by Juan L. Mercado (Phil Daily Inquirer & Cebu Daily News 22 May 07 )
“All nations are constructed on the basis of great rememberings and great forgettings,” Ernest Renan wrote. Is today’s frenzy over election results, actual or fudged, mutating into amnesia that smothers other issues?
Impunity for crime here drives parents to “wear down the stones of public squares” in the words of a Honduran mother, searching for her abducted son. A recent Inquirer photo shows the late press freedom advocate Jose Burgos Jr’s widow : Edith. She stares at a dumped corpse in a macabre ritual mothers of "desaparecidos" agonize through.
“No,” Edith says, the article reports. It’s not the body of her third child: 36-year old agriculturist Jonas.. In a Quezon City mall, burly men bundled Jayjay into a car traced to the 56th Infantry Battalion. Jayjay has not been seen or heard from since.
Only motorcycle keys were left of Redemptorist Father Rosaleo “Rudy” Romano, abducted by Marcos agents in Cebu July 1985. Olongapo publisher Romeo Legaspi disappeared in January 1993. Sto. Tomas students were among those who vanished in paranoid communist progroms. Muslim community leader Datu Abdullah Sadurah Alah disappeared. And kidnapped UP students Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan have never surfaced.
Abductors, meanwhile, loll in impunity. In a Mother’s Day gathering of desapaercido parents, at Quezon City ’s Good Shepherd convent, Edith said: “I have forgiven my son’s abductors, his torturers, and even their Commander in Chief. If we accept what has happened, and forgive the wrong done us, the dawn will come early”…”
Did the "capo di tutti capi" listen? “The weak can never forgive,” Asian statesman Mahatma Ghandi once said. “Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong…( Even when violence appears ) to do good, the good is only temporary. The evil it does is permanent…”
Forgiveness, however, does not extinguish accountability. “Men are unable to forgive what they can not punish” Hannah Arendt, stresses in her essay on Nazi terror.
That’s precisely the point of "Let the Stones Cry Out”. Published by Protestant National Council of Churches here, this 83-page report documents 836 politically motivated killings since 2001, Most remain unsolved .After the Palm Sunday killing of Indonesian priest Fr. Franciskus Madhu, SVD, in Kalinga, Catholic bishop Prudencio Andaya asked: . “Perhaps, we’ve been too silent for a long time, afraid to speak out against all killings in the past that we tolerated more killings to happen! "
A culture of impunity -- where traitor, abductor or torturer go free -- does not emerge full-blown over night. It builds up incrementally, stoked by official support, tolerance and silence. “A man begins to die the moment he remains silent about things that matter,” Martin Luther King warned.
The Philippines waffled on who collaborated with World War II Japanese occupiers, historian Frank Golay notes.This blurred the difference between Quislings and resistance fighters.
Under Marcos’ dictatorship, the Philippines “became a gulag of safe houses where members of the Armed Forces…were responsible for acts of unusual brutality,” torturing over 35,000 men and women,. Amnesty International noted. But those who tortured and salvaged bluffed and threatened their way into first de facto, then legalized, impunity.
“Policemen and soldiers who tortured and salvaged are still among us,” sociologist John Carroll, SJ noted in his 2002 paper: “A Nation In Denial”. Some were elected to national office. Little has been done to “uncover the facts, give the nameless dead their true names and decent burials”, much less identify, and prosecute perpetrators. “Unless the nation rises to vindicate it’s common conscience, it may be condemned to wander forever in the wilderness of valueless power plays among the elite.”
That has come to pass in today’s generation of abductors and killers, whether as vigilantes in Cebu City , rouge military bands or communist executioners..
South Africa ’s truth commission sought confession to shape collective memory. Greece prosecuted torturers as ‘national catharisis”. Guatemala , where 100,000 were salvaged. launched a project to “recover historic memory”.
By contrast, “the Philippines stretched impunity to it’s limits…by trying to forget it’s authoritarian past,” writes Alfred McCoy in “Closer Than Brothers” ( Yale University) “This evasion transformed torturers into heroes…Remembering became stigmatized as subversive...and politics emerged with the lingering paralysis of collective trauma”
Do parents of our desapercidos foreshadow a Philippine version of Argentinian mothers who turned Plaza de Mayo into a worldwide scream of protest against abduction of their children?.
Perhaps not – for the moment. In eight years, 30,000 individuals disappeared in Argentina . We’ve not reached the grim benchmark that Inquirer’s Michael Tan recalled : chiquitos desaparecidos : children given away, once their “disappeared” mothers, who gave birth in detention centers, were salvaged.
But the perception spreads that to survive politically, this regime would not think twice to expand further today’s impunity. How wretched the country where tenure of public office compels mothers, like Edith Burgos, to say: “I will continue searching for my son.”
Donde estas, Roger? Donde estan? “Where are you, Roger? Where are they?” cried Elvia Cristina de Gonzales of Honduras , in a poem, after her 24-year old son disappeared. In today’s Philippines , even “the stones cry out,” the same question. ####
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