as a senator.

I do this not out of vindictiveness, but out of a need for healing that you owe me and all those who passed through martial law. I do not do this in anger, but in order to share with those who did not go through those years. They need to understand why you and those like you should never ever be allowed to have power again.

Now is a good time. If we did not learn our lesson then, it is time to look back now – time to realize that those who betray the nation are likely to betray it again. As you have done after martial law.

Ah, what catharsis to write this! What a relief to be able to call you names. I remember how you would punish people who criticized you, Marcos, and your cabal. This is what you did to my friend and former Philippine Collegian editor, Abraham Sarmiento, Jr. You imprisoned him for writing editorials critical of martial law. You released him only after you personally expressed displeasure over the editorials. I know because he told me. He stuck to his principles after release. You imprisoned him again and kept him in a cell until his health had so deteriorated he died shortly after his second release. Even as you seemed to recover your career, I often comforted myself with the thought that at least the sacrifices of those who fought the dictatorship allowed me the freedom to criticize you. That I did not do so daily was merely because of my limitations and not out of new-found respect for you.

Do you think I have forgotten my mother’s years of excruciating worry as she watched me go deeper and deeper into the anti-dictatorship struggle? Oh, how her friends would comfort my mother, “Don’t worry, Rita. If she gets caught I will agree to his advances and spend the night with him in exchange for your daughter’s freedom.” Yes, even then we knew that you were a predator as well. You were so lascivious my humble family knew of two people whom you had propositioned. You abused power to the maximum. You made us see with clarity what Hannah Arendt calls “the banality of evil.”

Detention, torture during martial law

And I, like many who lived through those years, knew of your evil as a daily reality. My first job as a young doctor was with a health and human rights organization. I worked with those who had been tortured. Those days, detention and torture were almost a sure-fire combination. So I and a couple of colleagues would make the rounds of the detention centers with every new report of an arrest, hoping that, with a quick response, people would be tortured less, not killed.

We would present ourselves at the detention centers to any officer who would see us. (They never had a real system for us. That would mean some form of accountability.) We had to be brave because we knew at once this marked us as communist enemies. But they also had to have a semblance of regularity. So our requests would be considered. If the officer was a tough psychopath, he would just say “no” outright. But this would give us ammunition to go squealing to international human rights groups.

So we would often have to wait for hours for someone from the Judge Advocate General’s Office (JAGO) to make a decision. I never met anyone from JAGO then. I did often get turned away by that office. If the JAGO turned us away, we would write you. Very rarely, for reasons unknown, you or JAGO would agree to our visit, often after weeks of delay. We always thought the delay was to ensure the torture would continue. Marcos, you and your military believed in torture as an investigation technique. After the torture, you would have us wait a few more days until the physical evidence of torture had disappeared. If there was enough international pressure; if you wanted us off your backs; if our seeing the detainees would not cause you any harm, you let us see them.

But they would tell us their stories. A detainee was lucky if all he or she got was getting beaten within an inch of their life. (I guess they left that for the amateurs called fraternity boys.) Electrocution, water boarding, rape and other forms of sexual harassment, sleep deprivation, hearing your wife being raped, hearing your comrades being tortured, being asked to sit on a block of ice while naked – your minions were so depraved in what they created.

Six weeks ago, labor leader Romy Castillo died of lung cancer. In 1984 your military electrocuted his testicles, put a barbecue stick up his penis, repeatedly submerged his face in a feces-filled toilet bowl. They beat him and played Russian roulette on him. I cannot forget the day, shortly after his ordeal, when I visited him in detention. I will not let you forget his story nor escape your liability for it.

Your military killed my childhood friend Lorenzo Lansang when he was only 19 years old. He was summarily executed in a field in Quezon province. Your hands are smeared in his blood and I will always point out how bloody they are.

I blame you and Marcos for the corruption and brutality of the military and police today. I still keep abreast of the torture situation. And it looks like the police and military have no idea how to interrogate and investigate without varying degrees of torture and intimidation thrown in. They have become addicted to it. All those recent reports of human rights violations by state authorities? Your face is on the logo.

And I remember that your wealth came from the thievery of the martial law years. It does not therefore surprise me that you stole your pork barrel funds.

You find me too dramatic? I could fill entire pages with more stories. And I am not alone. How lucky that I am much younger than you. I and my cohort will live after you and tell our tales.

Karma

Dear Johnny boy, I bet you miss the days when you could have imprisoned me for this. When you could have had your military rape me as revenge. I, on the other hand, am so glad you are under arrest now. Defanged, at last. Hopefully forever.

Unlike you, however, I would not wish torture upon those I truly think are enemies of the people. In short, I would not torture you. I would not deny you seeing your lawyers or doctors or relatives as you did to so many during martial law. It is fitting though that you may suffer in detention more than usual. I do note that you may be experiencing pain because you are old and infirm. I note it.

Your conviction will be so good for our country. It will show that such diabolical behavior will not always be rewarded. That somehow power can end and then a price will have to be paid. It may deter future wrongdoing. It may convince a few more people not to value the things you value.

The only thing I am afraid of is that you are morally incompetent. So much of your record indicates “sociopath.” I fear that it does not matter to you what people think or will remember. It isn’t right that your punishment will be so short because you’re not likely to live 20 more years. That was the amount of time you kept our people subjugated to martial law. So I can only hope that you at least care enough so that the last days of your life can be lived in regret.

I am hoping you care about how history will remember you. You did write and spend for the publication of that lie of a memoir. So I hope that you live to see your conviction. That after your conviction, all those you intimidated and harmed before, during, and after martial law will find the courage to tell their stories. I hope that you live to hear those stories.

But for now, this is my story. And before you go, I want you to know that the other stories will come. It’s called History. It’s called karma.

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. #

 

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.