NUJP did hold its usual “media jam” this year, during which, however, the gaiety was in constant danger of being overwhelmed by the uncertainties of the decade, specially the past two and a half years.

The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) launched a page on its website calling attention to, and demanding action on, the continuing killing of journalists and media workers, the use of criminal libel to silence journalists, and the failure of the Philippines, almost uniquely among the countries of Asia, to pass a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.

The Freedom Fund for Filipino Journalists (FFFJ) released a petition for signature by press freedom activists and advocates, whether individuals or organizations, urging the passage of the FOI bill pending in Congress, but with the caveat that any attempt to saddle an FOI law with a right of reply provision should be opposed as a threat to press freedom.

The pessimism evident in the activities and statements marking World Press Freedom Day did not take shape only after the Ampatuan Massacre. It’s been in place since a trend towards media and press liberalization worldwide was reversed by the events following the attack on the World Trade Center and other US targets on September 11, 2001, and replaced by human rights and press repression in the name of anti-terrorism.

In the Philippines, to curry US favor to support her staying in power, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who only a few months earlier had assumed the Presidency thanks (or no thanks) to EDSA 2, used the occasion to pledge unconditional support to whatever initiatives US President George W. Bush would take to punish the suspected perpetrators.

The regime focus on staying in power inevitably led to attempts at the curtailment of free expression, culminating in the 2006 declaration of a state of emergency, during which it threatened several media organizations with inciting to sedition charges and other harassments including the surveillance of their offices and putting them in a list of “Enemies of the State.” Arroyo’s husband Jose Miguel paralleled these attempts at repression by filing 11 libel suits against 46 journalists.

The killing of journalists also spiked during the nine-year watch of Arroyo as a consequence of the regime’s unstated but operational policy of indifference to the murders even as its military goon squads were orchestrating the extra-judicial killing of human rights and political activists.

The result was the significant erosion of the press freedom and the freedom of expression, including the right of assembly, the Constitution guarantees, with the country steadily falling in the ranking of international press freedom and free expression watch groups. The media and civil society organizations campaigning for a freedom of information act continued their advocacy despite the hostile environment for free expression, but were repeatedly repulsed, the last instance being the fraudulent pledge to support an FOI bill by the 14th Congress while being opposed to it, resulting in the reconciled bill’s not even being discussed at all.

But not all the problems of the Philippine press have been due to external factors. What has been evident since the martial law period is that some of the most critical of these problems are also internally-sourced.

External assaults against the press are continuing, among them the killing of journalists for their work (the most recent occurred four days before World Press Freedom Day); the surge in the number of criminal libel suits against journalists despite the October 2011 UN declaration that the Philippine libel law is excessive and incompatible with international human rights law; the increasing difficulties in accessing government-held information as a result of such State acts as the refusal of the Supreme Court to release the Statements of Assets and Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) of the justices; the barriers to accessing the SALNs of other officials imposed by former Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez; and other forms of harassments such as physical assaults, verbal abuse, threats and the denial of access to press conferences.

These are by themselves bad enough. But unremarked is the even worse consequence of these assaults’ enhancement of the built-in constraints in media organizations on the coverage of events and issues crucial to citizen understanding of the perennial crises — the egregious human rights violations, the worsening hunger and poverty among millions of Filipinos, the deficiency and even absence of both simple and social justice, the epidemic of violence, the political instability and the corruption in both the public and private spheres — that have afflicted the Philippines and Filipinos for decades.

In a turn of events that can only be described as bizarre, press freedom is actually being abused in the reporting, emphasis and focus on events irrelevant to that need, among them the glee with which the press and media follow celebrity trivia, including who is dating whom, and most particularly who Benigno Aquino III has been seen with; their enthusiasm for sensationalizing crime, violence and sex; the flippancy with which they depict those individuals in the news who are unable to retaliate, such as the poor and powerless; and the sacrifice of accuracy and fairness for the sake of speed and exclusives.

The “mainstream” or dominant press does report the scandals, controversies and atrocities that almost daily add to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Filipino flesh is already subjected to. But the same freedom is hardly utilized to look into the root causes of the Philippine crisis, its exercise being limited to reporting and describing the symptoms of the disease. That task has not surprisingly been left to the tenacious survivors of the 123-year-old alternative press tradition (which began with the publication of La Solidaridad in February, 1889), among other reasons because the political and economic interests that control the dominant press prevent its doing so.

Press freedom does have to be defended from external threats. . But equally important in the Philippine context today is practitioner determination, whether he or she is in the mainstream or the alternative wing of the press, to overcome as well those constraints on the duty to provide the information and analyses a country in crisis sorely needs.

(BusinessWorld)

Among the reasons could have been UP’s being a secular institution rather than a religious one, and the claim, made through the media by adherents of “godly” education, alleging the infestation of the philosophy department of its then College of Liberal Arts with atheists, who were also accused of being communists.

UP of course cannot but be secular. It is a State university with no allegiance to any religion. On the other hand, most if not all of the supposed atheists in the then philosophy department were actually agnostics (they didn’t think the existence of God could be proven) rather than atheists (who believe there is no God), and most of the faculty adherents of a school of philosophy known as logical positivism rather than, and antithetical to, Marxism.

But as the political, economic and social crisis of Philippine society intensified, both professors and students became more and more involved in identifying the roots of that crisis and in the search for its solution. UP was no longer just a “godless” university, it was also thought to be the lair of activism, specifically of leftist, even communist activism.

Not a few families kept their children from UP for this reason, although, unknown to them, in most of the other schools to which they sent their children including the most “exclusive” (read expensive), a good number of the faculty and many of the students were by the late 1960s also immersed in the same process. By the time Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, student and faculty activism was a national phenomenon, as part of the larger movement for change and democratization the declaration of martial law was meant to stop (although the proclamation was also meant to ensure that Marcos would remain in power beyond 1973).

The martial law period did achieve that purpose. Through arrests, torture, extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances as well as other means, not only was an entire generation decimated during the 14 years in which the country was under authoritarian rule. By the time the Marcos regime was overthrown, the members of the next, often without their knowing it, had also been intimidated into not even thinking about involvement in any authentic movement for change, and into, instead, concentrating on their personal advancement . Martial law had instilled not only fear but also a focus on self-aggrandizement, and was in that sense eminently successful in instilling the values of selfishness among many of the young men and women who went into college by the time the Marcos dictatorship was overthrown.

