RP centennial marks a glorious history

RP centennial marks a glorious history

By Jamil Maidan Flores

JAKARTA (JP): One hundred years ago this month, Emilio
Aguinaldo y Famy, leader of the Filipino forces fighting for
freedom against the Spanish colonial regime, unfurled what was to
become the first Philippine national flag from the balcony of his
residence in Kawit, Cavite, the Philippines, and declared the
country's independence to the crowd gathered below and to the
rest of the world.

The subdued commemoration of this event by the Filipino
community in Jakarta belies a grand fiesta, an extravaganza that
ranges from the sublime to the frivolous, with which this
independence is being celebrated in the Philippines and by
Filipino expatriate communities elsewhere. Nothing has been
spared to project this day as marking "100 years of freedom".

It does not add up, however, if you consider the time when the
American military authorities banned the display of the
Philippine flag and the more than three years of Japanese
occupation. And there will be those who raise the insistent
question: What about the years under the Marcos dictatorship? No,
whatever Filipinos are celebrating today, it cannot be "100 years
of freedom".

But there was one defining, shining moment 100 years ago when
a revolution erupted in the Philippines and Filipinos declared
independence and formed a republic, "the first crystallization of
democracy in all the east". That moment cast a rousing light on
the colonized nations of Asia and, according to historians not
necessarily Filipino, prepared them for their own nationalist
struggles.

The revolution had a fascinating cast of characters. There was
Andres Bonifacio, the warehouseman who moonlighted as the
organizer of a secret society, the Katipunan. He was a genius at
building a revolutionary organization but on the battlefield he
had two left feet and in politics he was ill-fated.

Then there was Aguinaldo himself, brilliant with his guerrilla
tactics against the Spaniards but politically naive in dealing
with double-dealers like the American admiral, Dewey. There was
Gen. Antonio Luna, whose fiery temper led him to an untimely
death, like that of Bonifacio, at the hands of his compatriots.

Gen. Gregorio del Pilar, the boy general who held the
Americans at Tirad Pass the way Leonidas of Sparta held the
Persians at Thermopylae. And then there were the many barefoot
revolutionaries who could barely read or write but could get
wonderful military results with knives and bamboo spears.

Above them all towered the figure of Dr. Jose Protacio Rizal,
one of four Asian giants in that era, the others being Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Dr. Sun Yat Sen.

Without Rizal there could not have been a Philippine
revolution. The ideology of that revolution might have been
elaborated by Jacinto, the ideologue of the Katipunan, and
Mabini, the foreign minister of the first Philippine Republic,
but the ideas and the emotions that gave it substance and fire
came from the crucible of Rizal's writings, discourses and
personal sacrifices.

During the American regime in the Philippines, a false image
of Rizal was foisted on the Filipino public: a Rizal who was a
sworn pacifist, who was proreform but against revolution and
independence from Spain. It was, of course, to the interest of
the American authorities that the Filipinos be made docile by
giving them as a national hero a man who absolutely abhorred
shedding blood, except his own. But nothing could be farther from
the truth.

Today there is abundant evidence of a Rizal who held that if
reforms were not forthcoming from Spain, and he knew they were
not, then he was all for independence and revolution. He was,
however, against a premature irruption of that revolution as he
did not want his countrymen to sit like ducks in the gunsights of
the Spanish civil guards. He wanted a revolution equipped with
guns that, interestingly, could only have been procured from
Japan.

That his influence reached across the seas to other Asian
nations is evidenced by the fact that leaders of nationalist
movements from Nehru to Sukarno often cited him, sometimes with
charming inaccuracy. A curious fact is that he is the only
Filipino who ever bore the name Jose Rizal, but there must be
about a dozen Jose Rizals in Indonesia; this writer having come
across three of them in Jakarta alone.

Today, it is impossible to imagine a Philippines that never
had a Jose Rizal. No Filipino can possibly understand the social
history of his country without reading Rizal's two novels: Noli
Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. And no foreigner can say that
he knows the Filipinos if he has not read these two books.

If Rizal were to come back to life in the Philippines today,
he probably would not be too disappointed with what he sees. In
100 years, despite an eternity of American governors-general and
the two decades gobbled up by the Marcos regime, the Philippines
has had an even dozen presidents, with a 13th to assume office in
a few days.

In recent years, the luck of the Filipino has been holding
out: Cory Aquino restored democratic institutions, although she
was too busy surviving coups d'etat to do anything else, Fidel V.
Ramos instituted far-reaching economic reforms that have enabled
the country to cope well enough with the Asian financial crisis.

And now, President-elect Joseph Estrada, who once was labeled
a buffoon by business circles for his inability to pronounce the
word globalization, has been doing all the right things and
saying all the right things, as if he has been President all his
life. Maybe the Filipinos have something worth celebrating after
all.

All because of one brief shining moment in history. It was so
brief. But it shone.

The writer, a Filipino, is a former journalist now doing
research on Southeast Asian history.