Treading fine lines, changing the past

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."