This was more than evident in the University of the Philippines, where the activism of the 1960s and early 1970s had given way to complacency and indifference to social issues by the 1980s. Of course remnants of activist commitment survived among the members of the generation that came after that of the 1960s. But the waning of interest in social and political issues was apparent in, among others, the decline of participation in mobilizations for, say, opposition to the renewal of the US military bases agreement in the late 1980s. The apathy to taking to the streets continued in the 1990s, despite wide-spread awareness of the many problems of Philippine society among students, the apathy being driven by a sense that once one graduates, one can either go abroad or into call center work anyway. Education does open doors otherwise closed to those denied the same opportunity.

One can argue that the Estrada years and the scandals and atrocities of the “Arroyo decade” resulted in, among others, an upsurge in student activism. But the assumption that that activism is primarily based in the University of the Philippines may not be sustainable. Progressive student organizations in UP remain small. Their mobilizations on UP campuses in support of various causes or against certain policies have not always been successful. Some also suffered substantial losses during the last student elections in UP Diliman and other UP System universities. It can also be argued that the center of gravity of the student movement, such as it is, has shifted from UP to other schools.

And yet, as UP Student Regent Krissy Conti said in a statement posted online this April, “There is an established trend of UP students’ being accosted, harassed, and attacked by (government security forces).” Such harassments, and even arrests, continuing detention, and in the case of social work students Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño, enforced disappeartances, have taken place when UP students are doing field work, sharing classroom knowledge with depressed communities, or attending seminars and workshops in the provinces.

Two UP Manila students were shadowed by the military last April, apparently on mere suspicion that one of them was the daughter of an alleged New People’s Army leader. Eight UP Los Banos students on field work in a Batangas town were accosted by military elements who demanded that they submit their names and surrender the video footage they were taking of the locality to them. Three UP Diliman students doing their practicum in Porac, Pampanga, “were made to stand under the midday sun for an hour while they were accused of being members of the New People’s Army (NPA), and verbally and physically abused by the soldiers,” said Conti.

In addition to these incidents, other UP students and alumni have been arrested and detained by the military, prompting the University Council of UP Diliman (the policy-making body of UP constituent universities made up of assistants professors and up) to issue last December a statement demanding the release of detained UP students and alumni, as well as respect for academic freedom and other rights. The Council noted “a disconnect between how certain agencies perceive the University and its necessary role in a society in crisis.”

The incidents seem to be premised on the mistaken assumption that every UP student is either part of the political infrastructure of the Communist Party of the Philippines and/ or of the New People’s Army, if not NPA guerillas themselves. But they also indicate the State’s failure, particularly on the part of the security forces that are solely focused on counter-insurgency, to understand the role of universities, including a State-owned and -controlled one like UP, in examining the state of the country through research (which includes field work) as part of the process of finding the solutions to its problems, and the departure from conventional and failed approaches that may result from it.

If such efforts by the young as undertaking field research and sharing classroom knowledge with the communities — commitments at the very heart of what universities should be doing in a society in perpetual crisis — are met today with the same forms of repression perfected by the Philippine police and military during the martial law period, what hope is there in addressing this country’s problems except in organized resistance to the forces preventing the discovery, much more the implementation, of the needed solutions?

(BusinessWorld)

Occupying the number one place in the 2012 Index — i.e., it has the most number of journalists killed for which the perpetrators have not been punished — is Iraq. In second place is Somalia, followed by the Philippines at number three. Behind the Philippines in fourth place is Sri Lanka. In fifth place is Colombia, followed by Nepal in sixth, and Afghanistan in seventh.

The company in which the Philippines finds itself are countries that are either besieged by sectarian violence and foreign occupation (Iraq and Afghanistan); civil war (Colombia); are already failed states (Somalia); or recovering from civil war and ethnic conflict (Sri Lanka and Nepal); International observers puzzle over the continuing killing of journalists and the high level of impunity in the Philippines, the country being (officially) a democracy and not being (officially) at war.

The Philippines was sixth in the Index in early 2009, but was ranked third in 2010 because of the November 23, 2009 Ampatuan Massacre and the continuing state failure to resolve the over 100 murders of journalists that have taken place in these isles of fear since 1986. Last year, the slow progress of the Ampatuan Massacre trial, and the killing of environmental advocate Gerry Ortega in Palawan and the suspected masterminds’ still being at large despite a warrant for their arrest, helped keep the Philippines in third place.

The Macapagal-Arroyo administration used to dismiss the Philippine ranking and UN Special Raporteur Philip Alston’s 2008 report that the Philippine police and military were responsible for most of the extra-judicial killings in the country as so much black propaganda, with its secretary of justice at one point declaring that Alston was “just a muchacho (houseboy),” and suggesting that the CPJ “jump in the lake.”

In contrast, there has so far been no reaction to the 2012 Index on the part of the Aquino III administration, despite the Index’s declaration that “even after the horrific 2009 massacre in Maguindanao province that claimed the lives of 30 (sic) journalists and more than 20 other victims, Philippine authorities have yet to effectively combat impunity.” A few local media organizations took note of the Philippine ranking, while plaintively asking how it could be improved.

The answer has been known for over a decade: the country’s ranking could improve only if impunity were ended or at least minimized, meaning if the perpetrators and masterminds of the killing of journalists are identified, tried, and punished.

Doing so has been exceedingly difficult, because of the weaknesses of the justice system, which include its glacially-slow processes; the collusion between the police and local officials; these worthies’ being themselves the masterminds and/or perpetrators; and, as starkly demonstrated by the “horrific” Ampatuan Massacre, the existence of warlord clans with private armies consisting of paramilitaries, bought and paid for police and military personnel, and other goons in over a hundred places in the Philippines. The Aquino III administration, however, has refused to dismantle the warlord armies and paramilitaries because they’re used to augment government military forces in counter-insurgency operations.

The killing of journalists has continued during the Aquino III administration as a result, with four killed in the line of duty during Aquino’s first year in office by the usual suspects (hired guns including police and military personnel in the pay of local officials). Although not killed for their work, the killing of at least three other journalists was nevertheless also a telling indication of state failure to protect citizens, including human rights and political activists, who also continue to be harassed, threatened and killed.

