Her father’s daughter
July 20th, 2003
I belong to the decades-old organization of former political prisoners which goes by the jaw-breaking name Samahan ng Mga Ex-Detainees Laban sa Detensiyon at Para sa Amnestiya, or SELDA.
SELDA initiated the class action suit in Honolulu which over ten years ago won former political prisoners a $2.3 billion award to be sourced from the Marcos Estate.
No one among the 10,000 claimants in whose behalf SELDA lawyer Romeo Capulong filed that suit has seen a cent of that award. Few of those still with SELDA expect to.
But another group whose members broke from SELDA in the early 1990s, which calls itself Claimants 1081, is more optimistic. Apparently its leaders—at least that’s the impression one gets from the statements of its spokesman—have already decided in their minds who will get what and how much.
Because this group represents 3,000 out of the 10,000 original claimants, it expects 30 percent of the $2.3 billion. The group hopes to get at least part of that amount by Christmas this year, or on December 10 at the earliest.
In furtherance of the truth that experience may not be the best teacher, it has even worked out a scheme of distributing the money. It has allotted P1.5 million to the relatives of victims of forced disappearances, and P700,000 for victims of torture.
So far it has not gone any further by, say, allotting P200,000 for the loss of an eye, or P150,000 for the loss of a finger, or P100,000 for psychological trauma—or perhaps P75,000 for victims of rape?
But it would not be surprising if it did, so confident is it that it will see the money by Christmas. One of the reasons for its confidence is one of its members: Presidential Chief of Staff Rigoberto Tiglao. Tiglao is a former leftist who was arrested in 1972, who responded to that experience by promptly repudiating whatever it was he stood for.
Thus did this group’s spokesman wax enthusiastic in an interview with the media, heaping praises on President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Tiglao, who incidentally will be the group’s featured speaker in a conference it is holding from August 2 to 3. The group hopes to hear from Tiglao himself what prospects there are for its members’ being compensated.
SELDA has not drawn up a schedule similar to that of Claimants 1081. It does not think that the issue is about money, but about justice. Simply put so even morons can understand the concept, the class suit was filed to make a point, in the absence of any effort by any of the governments that succeeded Marcos’ to hold it to account. The point is to punish the guilty for their monstrous crimes during the martial law period, at least by exacting from them what they value most, which is money.
Of course the PCGG tried and has been trying for over 17 years to get its hands on the Marcos wealth. But it would have served justice as well as history better if a Truth Commission had been established, in the manner of South Africa’s Truth Commission. Such a Commission would have looked into the abuses of the martial law period, identified those accountable for them, and described it on the basis of documentary and other evidence as a period of violence, abuse and terror presided over by an usurper, thief and murderer that should not be repeated.
As I said in an earlier column, without such an accounting and official inquiry, the Marcos period can never achieve closure, and will continue to haunt the country as revisionist historians and its partisans in government and Philippine society try to re-invent it.
That is exactly what we are witnessing now: one more attempt at the re-invention of martial law in the wake of the Supreme Court decision calling $658 million of the Marcos assets as ill-gotten wealth, and therefore forfeitable by the government.
The news from Congress is that the amount can be waylaid by the usual House crooks in the intricacies of the legislative process, with the enthusiastic assistance of Marcos’ own daughter Imee Marcos and her allies to block or emasculate House Bill 4535, which seeks to compensate Marcos-era victims, and which could very easily source the funds needed from the $658 million.
It is even possible that Imee Marcos herself and her Marcosista retinue will end up benefiting from at least part of the very amount the Supreme Court says was illegally acquired by her family.
Although there is a sizeable group of congressmen supporting House Bill 4535, the distinct possibility is that it will be overwhelmed by a combination of Marcos partisans and those who for a number of reasons preceded by a peso sign will find it in their interest to team up with the likes of Imee Marcos of Ilocos Norte, Rodolfo Albano of Isabela, Roque Ablan and Salacnib Baterina of Ilocos Sur, and Jose Solis of Sorsogon.
The spectacle of a Marcos daughter and her allies benefiting from money the Supreme Court says was illegally acquired by Marcos would not be unusual in this country, where in the normal course of events the innocent are punished and the guilty rewarded, and heroes vilified as villains while villains are held up as role models.
Precisely because justice is as rare as an honest Camp Crame guard in this country, SELDA doesn’t think former political prisoners will ever get any of the money—or the even more important compensation of the culprits’ confessing to their crimes, and recognizing the wrongs they committed on the now aging former political prisoners and their kin, as well as on the entire country.
Having said this, it must be said that not all the victims of the martial law period are among the 10,000 claimants who registered as petitioners in the Honolulu class suit.
I know of several political prisoners who never bothered to file any claim. One did not do so because he not only did not want to relive all over again the brutal torture he suffered at the hands of one of the Arroyo government’s heroes, former congressman Rodolfo Aguinaldo. He also feels that to do so would be to put a price on his commitment to his resistance to the dictatorship, and to a sovereign and just society.
I am sure that a boy of 14 who arrived at the Camp Crame gym detention center in October 1972 with his arm broken in two places by his NBI captors did not file a claim either, and that neither did his fellow community activists—mere children most of them—who similarly experienced the brutality of a regime sustained by bayonets.
But not only “politicals” were victimized by the martial law period, during which the injustice already rampant in Philippine society achieved new lows. Ordinary, non-political people were similarly victimized, for example a newly-arrived Samareno who for some reason had earned the ire of a Constabulary sergeant.
The sergeant led a raid on the one-room shanty the Samareno was renting in one of the slums of Quezon City, planted a rusty pistol on his person, and took him to Crame where he was savagely beaten. Detained indefinitely, the Samareno was eventually abandoned by his starving wife and children. When finally released after several months he had lost his entire family.
It is not only for its disastrous policies that the martial law regime should be judged, but for what it did to people. It did not only detain, torture, and murder many of them. It also forced families apart, destroyed numerous, otherwise productive lives, and savaged an entire generation of the best and brightest sons and daughters of the Filipino people.
It was to make the entire country understand these monstrous crimes against ordinary men women, and children, as well as why they happened and who were responsible for them, that SELDA filed the class suit against the Marcos estate over a decade ago.
In her public appearances seemingly urbane, sophisticated and even civilized, Congresswoman Imee Marcos, who is likely to stand for election to the Senate in 2004, is apparently clueless about the human cost of the martial law period. She is her father’s daughter after all.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, July 19, 2003)
Imee Marcos is anything but clueless; she is, in fact, brilliant and probably one of the few in Congress who use logic rather than rhetoric.
Except for a few, Filipinos view martial law as an evil per se because the only brand of democracy is the American type, which is in many ways a mockery of genuine democracy. Ferdinand Marcos is the only president the Philippines has had who had a real and clear political platform. His tragedy is that he eventually became a victim of the eco-political system that he wanted to reform through DISCIPLINE of oneself and self-policing of the ranks.
Admittedly, the martial law years were played out at great human cost, but isn’t that true for all the presidents from Aguinaldo down to the latest president, that joke of a president called Gloria Arroyo?