LuisTeodoro.com

Nothing the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines can say—that it was Justice Secretary Hernando Perez who first raised his voice, or that he, the ambassador, lost his temper because he could not understand Philippine laws—can justify his shouting at Perez and his pounding on the table.

It was not only undiplomatic; it was also presumptuous and ill mannered. Although ambassadors are supposed to be extensions of the sovereign power of the countries they represent, they are nevertheless guests in the countries of their assignment and are expected to behave accordingly.
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The country marked the 30th anniversary of the declaration of martial law on
September 21. Except for a few, among them Vice President Teofisto Guingona
Jr., the politicians, whether identified with the opposition or with the administration, were conspicuously silent.

It’s easy enough to see why. Some—still too many—of the politicians now in the executive department and the legislature were part of the martial-law regime themselves, or were part of its apparatus of repression.
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Ferdinand Marcos placed the Philippines under martial law 30 years ago to the day. Filipinos came to know about it only two days later, however. Marcos had signed Presidential Proclamation 1081 on the 21st, but implemented it only in the evening of the 22nd. That was when, order cover of night, he had his political opponents and other “enemies of the Republic” arrested, shut down radio and TV stations and newspapers, and erected checkpoints manned by heavily armed troops on the streets of the country’s cities.

On the 23rd, a Saturday, Filipinos awoke to a newspaper—and radio/TV-less country, and with media people, academics, student and labor leaders, as well as Ninoy Aquino and other opposition politicians in jail. By 7 p.m. that day, however, radio and TV were partially restored so anxious citizens could hear Marcos intoning in funereal tones that he had placed the entire country under martial rule two days before.
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I didn’t quite now how to do this paper. The martial law period is a personal matter to me. It is not only because I was imprisoned for seven months, from October 1972 to May 1973. It is also because of the many people I knew, some of them among the brightest and best sons and daughters of the Filipino people–students and poets, artists and doctors, teachers and lawyers, journalists and farmers, workers and small businessmen, nuns and priests, and plain citizens of their generation–who lost their lives, were separated from their loved ones, or suffered torture and other indignities during that brutal period.
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Despite the usual pledge every Philippine government makes (the Arroyo administration is no exception) when it’s in power, Filipinos are still waiting for a big fish to be convicted of corruption. Many of them have tired of waiting, and are voting with their feet by moving elsewhere, even at the risk of rape, as in Malaysia, or of beatings, as in certain countries of the Middle East.

Joseph Estrada is so far the biggest fish of them all, but only in terms of his having been arrested and indicted. Estrada’s indictment was itself unprecedented in the Philippines and, at the time it happened, greeted by a middle class weary of government wrongdoing as a hopeful sign that something would finally be done about the world-class corruption that’s plagued this country since Marcos.
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DAKAR, Senegal—“A global crisis” is how participants in the Annual General Meeting of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) which concluded yesterday in this former French colony described the state of free expression.

The Canadian-based IFEX is a global network of free-expression and press-freedom advocacy groups. It monitors through its Action Alert Network the state of free expression all over the world and issues a weekly communiqué on urgent cases that need to be immediately addressed. The Philippines’ Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility is a member of IFEX and of its governing council.
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The rest of the world may attach a different significance to it nowadays. But September 11 has been a significant date for Filipinos since 1972.

The year marked the declaration of martial law, the first open attempt to place the country under a dictatorship. That declaration also happened in September—on the 21st, or 10 days after the 55th birthday of the one man in Philippine history whose name is indissolubly linked with it, Ferdinand Edralin Marcos.
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