Significantly, since 2011 there has also been a rise in the number of libel suits against journalists despite a declaration by the United Nations Human Rights Committee in October that year that the Philippine libel law criminalizing libel is incompatible with the international human rights covenants to which the Philippines is a signatory. Various forms of harassments, including threats, physical assaults, illegal detention, and, in one instance, the burning of a radio station, have also occurred with increasing regularity.

Because Aquino III promised during the 2010 campaign for the Presidency of the Philippines to defend press freedom, enhance government transparency, and stop the killing of journalists, one would have expected his administration to have taken concrete steps by now to make good on those promises. Instead Mr. Aquino has refused to dismantle the private armies responsible for scores of human rights violations including the Ampatuan Massacre, while it took his administration all of 21 months to put together a Freedom of Information (FOI) bill that could help enhance access to information, earlier versions of it being actually restrictive.

Malacanang has submitted its latest version of the bill — which while not perfect (no law ever is) is acceptable to most of the press and civil society organizations that have been campaigning for an FOI since the 1990s — to the House of Representatives, but seems not to have done any political spadework to assure that it won’t be mangled beyond recognition, or will even pass at all. The FOI advocacy groups now fear that any bill that would survive the Congressional mill is not only likely to be watered down by a Congress whose members dread exposure of, for example, their hidden wealth and/or assets and net worth. It could also contain a Right of Reply rider.

Nueva Ecija Congressman Rodolfo Antonino has vowed to include in any FOI law a provision making the right of reply mandatory for the media, despite the fact that media organizations are ethically bound to open their pages or airtime to both or all sides of any controversy or issue. Antonino says he fears that the media would abuse the right to information once an FOI law is passed, and would compel media organizations to devote unlimited space and time to “replies” by anyone — mostly politicians — who feel that their side has not been given space or airtime. The bill would in effect punish ALL media organizations for the failure of SOME of its members to report all sides of a controversy or issue.

Antonino has filed an FOI bill with such a rider, thus making an FOI law meant to enhance press freedom at the same time the instrument for its infringement. The FOI law thus passed, rather than being part of the solution to the legacy of secrecy of the past Arroyo administration, would be part of the problem instead, which raises the question of whether, given the kind of officials this country has, any of the country’s problems can ever be solved in anyone’s lifetime. The political elite claims to be part of the solution, but is actually part of the problem.

(BusinessWorld)

As the US spokesperson on global affairs — which from Afghanistan to Zanzibar the US thinks are ITS affairs whatever the local inhabitants may think — Clinton herself has repeatedly criticized China for censoring the Internet, suppressing criticism of the government and its policies, and imprisoning dissenters.

The criticism is not without basis, and should have included the fact that China is also the world’s leading exponent of the death penalty — except that the criticism isn’t sincerely in the interest of human rights, the US itself being a major beneficiary of China’s economic policies, which includes opening the country to foreign investments and its markets to US multinationals.

The US plays the human rights card to make China even more pliable than it already is to US and Western economic penetration. Along that line, while lecturing them on human rights, the US has also been pressuring the Chinese to, among other supposedly “constructive” initiatives, revalue its currency to make its products more expensive so US corporations can compete with Chinese companies.

Clinton declared in her Annapolis address that “China is not the Soviet Union.” But as it disengages from Iraq, the US government has been ringing the alarm bells over China’s supposedly growing military might in almost the same way that during the Reagan administration from 1980 to 1988, the US government exaggerated Soviet military prowess to justify defense spending at the expense of social services and to frighten the entire planet into uniting against the USSR.

To validate the claim that China is a military threat to the whole of Asia and the entire planet — despite the assessment by experts including its own that China’s military capacity is way behind that of the US — last year it promised military support to the Philippines, historically its most reliable and docile client-state, in the (extremely remote) event that China attacks the Philippines over the Spratlys dispute. In a blatant attempt to militarize the dispute, it loudly announced increased levels of aid to the Philippine military even as US troops marked their tenth year of “rotational” presence on Philippine soil via the Visiting Forces Agreement.

The Clinton statement glossed over what the US is actually doing in Asia, where, Clinton also said, the US is “not on the brink of a new Cold War.” Which indeed it isn’t, what it’s on the brink of being the reestablishment of its formerly huge military presence in an Asia it fears would otherwise be dominated by China unless it redeployed its troops in the Philippines, established bases in Australia, and upgraded military ties with Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia among other countries.

The purpose, of course, is to remake the world in its own image, the better to have access to the planet’s resources and markets. And who with better right? After all, as Clinton declared in the same address, the US, because of its military power and “core values,” is still “exceptional” despite rampant talk of its decline.

Just how exceptional the US is and what some of those core values could be is easily demonstrated through the right numbers. The US, for example, has so many men and women in prison — about two million mostly African American and Hispanic people, or some 25 percent of the total prisoner population of the world — it’s still building even more prisons.

There are more guns — 200 million — in the hands of some 60 million private individuals in the US than anywhere else, which annually exact a toll of about 30,000 gun-related deaths, of which more than half are from suicide, and about a third from homicide. In recent years, the number of school shootings has also so increased they have been described as of “epidemic proportions. “

What core values could Clinton have been thinking of, meanwhile? Perhaps respect for gender, ethnic, religious and racial differences? And yet the US is home still to the most vicious forms of racism, a perversion hideously alive and well in the US, where it is often punctuated by violence.

The February 26 murder in the US state of Florida of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old unarmed African American male, who was shot by George Zimmerman, a 28-year old, mostly white, Hispanic American, is a recent case. Martin was most probably the victim of racial profiling, which among the white majority including the police tags individuals as potential criminals, terrorists, etc., on the basis of race. In 2011 some 500,000 mostly colored people, say human rights groups, were stopped and frisked by police all over the US on mere suspicion, and in violation of their rights.

The US chapter of the International League of People’s Struggle claims that other killings of mostly African Americans and Hispanics have been encouraged by the impunity, or exemption from punishment — the very same impunity that prevails in the killing of journalists and other people in countries like the Philippines — of the killers of Martin and other people of color.

Despite his shooting of Martin, Zimmerman had not been arrested as of April 11, and US activists fear that it might have encouraged such other acts of racial violence as the shooting death of three people in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by two white men last April 6.

