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.