Treading fine lines, changing the past

Juan Mercado, Inquirer News Service, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Asia News Network, Mannila

"While editor, Sukarno and Soeharto jailed you," the late publisher Joaquin "Chino" Roces told the tall Indonesian seated next to him. "What would you advise us?"

The Press Foundation of Asia boardroom fell silent. Outside, the siyam-siyam monsoon pounded the city. Inside, the talk swirled around impending governance by bayonets. Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile's fake ambush to trigger Proclamation 1081 was only days away.

"First, be friendly with your guards," came Magsaysay Awardee Mochtar Lubis' measured reply. "Second, keep busy. Third, don't let prison embitter you."

Thirty-two years later, with detention behind us, I'd add: Sign a power of attorney for the wife. It will smooth things for her.

These flashbacks recur when the day dictatorship began rolls around. Today is the 32nd anniversary of that imposition.

Wherever held, columnist Ellen Goodman says, these rights are about the fine line we tread to honor a difficult past. These observances are about "the moral costs of both forgetting and remembering."

We fear papering over "searing moments that did injustice to lives that were lost or forever changed" by brutal rulers, Goodman asserts in her Boston Globe column. Does remembering with undiminished intensity over time make us "curators of our ancestors' grievances? Can we acknowledge the past, and honor it, without being trapped in it?"

Do memories of rattling, in a prison van from Camp Crame to the Marcos Supreme Court, embalm in greying journalists "sterile baggage of the past"?

Among newsmen crammed into a "Black Maria" then were Daily Mirror's Amando Doronila, Evening News' Luis Beltran, Philippine News Service's Manuel Almario, Graphic's Luis Mauricio and Taliba's Benny Esquivel.

In court, our pro bono lawyer Joker Arroyo told us of a habeas corpus challenge (GR L33537 to 73). The self-effacing National Press Club president Eddie Monteclaro sued on our behalf.

Sen. Benigno Aquino and others followed shortly.

Sen. Lorenzo Tanada, Sedfrey Ordonez, Joker and others were there for the Fort Bonifacio detainees. Summoned before the tribunal a day earlier were Sen. Jose Diokno, Free Press' Teodoro Locsin Sr. and Napoleon Rama, and Chino Roces, among others.

It took guts to sue then. Few would, as Henry V said, "stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood/disguise fair nature with hard- favored rage." Provoking the dictator's anger resulted in drastic reprisals.

Manila Chronicle's Primitivo Mijares did not live to tell about it. So, many played it safe. Daily Express and Kanlaon Broadcasting censored reports of the habeas corpus hearings.

"Whenever press freedom has been permitted, Filipinos have defended it with passion," David Rosenberg writes in Marcos and Martial Law in the Philippines. "Whenever it has been prohibited, they complied... with obsequiousness."

"No other case of such transcendental significance to the life of the nation (has) confronted this Court," Chief Justice Querube Makalintal wrote in September 1974, two years after justices dawdled on the issue. Marcos sidetracked the case by piecemeal releases, rendering most suits "moot."

Were the justices cowed? Was it safer -- and more rewarding -- to play ball? Compromise on the king's plan to divorce the queen and wed Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's adviser badgered Thomas Moore. "Think carefully Master Moore. Do not provoke the king. Indignatio principis mortuus est (The prince's anger is death)."

An unruffled Moore replied: "Is that all, my lord? What that means is: I will die today and you will die tomorrow."

In his last speech, Benigno Aquino wrote: "It is ironic...that the Supreme Court, last April, ruled it can no longer entertain habeas corpus petitions for persons detained under presidential commitment orders. [This] covers all so called national security cases and, under present circumstances, can cover almost anything."

This was Aug. 21, 1983, a year short of Orwell's cutoff point. Before Aquino could read his arrival statement, he was gunned down. Indignatio principis mortuus est.

"We don't want to transmit all burdens of the past," Columbia University's Carol Gluck says. To heal trauma, historian Gluck offers three R's: Remembrance, reflection and responsibility. Do we meet those standards?

Remembrance: "There's no excuse for sending the past down memory hole." But eight out of every 10 Filipino students today know nothing of martial law. What can be recalled from a black hole? But it can be shoveled full with distortions. Martial law was "the most democratic period" in our history, Imelda says.

Reflection: Think through what really happened. From his prison, Sen. Jose Diokno wrote in December 1972 that we "must determine what led to this madness and how, when it ends, it need never happen again."

Responsibility: "We must take responsibility for the past and therefore the present and the future." Has anybody gone to jail? Has loot been returned? Did anybody apologize?

Ferdinand Marcos Jr. snapped: "Why should we apologize? All they want is the money."

No, wonder the fourth "R" -- reconciliation -- never materialized. In "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," Milan Kundera notes: "The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."