But what’s even worse, says an ILPS statement demanding justice for Martin, is that “police around the U.S. are waging what amounts to a war against people of color. Armed police invade Black and Latino communities in the brutal manner that US soldiers invade villages in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“Muslim communities have also become the targets of police and federal terror as the US state concocts phony terror plots to justify its imperialist wars in oil-rich parts of the world. Secret police and federal agents infiltrate mosques and Muslim, Arab, African and South Asian communities to frame and entrap young people and justify their bloated national security expenditures. Anti-Islamic bigotry led to the March 25 beating to death of Shamia Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi mother who was found dying in her home with a note calling her a ‘terrorist’ beside her body.

“Police violence and spying are also on the rise against political protest. People taking part in the popular Occupy Wall Street and allied Occupy movements across the United States have been beaten, pepper-sprayed and arrested by police protecting the interests of the bankers and corporate tycoons.”

What emerges from these and other accounts of violence, hate crimes and racism in the US is a society in deep crisis that’s hardly a model for replication in other countries, or the justification for the US’ lording it over the planet and presuming to lecture other countries on human rights and “constructive” behavior. But Clinton’s statement about US military power at least is true: that power does exist, and is the sole basis for its unworthy and self-serving hegemony over much of the world including the Philippines.

(BusinessWorld)

Those professionals and middle class folk — including, perhaps especially, journalists still with enough brains to think about such matters — who’ve either decided to stick it out in this country despite the political instability, economic stagnation, and the chaos of daily existence; or who have no choice but to stay, are more likely to thumb their noses at their fellow professionals who’re residents or citizens in other countries.

Poorer folk are less concerned with professionals abroad. They’re more aware and appreciative of the OFW phenomenon, many of them being likely to have a relative looking after someone else’s children in Singapore or Hong Kong whom they openly envy, or to at least have heard of someone who has such kin, who, during their visits to the Philippines, bear goodies like CD players and TV sets, or the money with which to buy them.

But those on either side of the class divide do share at least one thing: they tend towards the generalizations many Filipinos routinely make about themselves and each other (Filipinos are a religious people. Filipinos love to sing. Filipinos are peace-loving. Etc., etc.)

It’s common for editorial writers and columnists — the presumptive elite of the journalism world — to put down immigrants in general as people who’re merely after more money and who couldn’t care less about the country of their birth. Some immigrants do fall in that category. But the generalization forgets that others are driven by a quest for the order and predictability that the Philippines lacks, or by the limited opportunities for employment and social mobility in their country of origin.

OFWs are on the other hand officially the country’s heroes by virtue of the billions of dollars in annual remittances they send that help keep the economy going. They’re also the people who lend the desperate the money they need to keep their children in school, or who contribute the money that build basketball courts — or, who, by simply spending money in the communities, help boost the local economy.

Inevitable that these two views of a continuing and ever growing phenomenon should clash, and that the clash should express itself in a debate over “Filipino-ness.”

There’s the view that anyone who’s decided to move to another country, and that includes their children, no longer has any claim to being Filipino. The argument is that, having abandoned the country of their birth and pledged loyalty to another, they’ve lost the right to even complain about how the country’s being run, much less participate in the effort to change it.

On the other hand, there’s the view that they’re all Filipino nevertheless, and their progeny equally Filipino, residence or citizenship in another country being a mere formality. It’s a belief lived in practice among some immigrants who speak a Philippine language with each other and the children, observe the Philippine holidays, and teach their children such traditions of the home country as kissing the hand of older folk. At the core of either view are certain assumptions about who or what is the Filipino.

GMA-7 TV’s Arnold Clavio defined being Filipino in a recent on-the-air rant against the Philippine Football Team Azkals in terms of being “kayumanggi,” or brown-skinned. TV host Clavio’s contention was that, for the fairness of their skins, the bi-racial members of the team, two of whom have been accused of sexual harassment, are only pretending to be Filipino.

The rant was relatively rare, more praise rather than criticism being heaped on the Azkals, for, among other reasons, certain of its members’ being mestizo, or of mixed blood, fairness being such a premium in the Philippines there’s a whole industry devoted to whitening skin in these isles of contradictions. But as rare as it was, it also demonstrated the secret contempt with which, in certain middle class circles, the bi-racial or even multi-racial Filipino, the inevitable result of migration and intermarriage, is held. Clavio’s rant predictably provoked accusations of racism.

Filipino racism is among the bizarre offspring of the colonial experience. Many Filipinos stereotype and ridicule the darker-hued. Students from Africa, for example, complain about being subjected to racial slurs, usually by ordinary folk including their fellow students in the schools they attend. The other side of this racist coin is the affirmation that being brown-skinned puts one in a category superior to darker people, though a notch or two below whites. But Clavio went a step further: brown’s not only fine, it’s also better than fair.

And yet being Filipino is hardly determined by “brownness,” millions of Filipino men and women whether at home or abroad being multi-hued as well as multi-cultural. Among those known as “Filipino Americans” (note the absence of a hyphen) in the United States, for example, are Filipinos of Chinese, Japanese, (Asian) Indian, and Spanish origins, among others, of which varieties of nationals the Philippines, from La Union to Jolo, has plenty.

Neither is brownness uniquely Filipino, that attribute being shared across the planet among many races. Centuries of interaction with other countries and cultures have changed the definition of “Filipino-ness” from that of “being brown,” which might have served during less cosmopolitan and more parochial times, to something far more complex.

Though its bases are historical and unalterable, “Filipino-ness” is at the same time a continuing process, a work in progress shaped by, among other factors, the continuing Filipino interface with the many cultures and nations all over the planet.

It’s a truth Philippine media practitioners and journalists must recognize and understand, but usually don’t, despite their perennial lip service to the “global Filipino,” and their celebration of the triumphs of Filipinos of mixed parentage in beauty contests, or in theater, academia, music, film, business, medicine and the sciences in their countries of residence or citizenship abroad. Primarily it’s because too many media people have neither the interest, curiosity nor intellectual drive to examine issues other than what’s currently in the news or in fashion, which they usually look at superficially, anyway.

“Filipino-ness” in the time of globalization is among those phenomena Filipinos themselves must intelligently address. The media must help them do so, but are failing to provide the information, and much less the insight, they need.

Luis V. Teodoro is on Facebook and Twitter. Some parts of this column are adapted from the author’s piece, “Hyphenated, ” in the CMFR In Medias Res blog.

