Revising history
June 4th, 2003
The Report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is all of five volumes, and published by the British publishing house Macmillan with an accompanying CD-ROM.
The report documents South Africa’s experience with apartheid, the policy that for 34 years kept the white minority in power over the black majority in that country through draconian national security laws and gross human rights violations.
The document is the result of hundreds of hearings conducted by the commission after the fall of the apartheid government in the late 1990s, during which it heard the testimonies of over 20,000 witnesses.
The commission heard not only the victims of apartheid but also its perpetrators, in furtherance of the purpose to make all South Africans, whether black or white, aware of what happened during the three decades in which apartheid was in force—and, more important, so they could put that past behind them and begin all over again.
In his foreword to the report, Rev. Desmond Tutu, who was himself involved in the resistance to apartheid, and who chaired the commission, emphasized that the commission was primarily established to provide the basis for authentic national reconciliation.
While Tutu acknowledged that the commission was created to determine accountability—those guilty of criminal acts would have to be punished—its main purpose was to discover the truth about that period of violence and hatred, and to cleanse the wounds it inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people, on victims as well as perpetrators.
“There can be no healing without truth,” said Tutu. “We pray that the wounds that may have been reopened in this process have been cleansed so they will not fester; that some balm has been poured on them and that they will now heal.”
The wounds were considerable. Thousands were tortured and died in the prisons of successive apartheid regimes. Husbands were separated from their wives, children from their parents. But worst of all, the over three decades of apartheid left deep divisions in South African society, as well as a legacy of social and political instability, violence, mutual suspicion and hate.
If all these sound familiar, it’s because these also happened in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship. Although it did not last as long, the wounds that terrible period in Philippine history inflicted on Filipinos have been no less painful, and its impact on Philippine society no less disastrous.
Any comparison with the South African experience ends with the aftermath, however. The South Africans may have a five-volume report to refer to, an authoritative resource which can guide them in understanding the legacies of apartheid and how to deal with them. Filipinos have none.
While there have been many attempts to put the Marcos period in perspective, to understand and evaluate it, and to assign accountability, these have been the results of independent, private research by Filipino and foreign scholars rather than by any official effort by a body with the authority of the entire nation behind it—which was the case with the South African Commission, whose report has been described as “the report of a nation.”
For some reason, there was no initiative after the fall of Marcos similar to the South African (or, for that matter, of other countries like Chile) effort at truth and accountability. It did not seem to have occurred to anyone except some organizations of Marcos-era victims (for example, former political prisoners and their kin) that to effect a closure to that terrible period, the truth needed to be found and told—and told authoritatively by the nation itself via a body that would seek it out, establish accountability, and present to the world and to all Filipinos a record and interpretation of what that period was and what it meant.
As in the South African case, such an effort could have been the authentic basis for the reconciliation that immediately after 1986 became the mantra of the perpetrators of the abuses of the Marcos period, whose idea of reconciliation was national forgetfulness rather than remembrance.
It’s been said often, but the saying does not make it any less true: only knowledge and remembrance can prevent the repetition of the wrongs of the past. Most Filipinos not only do not remember the terrible wrongs of the Marcos period; most of them have no knowledge of these.
That explains why they are in constant danger of reliving it—why journalists and social activists can today still be killed with impunity, why torturers from the Marcos period can be elected to the highest office; why a still politicized military and police has become a major power center in this “democracy”; and why the current Philippine government can pander so shamelessly to the very same superpower that supported Marcos for all the years that he was dictator of the Philippines and inflicting vast suffering on the Filipino people.
It also explains why the name Marcos invites no shame, and why having that name attached to one’s person does not prevent one’s being a provincial governor or congresswoman, unlike in Italy, where the election to parliament of a Mussolini granddaughter provoked widespread disgust, or in Germany, where no one now claims the name Hitler.
It also explains why the 10,000 victims of human rights violations and their kin who have been seeking compensation for the last 17 years for the illegal detention, torture and other forms of violence they endured have yet to see any result in their efforts. It explains why Marcos’s own daughter Imee Marcos has blocked a bill that would recognize the validity of their claims in Congress, on the argument that it falsely condemns the Marcos regime.
The same lack of knowledge and the failure to remember among Filipinos explain the audacity with which a former Marcos ally, Rep. Roque Ablan of Ilocos Norte, filed a bill declaring September 11 President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Day in his province. The passage of the bill, it is widely surmised, would encourage Ablan to file another which would make Marcos’s birthday a national holiday.
How can such offenses to the truth be possible, and even flourish? The answer lies in the vast majority’s lack of knowledge of what the Marcos period was. For many of them, including college students, the Marcos period was merely a minor episode in Philippine history, a period whose impact is debatable, and which could even suggest that dictatorship—a word without meaning for many Filipinos, who think that it meant only being deprived of the right to spit on the streets—could be an option this country can explore.
It is too late for any Truth Commission to do its work. This country can never achieve the closure based on truth that it needs. Only that kind of closure to that terrible period can enable Filipinos to recognize efforts like Ablan’s and Imee Marcos’s campaign for what they are: as attempts to revise history by papering over the crimes of a brutal regime whose legacies of violence, corruption and instability still haunt this country. Without that closure those attempts will not only continue. They will, in time, also succeed.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, June 1, 2003)