Rizal's death spurred end of colonialism in Philipines

By Harvey Stockwin

Within a few centuries, when humanity has become redeemed and enlightened... when justice rules, and a man is a citizen of the world, the pursuit of science alone will remain, the word patriotism will be equivalent to fanaticism, and he who prides himself in patriotic ideas will doubtless he isolated as a dangerous disease, as a menace to the social order -- Philippine martyr and nationalist hero Jose Rizal

HONG KONG (JP): Exactly 100 years ago yesterday the Asian anti-colonial revolution in the 20th century got underway as Jose Rizal, a distinguished Filipino intellectual, was executed on the Luneta Park in Manila by the ruling Spanish colonialists. Rizal's execution was reenacted in the Luneta, exactly as it originally took place.

Rizal requested that he should be allowed to face his executioners. He maintained, with good reason, that he had not been disloyal to Spain, and should not be shot in the back like a traitor.

The appeal having been refused, Rizal was shot at 7.03 a.m. on Dec. 30 by a squad of Filipino soldiers. In a scene redolent of colonial reality, behind the executioners was another squad of Spanish soldiers, ready to shoot both Rizal and the Filipino soldiers if they failed to do their work.

With a final effort of will, Rizal avoided falling face down but instead twisted his body and fell with his sightless eyes facing the sky. Earlier, Rizal had been found guilty on a charge of subversion, to which he pleaded innocent.

His trial came about as the a rebellion, led by a revolutionary group called the Katipunan, slowly gained ground in the Philippines. The Spanish, who had been ruling the Philippines for over 300 years, needed a scapegoat for their failure to suppress the rebellion. They calculated that Rizal's execution would intimidate the rebels.

Ironically Rizal, who had considered the rebellion ill-advised and premature, was taken into custody in Barcelona in Spain when he was on his way to serve as a doctor with the Spanish army in Cuba.

On the one hand, he was, like many Asian nationalists of that period, ambiguous towards the colonial power -- believing, as Gandhi initially did in South Africa and India, that reform and change could come from and through the colonial power itself.

On the other hand, Rizal had in effect instigated the rebellion with his writings, particularly with two novels which exposed the failings of Philippine colonial society and the narrow-minded dominance of the Catholic Church. Illustrating that very quality to this day, the Catholic Church in the Philippines respects Rizal as a nationalist figure on the dubious and questionable ground that he recanted his Masonry and heretical views in the final hours before his execution.

Almost certainly Rizal did no such thing, but thereby hangs a continuing historical mystery.

In his final hours, Rizal wrote out 14 verses of a valedictory poem in Spanish entitled My Final Farewell. He whispered to his sisters on their last visit to him in his cell that they should look in the lamp he was giving them. When they got home with the lamp, the poem was found inside it, and thereby retained for posterity.

Widely regarded as a masterpiece, it can be safely asserted that Rizal's poem will be moving millions of Filipinos to tears tomorrow as it is recited throughout the nation and abroad in Spanish, the language in which it was written, Tagalog and English. It is the poem of a man sure of his own convictions, most unlikely to recant any of them, even when pressured by priests to do so, as Rizal was in his final hours.

Rizal also whispered to his sisters to "look in my shoes," after he had told his mother to reclaim his body after execution. But his mother was unable to do that. The Spanish quickly buried him where his grave could not focus popular anger. When Rizal was disinterred many years later, whatever was in his shoes had turned to dust.

The only way in which this mystery will ever be clarified is if the Spanish soldiers, or the Jesuit priests, themselves examined Rizal's shoes before he was buried. But it seems a forlorn hope that they would have recorded what they found in Spanish or Church archives.

One hundred years on, while it can only be speculation, the possibility remains that Rizal hid in his shoes a denial of the recantation which he knew the Church would quickly assert.

The whole issue of Rizal's relations with the Catholic Church was intimately tied to the question issue of colonialism, given the high degree of control over the Spanish colonial government exercised by the Church. Rizal had exposed this in his novels, which clearly showed that Rizal was way ahead of his contemporaries elsewhere in Asia in viewing colonialism in a critical light. The clergy were therefore to the fore agiuating for his arrest, trial and execution.

In this way Rizal remains a controversial figure within the Philippines, seen in one perspective by the still-powerful Church, seen in another light by ardent nationalists.

But there can be no question that Rizal's unjust death was the beginning of the end of Western colonialism in Asia. The Spanish badly miscalculated. Rizal's death did not intimidate the rebellion but inflamed it. Spanish colonialism delegitimized itself, as other colonialists were to similarly bring themselves down with harsh acts.

Within 18 months, aided by the outbreak of the Spanish- American War, Spain's colonial grip on the Philippines ended. The Philippine Republic became colonial Asia's first independent government until 1901, when the Philippines became a colony of the United States.

Since the U.S. colonial government in Manila quickly permitted Rizal to be hailed as a nationalist martyr, this began another controversy, with some Filipino nationalists seeing Rizal as an American-sponsored hero, and preferring to stress the more violent heroes of the Katipunan.

Controversy aside, Rizal remains both a Filipino and an Asian trail-blazer. In that farewell poem, he hoped his life and work would mean that: "A vibrant note will echo in your ears and faces/ Scent, light, color, words, lyric and lament/ will echo my faith's essence, my content."

So it has proved. Rizal, a Renaissance man of many talents, remains a beacon of aspiration and achievement for Filipinos to follow. His statue is to be found throughout the archipelago. He has inspired a vast literature. His remains today lie underneath the Rizal Monument in the Luneta, not far from where he was executed, and where all state visitors are expected to place a memorial wreath.

Just before this centennial, Rizal finally found a permanent place in the Spain he served -- and idealized. On Dec. 5, the grand-daughter of one of Rizal's nine sisters, Carmen Consunji, unveiled a replica of the Luneta Rizal Monument in the Parque de Santander in Madrid.

For this reporter, Rizal is best remembered for the prescient political insight, of much relevance during the long years of the Marcos dictatorship -- "There are no tyrants where there are no slaves."

One hundred years on, foreign colonialism in Asia is finally ending with the return of Hong Kong and Macau to China in 1997 and 1999. But other forms of tyranny in Asia still exist, sustained by continuing servitude.