(BusinessWorld)

Malacanang has mobilized its huge stable of photo- and videographers to disprove the suspicion that’s rapidly morphing into a conclusion, and already widespread long before the youth group Anakbayan coined the term, that Benigno Aquino III is more preoccupied with dating rather than assessing typhoon damage, or with sampling Manila night life rather than defusing a hostage crisis — and very recently, with sleeping till eleven a.m. after a night of carousing rather than looking into how his government can relieve Filipinos from the inflationary impact of the oil companies’ jacking up pump prices.

The photos and the videos show Aquino scanning important-looking documents, holding meetings, inspecting project sites, and in one instance, lugging around a big pile of documents, despite his having aides to do that for him. Aquino has also been photographed with his most favored constituencies — some say his real bosses — the police and the military, whose affairs he always attends, and on whom he has showered such benefits as low-cost housing and additional allowances, with which perks such other public servants as teachers, for example, have not been blessed.

In the effort to halt and repair the damage the spread of the term has done both to him and his government, Aquino and his spokespersons have also criticized those who coined the term, with Aquino himself declaring that “some people,” meaning student activists, just won’t recognize his alleged achievements during the 19 months he’s been in office, which supposedly includes, among others, the strong performance of the Philippine Stock Exchange.

But the Palace reaction shows that it’s been hurting, despite Budget Secretary Florencio Abad’s prophecy that the enthusiasm with which not only activists but also bloggers, civil society advocates and otherwise blasé citizens have taken to the term would soon pass. Contrary to Abad’s hopes, however, “Noynoying” has gone viral over the Internet and is threatening to join the company of such other durables as “Imeldific.”

But you have to at least grant that Aquino still cares enough about his image and what the public thinks to protest his name’s being associated with the arts of doing nothing while everything goes to hell, in which Juan Tamad (Juan the Lazy) of Filipino folklore was especially adept.

Part of it could be because he himself suspects that the protesters may be right, if not about his not doing everything, at least about his not doing anything about some things. After all, haven’t he and his officials made it their mantra to declare that about the increases in the prices of petroleum products the only thing they can do is nothing?

That laid-back attitude towards escalating gas prices is enough to recall to Filipinos that image they grew up with of Juan Tamad lying under a guava tree waiting for the ripe fruit to fall into his mouth. Except that gas prices aren’t likely to fall no matter how long Aquino and company wait and hope for the best — not while declaring for all the world and the oil companies to hear that no, they can’t do anything about it.

Never mind. Aquino and company can always claim that protesting the coining of “Noynoying” to describe his work ethic would be to do something. But another Juan, namely Juan Ponce Enrile, objects.

For those who can still remember, Enrile’s signal achievement in life has been to reinvent himself as a democrat despite his years of dedicated service to the Marcos klepto-tyranny. Enrile now says Aquino III shouldn’t be taking the term seriously and suggests that he just laugh it off.

Enrile — on whom the title “honorable” is now attached as a senator and as Senate President in one more demonstration of the truth that there’s no justice in this world — says he himself was called all sorts of names, among them “matador,” “diktador,” and “martial law administrator,” but that he simply ignored the name-calling and the name-callers.

Enrile was obviously recalling his martial law days, when the most preferred term when referring to him was “fascist,” a term he doesn’t seem to remember — although, in one interview in 1971, he referred to himself, while executing the Nazi salute and clicking his heels, as “the Number Two fascist in the land,” Marcos being Number One.

In fact he was never referred to as “matador” either. That’s a tag that more closely means bullfighter rather than butcher. Neither was Enrile referred to as “diktador,” that term being reserved for his boss Marcos, who was, after all everyone’s dictator including Enrile’s. As for “martial law administrator,” that wasn’t a label but a description — because, as Secretary and later Minister of National Defense, that was what he was.

Interesting that Enrile can’t even accurately recall the names he was being called during the martial law period, and didn’t mention how he was referred to after, for example during the presidency of Corazon Aquino, who, at one point, called him an annoying mosquito for his (allegedly) perennial masterminding of the many failed coup attempts his henchman Gregorio Honasan kept launching to restore authoritarian rule.

But what’s even more interesting is Enrile’s trying to tutor Aquino III in the arts of ignoring his constituencies’ complaints, as those are currently embodied in the term “Noynoying.” Enrile was actually saying that what some of those constituencies are complaining about doesn’t matter. Indeed it didn’t matter during the martial law period, when no one in the Marcos dictatorship, least of all Marcos and Enrile, cared about what the people living in their archipelago of fear were thinking, feeling, or saying. But shouldn’t it matter now, when a democracy’s supposedly in place in these isles of fun?

Enrile’s thoughts on the subject should remind us all that for all the lip-service this country’s so-called leaders habitually pay to democracy, authoritarianism is still a living malignancy in the brains and instincts of Philippine officialdom. Among the primary symptoms of the infection are the continuing violations of human rights in both city and countryside, and the persistence of warlordism and military rule in furtherance of counter-insurgency that, despite protests, Aquino III hasn’t done anything about except to let them happen.

As for Enrile’s advising Aquino III to do nothing about “Noynoying,” wouldn’t that itself be a form of the “Noynoying” Aquino III has been demonstrating on the matter of human rights and such other issues as rising gas prices?

(BusinessWorld)

Justice Secretary Leila de Lima nevertheless said Renato Corona was “acting like a politician,” implying thereby that he isn’t one, and declaring that, therefore, it was “unbecoming” of him to bring his case to the media by giving no less than six interviews in some of the most popular radio and TV news and public affairs programs.

Like every other citizen, Corona has the right not only to receive, but also to release information, whether in the form of documents, statements or interviews. If he prefers, he can even stand on his head or walk a tightrope to get media attention. In the context of the media campaign Malacanang has been waging against him, Corona’s right to defend himself in the same arena is undisputed. But it isn’t his right De Lima was questioning, but the propriety of his doing so, presumably because, as Chief Justice, he should be above politics.

Corona and his media surrogates have made much of the alleged use of the double standard in De Lima’s statement as well as in the comments of other, presumably anti-Corona observers: i.e., De Lima et al. are saying that the Palace and its partisans can go to the media but Corona cannot. It sounds like a valid argument on the surface, but doesn’t take into account the fact that Chief Justices are not elected while Presidents are, which makes Benigno Aquino III not only President, but also a politician.

Together with the back room deals, and the wheeling and dealing that go into winning elections, the media are among the politician’s weapons of offense and defense when seeking public office. Qualifications don’t always and sometimes don’t even count — not in this country they don’t. What counts most is one’s capacity to wage what the Commission on Elections has described as a “credible” campaign, meaning not only how much money one has, but how well one has made his or her presence felt in the media either through advertising, buying off reporters and even entire radio stations, or both.

