Ablan’s objectivity
June 4th, 2003
Ilocos Norte Rep. Roque Ablan has asked for an “objective” and “intelligent” discussion of his bill to declare September 11 “President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Day” in his province.
This request implies that opposition to his bill has been subjective and unintelligent. It is true that it is extremely difficult to be objective about the one single Philippine president who did more to ruin this country than all his predecessors (the jury is still out on whether his successors, especially the current one, can beat that record).
Despite that difficulty, there are tons of documents and hundreds of scholarly studies available on the corruption during the Marcos period, its human rights violations and the extent of the Marcos wealth that can provide the basis for an intelligent — and quite possibly objective—appraisal of the regime.
These documents include the records of both US and Philippine congressional hearings; evidence presented in US and Philippine courts; materials of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG); and dozens of studies by both Filipino and foreign academics.
Anyone who wants an “objective” appraisal of the Ablan bill can look at these sources so he or she can find out if there is an “objective” basis for the consensus among informed Filipinos that the Marcos regime was corrupt and brutal and led the Philippines to a state of ruin it has so far been unable to rise from.
But Ablan also claimed that he was merely acting at the behest of the people of Ilocos Norte, the provincial board of which has passed a resolution asking him to sponsor such a bill. That resolution in part said that Marcos is “a source of pride and continuing aspirations [sic] for the people of Ilocos Norte.”
The sentiments in that resolution are those of the members of the provincial board of Ilocos Norte, and of Ablan himself. But he claims that they are also the views of the people of Ilocos Norte. Ablan did not present any “objective” basis for that conclusion, in the mistaken belief that the sentiments of those who govern them are equally those of the governed. It is of course possible that Ablan and company read the sentiments of their constituencies correctly. But that is no argument for his bill, but for the need for public education on Marcos and the martial-law period and its impact on this country.
Ablan himself, however, is convinced that Marcos did “many good things for the country.” He cited, among others, Marcos’s construction of the Philippine Heart Center, the Lung Center and the National Kidney Institute. He could have also mentioned Marcos’s emphasis on roads and bridges, which would include those he built in the Ilocos provinces.
The centers Ablan mentioned were indeed built, and the marvelous roads of Ilocos are proof that even kickback-built roads can survive both traffic and weather. But Ablan could have also mentioned, and for obvious reasons did not, the 29 presidential rest houses Marcos built all over the country the minute he assumed absolute power in 1972.
These rest houses include Malacañang of the North, the Sarrat guest house, the Batac guest house, and the Currimao guest house in Ilocos Norte; the presidential guest house and the San Fabian rest house in Pangasinan; the Talaga guest house in Bataan; the Romualdez mansion in Bulacan; the Bamboo House in Cavite; the Palace in the Sky in Tagaytay; the Canlubang presidential house in Laguna; and the presidential mansion and the Kagayonan beach resort in Albay.
In Imelda Marcos’s home province of Leyte there is the Nipa Hut, the Olot rest house, and the Green House among others. There are others all over the Visayas and in Manila. These rest houses and presidential retreats were built with the people’s money, just like the Heart Center et al. Unlike the latter, they were reserved only for the First Family and kin—and such close associates as Ablan himself.
At considerable public expense, Marcos built at least as much for his own ease and welfare as for the Filipino people’s—for whom, Ablan says, he built the Heart Center, etc.
The worth of any regime is not measured in construction alone, however, but with other criteria as well. Before Marcos, corruption had been endemic in Philippine officialdom. But Marcos brought official corruption to new heights. His distinction was that he was bold enough to go beyond the standard norms of plunder in Philippine government and politics, and amassed within the years he was in office enough wealth to make him the world’s richest man, thus establishing a world record of sorts.
Former senator Jovito Salonga, the first chairman of the PCGG, identified three main (there were others) sources of the Marcos loot (variously estimated at a low of US$10 billion to a high of $30-40 billion). First, Marcos is alleged to have diverted to his accounts, and on a vast, unprecedented scale, foreign economic assistance to the Philippines which if used for the purposes they were intended could have alleviated the poverty that afflicted much of the Philippine population.
Still according to Salonga, during his first term (1965-69) Marcos also diverted military aid from the United States to his own pocket, including the discretionary funds the US government put at his disposal as a reward for his support for the US war in Vietnam. Thirdly, there were the public works contracts (which included those for the construction of those wonderful roads in the Ilocos), from which Marcos is alleged to have received large kickbacks.
The availability of these and other data supporting claims that the Marcos period deserves the universal condemnation of the people of this country is in sharp contrast to the unavailability of data proving otherwise.
The question for Ablan and company is whether, as he claims, Marcos did “good things for the country”—or if, on balance, whatever good he did was vastly outweighed by the world-class theft of public funds and other resources and the brutality that characterized his regime. But to this question they reply only with the vaguest responses, and claims about what the Ilocos public supposedly wants.
This basic question can be expanded into even more specific issues. Do all the roads Marcos built, for example, outweigh the fact that during the martial-law period over 100,000 were arbitrarily arrested for a range of political offenses ranging from rumor-mongering to rebellion and subversion, or mere suspicion of having committed these and other crimes?
Does the construction of the Heart Center make up for the arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, murder and disappearance of thousands of men and women all over the country, and the permanent damage the regime did to such institutions as the police and the military, which have since become separate power centers in this country?
Does Marcos’s establishment of diplomatic relations with socialist countries (for which he has been praised by certain “socialists”) make any less worse the corruption and poverty his appropriation of public funds assured?
If Ablan indeed wants an objective and intelligent discussion of his bill, he can begin by addressing these questions—or at least by presenting evidence that a Marcos Day of worship is what the people of Ilocos Norte want. The problem is that in Ablan & Co.’s cosmos, one is objective and intelligent only when one agrees that Marcos was the best thing that ever happened to this country. To argue otherwise is to be the opposite.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, June 3, 2003)