On the other hand, the presumption is that Chief Justices are chosen solely on the basis of their qualifications, and not on the patronage, the dark arts of betrayal, media access and a good press, and those other tactics and assets that could decide who will be mayor, governor, congressman, senator or even President. In that sense De Lima’s statement was paying the post of Chief Justice, if not the man, a compliment, when she said Corona’s behavior was “unbecoming.”

And yet uniquely among the Chief Justices this country has had, Corona has been acting like a politician since Day One of his impeachment. It can even be argued that as far as “unbecoming” behavior goes, his accepting the post of Chief Justice in 2010 a few days after the 2010 elections had already qualified.

Practically everyone, including the media themselves, called Corona’s media appearances last week a media blitz, “blitz” being shorthand for blitzkrieg, or the rapid and overwhelming use of superior force in a war of quick resolution. But the word doesn’t really apply, Corona’s appeal to the media being as protracted and as orchestrated a campaign as the one Malacanang is waging.

Corona and company obviously know what they’re doing. It is on the front pages, in the six o’clock news and the public affairs programs where one’s views can be aired and the issues joined — and, depending upon one’s capacity to argue one’s case, how expertly one can manipulate reporters and interviewers, or, regretfully, how deep one’s pockets are, one can win over the public to one’s cause no matter how vile.

Corona has had his eye on the media before, for example when, during a speech at his alma mater Ateneo de Manila, he accused some senators of having prejudged his case, and when, in the first weeks of his impeachment trial, he made it a point to deliver calculatedly emotional speeches during flag-raising ceremonies at the Supreme Court.

In the first case, he and his PR advisers must have known that the media would report what he said, which they in fact did in print, and on TV, radio and online. During Supreme Court flag-raising rites last February, he made it a point to have his wife Christina by his side, and to be sure the TV cameras caught him dabbing a handkerchief at his presumably teary eyes, apparently in full knowledge of the tendency of the media to play up the sensational, the dramatic and the emotionally-charged even during the most perilous times. The results of this calculation were photos in the print media, and TV footage focused on — what else — Corona’s wife’s presence and his dabbing a handkerchief at his eyes, footage that as usual was repeatedly aired by the TV networks to the point of nausea.

And then, of course, there was that court holiday last February, and those statements from several judges — statements that later turned out to have been solicited by the Supreme Court –supporting Corona, and even arguing that his impeachment was an attack on the entire judicial system. Later Corona’s lawyers called a press conference in which they alleged that Malacanang was bribing some senators into convicting him. All grist for the media mill, of course, and all contributing to shaving at least a few points off Corona’s low approval ratings.

About Malacanang’s own sustained media campaign, which began on the tail end of 2011, there is no arguing. His own calculations about what would make headlines led Mr. Aquino to refuse to take his oath of office before Corona, to ignore him in state functions, and even to criticize him to his face when speaking before various audiences.

Mr. Aquino has concealed neither his antipathy to Corona nor his desire for his removal from the post of Chief Justice, not so much for his having been appointed only days after the 2010 elections, but for his supposed partisanship for Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, against whom a number of cases that would inevitably reach the Supreme Court have been filed.

Beyond these and the possibility that he may indeed be guilty of at least some of the charges against him, however, there is the lingering doubt that on at least one issue Corona may have a point, and it is that among Mr. Aquino’s motives could be retaliation for the Corona court’s having ruled that Hacienda Luisita must be distributed to its tenant farmers.

If that is the case, Mr. Aquino would only be acting as the politician he indeed is, while Corona behaves like the politician he isn’t supposed to be. In this confrontation the Filipino people are being asked to make a choice. But do they really have to?

(BusinessWorld)

Considering how much Miriam Defensor-Santiago thinks the world of herself, it might take her that long to discover that she’s neither the Sun nor the center of the universe. Relentlessly aware of her being a lawyer and a former professor of law, of having been a judge, and now a “senator-judge” who’s on her way to the World Court, Defensor-Santiago only rarely fails to remind everyone of her titles and alleged
accomplishments.

She does so almost inevitably at someone else’s expense, by demonstrating in word and deed her disdain for those other mortals she thinks don’t measure up to her levels of achievement. Those mortals include practically everyone else, whether congressman or lawyer, government official or bank clerk, or, for that matter, any other citizen of this supposed Republic. As such they’re expected to hang on to her every word rather than cover their ears to shield them from her screeching.

This conceit did not begin during the impeachment trial of Renato Corona, although, in the course of trying to live up to her own lofty idea of herself during that ongoing freak show, she’s made it a point to belabor at the expense of substance every technicality no matter how trivial so she can demonstrate her knowledge of the law, and in the process harangue and insult not only the prosecution panel as an entity but also its individual members.

In one by now nearly forgotten incident, during the Estrada impeachment trial in early 2001 she berated three citizen-spectators for supposedly heckling her. Her short fuse, her screams, insults and abuse have earned her a reputation as a virago, a harpy and a harridan, although many Filipinos call her other, even worse names.

They used to have fun doing so, but no longer. Nowadays those Filipinos who still have their wits about them are beginning to realize that she’s not so much the disease as one more symptom of the rot that’s eating away at the country of their frustrations.

Almost every instance in which Defensor-Santiago has blown a fuse has involved acts or statements she thought to be belittling her or ignoring her supposedly exalted status, recognition and respect for which she assumes to be a matter of entitlement. It’s disturbingly close to a belief that not being deferential to her constitutes lese majeste — except that Defensor-Santiago’s neither queen nor empress, and Filipinos not her subjects, although some might argue that the Defensor -Santiago delusion precisely consists of a misplaced belief in the perks of royalty.

One can imagine her declaring that if the people have no bread they should eat cake. To which the proper response would be “to the guillotine” — but only after the Bastille has been stormed and every royal pain thrown out of the State.

Defensor-Santiago’s is a perspective completely contrary to the pretensions of this rumored democracy. And that perspective is, at the moment, in the very center of the impeachment trial. That trial is not about her fellows in the Senate who’ve suddenly been transformed into “senator judges” by putting on maroon robes, the prosecution panel, or for that matter, even Corona. It is certainly not about Defensor-Santiago. It is about the corruption, greed, abuse of power, and lawlessness at the very core of the class that claims to be the guardians of law and the enforcers of order in this country whose foul reign has made injustice, poverty and misery the lot of millions.

At the heart of that malignancy is the contempt for the people and sense of entitlement Defensor-Santiago so starkly demonstrates. But that Defensor-Santiago’s behavior is more about civilization than plain civility is not as important as the fact that she is a type and a personification of the virus of despotism resident in the brains of practically every official, whether elected or appointed, who, while paying lip service to democracy, in their heart of hearts despise it because they think themselves miles above the governed.

That infection is evident in every Bureau of Customs clerk who thinks it his right to beat anyone who dares overtake his Porsche in Manila’s streets. It is evident in every mayor who barges into a broadcast booth to pistol-whip a broadcaster whose comments have displeased him. It was clinically evident in the arrogance of those who planned and carried out the Ampatuan Massacre, who thought themselves masters of the world, and immune from punishment by virtue of their wealth and power. And it is equally evident in the Corona impeachment trial, where, from day one, it has been argued that the supposedly exalted status and power of Renato Corona entitle him to deferential, even obsequious treatment rather than subjecting him to the most exacting standards of accountability a democracy expects of the powerful.

The disconnect between democratic imperatives and the predilections of the powerful has made this country what it is. It cannot be remedied by tinkering with the law, which, in any event, usually ends up strengthening the way things are and making attempts at change and reform even more technically infuriating. It cannot be remedied by throwing money at the poor either — or for that matter, by throwing out a Chief Justice who’s likely to be replaced by someone equally flawed. It can only be remedied by removing from the equation those who think themselves the people’s masters rather than their servants. That will take some doing — and in a country where nothing really changes, 350 years may not be enough time to do it in.

(BusinessWorld)

In the same speech Mr. Aquino also claimed that the martial law period — the 14 years from September 1972 to February 1986 during which the country was in the grip of the Marcos dictatorship — happened because Filipinos chose to be silent. Working for reforms, Mr. Aquino also said, is the duty of every Filipino, not just of Ninoy and Cory Aquino.

Mr. Aquino was right, but only partly, as far as the judiciary is concerned. But he was totally wrong about why martial law happened, and woefully mistaken in his assumption that the people were silent, or were even asleep, whether before it happened or while it was happening.

The transformation of the judiciary into a partisan instrument of the wealthy and powerful — if that is what he meant by that awkward phrase about its being one of the wrongs of the past — did not begin during the martial law period. Although it may be said to be part of its tainted legacy, neither was it completed during that time.

The process did not start with then Chief Justice Enrique Fernando’s shielding Imelda Marcos from the sun with a parasol during the first months of the martial law regime. It began with Marcos’ packing the Supreme Court with his appointees even before the declaration of martial law, which was his way of insuring that it would rule in his favor once he put the country under one-man rule.

That is exactly what the Court did once he had declared martial law. It ruled that it had no jurisdiction over whether Presidential Declaration 1081 putting the entire country under martial law was Constitutional or not. One of Marcos’ appointees even claimed that PD 1081 was the State’s way of defending itself from the threats Marcos alleged it was facing, thus making it evident that the student and labor leaders, the academics, journalists and opposition personalities Marcos had caused to be arrested could expect neither relief nor redress from the abuses of martial law — the arbitrary arrests, the torture, and the summary executions — through a Court that had abandoned its once exalted role of protecting human rights.

The roots of the present Court’s transformation into a tool of vested interests do go back to the Marcos period. But those who succeeded Marcos– and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo comes rapidly to mind — did help as well by doing almost the exact same thing that he did, which was to pack the Court with appointees calculated to assure them of decisions favorable to their interests.

But while the judiciary is indeed one of the things wrong in this country that has to be corrected, it isn’t the only thing. It’s not because of the judiciary’s failings alone that poverty and its companion, hunger, exist, and what’s more are growing despite the Aquino administration’s Conditional Cash Transfer program. Neither is it the judiciary alone that can be blamed for the continuing human rights violations and the vast inequality in incomes that afflict this country. And it is certainly not the people’s alleged silence in the face of these and other inequities that made martial law possible, and reform impossible.

Part of the reasons why martial law happened were sitting behind Mr. Aquino when he was delivering his speech admonishing Filipinos for their alleged silence and failure to act while he exalted his late parents (“Working for reforms is the duty of every Filipino, not just of Ninoy and Cory Aquino.”).

Juan Ponce Enrile may have reinvented himself as a democrat by putting his fate in the hands of the EDSA multitude in 1986, but he was among the architects of martial law, and had been, for years prior to September 21, 1972, one of Marcos’ faithful and leading subalterns.

Enrile’s own subaltern, Gregorio Honasan, was in the very military whose bayonets kept Marcos in power for more than 14 years (Marcos was elected President in 1965 and again in 1969), and had been accused of torture in Mindanao where he had spent most of his days in the active service. He was also a major player in the coup attempts of 1987 and 1989 against the Corazon Aquino administration.

The Enrile-Honasan duo were representative of the partnership between the bureaucrat capitalists and their military clients that together planned martial law and made it possible DESPITE the people’s defiance, as was evident in the demonstrations, protests, strikes, and even armed forms of resistance before, during and AFTER the martial law period.

Mr. Aquino is completely wrong in his assumption that there was dead silence among the people before martial law was declared. The situation was the exact opposite of his revisionist view of history: the ferment for reform and democratization prior to 1972, which had been seething since the mid-1960s, was among the reasons Marcos declared martial law, out of fear that it would eventually explode into a political and social upheaval that would finally complete the Philippine Revolution by democratizing both wealth and power.

Mr. Aquino should also look around him today, and perhaps listen to the clamor in the streets and the countryside, including his own Hacienda Luisita. The people are far from silent, and are expressing their will for reform and even revolution everywhere.

But Mr. Aquino should also take note that involvement in the movement for change in the political, social and economics structures of this country has always invited repression from the coercive instruments, the police and the military, of the very government that now claims to be for reform. Only a week ago, for example, several journalists looking into the demolition of houses and environmental degradation in a mining community were detained by the paramilitaries Mr. Aquino has refused to dismantle. Some UP students doing research on depressed communities have similarly been harassed by the so-called security forces of his government.

If he is indeed sincere about leaving behind him a legacy of change beyond improved credit ratings and a program of providing cash assistance to the poor no administration can sustain for long, Mr. Aquino would do well to look into doing what, among others, Marcos’ successors have been failing to do since 1986: reforming the police and the military by first of all dismantling the anti-insurgency focus of every administration since 1946 that’s at the root of the human rights violations that have been committed and are still being committed against those Filipinos who are, in various ways, fighting for the kind of change this country has needed not only since EDSA 1986, but ever since its colonizers set foot on it.

(BusinessWorld)

The shift in Thailand from military rule to democracy in 1992, and the fall from power of Indonesia’s Suharto in 1998, for example, were supposedly among the political upheavals the event inspired. Changes in other parts of Asia and in Eastern Europe have similarly been credited to the demonstration effect of Philippine People Power, or EDSA 1986.

These claims, however, were mostly based on the broad similarities between what transpired in other countries and what happened in the Philippines in 1986. By the 1980s the United States was abandoning its global anti-communist strategy of fomenting dictatorial rule in favor of supposedly supporting the democratic aspirations of the people its own previous policies had forced into such tyrannies as Pinochet’s in Chile and Marcos’ in the Philippines. This shift in US strategy resulted in a number of US-encouraged pro-“democracy” uprisings all over the world similar to EDSA.

Most of those who have been doing the hailing are also conservatives who define “change” solely in terms of the removal of Marcos from the scene, and who’re still trying to prove that the EDSA uprising was in that sense not only their sole creation, but also a rousing success.

But the suspicion that EDSA 1986 had not changed anything beyond removing Ferdinand Marcos from power didn’t take long to develop. The most visible leaders of that event, Fidel Ramos and Juan Ponce Enrile, were after all also the most visible symbols of martial law when Marcos proclaimed it in 1972: Ramos as chief of the dreaded Philippine Constabulary, and Enrile as Secretary, and later Minister, of National Defense.

By the time of the Mendiola Massacre of January 1987, or less than a year into the administration of Corazon Aquino, the suspicion had turned into a conclusion. It was after all the very same police and military goons that during the Marcos dictatorship had suppressed protests that opened fire on the farmers massed at Mendiola street (only a few blocks from the Presidential Palace) who were demanding land reform, and killed thirteen of them, in a bleak demonstration that the same state apparatus of repression was still in place.

Today the country is still mired in poverty; the vast income gap between the very rich and the very poor is growing; elite rule has turned the country into a vast den of corruption; justice, whether social or the simple variety that punishes the guilty and exonerates the innocent, is as elusive as ever; and human rights are still being violated, in many cases so flagrantly the martial law period might as well not have ended.

That’s as far as the “change” part is concerned. The “peaceful” part is also contentious. EDSA 1986 occurred in the context of a 14-year struggle against the Marcos dictatorship by a united front of anti-dictatorship and democratic forces and people’s organizations, including the New People’s Army and the Moro National Liberation Front. EDSA did not spring out of nothing overnight, but was the culmination of a process that included mass protests and the use of revolutionary violence against state violence. In the five days of EDSA itself, the presence of about a million people constituted a physical threat against the soldiers manning the tanks of the dictatorship, who could at any time have fired into the crowds.

If successfully changing society is the criterion, EDSA 1986 would not be a model. But, warns Michael James Barker of the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict, what happened during and after EDSA does offer lessons to activists and revolutionaries in other parts of the world.

In his “A Warning for Egyptian Revolutionaries: Courtesy of People-Power in the Philippines,” Barker contends that even a powerful popular movement such as the Philippine resistance to dictatorship could be undermined and hijacked, and its reformist, even revolutionary agenda transformed into its opposite: the preservation of the limited , anti-people interests of the local and foreign elite.

Barker reiterates in this essay his argument in an earlier paper, “The American Hijacking Of The Philippines’ ‘People-Power’ Struggle,” that the United States undermined the nationalist and democratic aspirations of the anti-dictatorship movement and that this has to be understood if it is not to happen in the Arab Spring uprisings against dictatorships in the Middle East, specially Egypt. Otherwise, the end result would be similar to what happened in the Philippines.

Marcos’ overthrow was indeed the result of a popular uprising, says Barker, but official US circles prior to EDSA had been disturbed by the development of a broad political and social movement that among other demands wanted the US bases out of the Philippines and society restructured to reflect the hopes of workers and farmers for social justice and the equitable distribution of wealth.

“Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the poor and oppressed citizens of the Philippines had been gathering political strength. This emerging power was significantly bolstered by the August 1983 assassination of the most visible leader of the elite opposition, Benigno Aquino Jr.,” Barker points out, and there seemed little doubt by the mid-1980s that Marcos’ days in power were numbered.

To prevent the removal of Marcos from morphing into a real revolution that would democratize political power and restructure the economy and society, the US dispatched operatives to the Philippines to redirect the movement of popular resistance from the reform and revolutionary path to what was essentially the return to power of the wing of the elite Marcos had swept aside, and the preservation of US influence and military bases in the country.

Barker quotes University of California sociology professor William I. Robinson’s Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Robinson said in that work that in 1984, Corazon Aquino was working with other opposition leaders to develop plans that “spelled out a nationalist-oriented program of social reform and development and also called for the removal of US military bases from the Philippines.”

To prevent that from happening, the United States, says Barker, funneled financial and political support to the conservative and middle-class segments of the opposition. It also “dispatched (its) finest experts in conflict resolution to meet with Cory Aquino and the leader of the right-wing opposition, Salvador ‘Doy’ Laurel, to convince them to abandon the program and to keep the US bases in the Philippines.”

They did, and the result was a police and military still committed to preserving elite rule and foreign domination, the return of some of the very same personalities, including the Marcoses, who had been so instrumental in establishing the dictatorship and keeping it in power, and hence the preservation of the status quo of poverty, social inequity, injustice, mass misery, and limited democracy.

“US intervention,” Barker quotes Robinson, “was decisive in shaping the contours of the anti-Marcos movement and in establishing the terms and conditions under which Philippine social and political struggles would unfold in the post-Marcos period.”

“The Egyptian people,” Barker then argues, “need to learn from the Philippine experience, and to do all they can to keep (what happened in the Philippines) from happening.” In short, EDSA 1986 does have a lesson to offer other movements across the planet that are fighting for authentic democracy and social change: as a negative example of how NOT to wage a revolution.
(BusinessWorld)