SINGAPORE – Vice President Jojo Binay was reported to be conducting his own survey to help him decide on the hero’s burial issue for the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos. I am sure this is not the way to decide the issue and I am confident Veep Jojo knows that too. It is lamentable that we have such short memories and that our educational system failed to teach our young post-EDSA generations an important history lesson.
Some readers have written me urging me to write something on the issue. The most I have written in reaction a Facebook post was to ask these bewildered questions: does this mean those of us who almost got killed on EDSA risked our lives for nothing? Or worse, does this mean we actually kicked out a hero? Our People Power revolution was supposed to have inspired people all over the world to throw out their own tyrants. If we declare Marcos a hero after all, wouldn’t that paint a rather confused picture of what we are as a people? How come those we inspired got the message of our People Power revolution and we apparently didn’t?
A letter from former Senator Saguisag to Veep Jojo and a You Tube interview of Singapore senior mentor minister Lee Kuan Yew posted by a Facebook friend made me think of the issue from an economic development perspective. It also helps to be away from Manila for a few days and have time to reflect in the first world atmosphere of neighboring Singapore.
In a sense Mr. Marcos could have achieved what LKY achieved for this city state by the time he left office. He had the time and he had the martial law powers to do what Mr. Lee did. When I first visited Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta in the summer of 1969, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Manila was the more developed...the more cosmopolitan. I remember writing an article in the Manila Times magazine about my impressions of our ASEAN tour...that it gave me so much pride to be Filipino. We were indeed the regional leader then.
But even at that time, Singapore was clearly on the rise. Mr. Lee was focused on the transformation of Singapore into an economic powerhouse. Marcos was at that time campaigning for a second term and was more focused on perpetuating himself in power. Shortly after winning an unprecedented second term, he started the wheels rolling on a plan to stay in office beyond Constitutional limits. His first ploy was to amend the constitution through a Constitutional Convention. But there were enough independent thinkers elected as delegates. I was assigned by ABS-CBN to cover the con con and I saw Mr. Marcos’s machinations to control the outcome. He soon realized this was a hopeless route.
And so he first declared a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus which meant he could keep political prisoners in jail indefinitely without having to bring them to court. While supposedly needed to fight a growing communist insurgency, it was used against political enemies. A year later he declared martial law. We all know how he abused his absolute powers beyond establishing social order. And rather than using his absolute powers to enhance economic growth as Mr. Lee did in Singapore, Mr. Marcos used his powers to gain wealth for himself, his family and his cronies.
At this point of our history, Mr. Marcos had the same powers as LKY. But the outcome is as different as night and day. And this is why Mr. Marcos cannot be considered a hero. He had his chance to build our country and make it great as he promised. But he and his cronies plundered it instead. He allowed his wife to live the glamorous life of a jetsetter cavorting with the world’s rich and infamous at our expense. He had a chance to restructure our society and free it from the feudalism we inherited from Spain but he made the elite even more entrenched so as to doom any chances of social and economic reform as we can see today.
LKY was totally different from Marcos. He led an ethical and almost puritanical personal life and totally devoted himself to Singapore’s development as a nation and as an economic power. Indeed, Mr. Lee had a more difficult problem of forging a nation out of a very diverse group of people who are as different as the Chinese can be to the Malays and the Indians residing in this former British colonial trading outpost. But Mr. Lee had a vision and a passion for his country and his people and was not sidetracked by a personal agenda to enrich himself the way Mr. Marcos did.
“We were not one people,” Mr. Lee intoned in his You Tube interview, “we did not share one language or vision of one future.” A testament to his success is that today, Mr Lee can say “we now share a future in the sense that we know if Singapore goes under, we all go under.” We can sense this feeling of nationhood everywhere in this city state in the attitudes and behavior of people that we might call in our realm as civic consciousness.
How did Mr. Lee do it? First, he said, is to provide people with security. Then he forged an educational system that not only taught them skills to build their economy but to teach them English as a unifying language. Then he started building the economy. “If you do not have economic development, what are we talking about. First get them decent livelihoods then we talk of a superior government and democracy is a superior form of government,” Mr. Lee said in his You Tube interview.
And that’s why I say Mr. Marcos is no hero. He had a chance to build up this country the way Mr. Lee was building up Singapore at just about the same time. We are suffering today the consequences of being a basket case in our region because of Mr. Marcos’s failure. Mr. Marcos allowed the greed we see in our politicians to characterize his watch. And he was worse than Indonesia’s Suharto who at least didn’t take the fruits of corruption out of the country. Mr. Marcos so ruined our economy such that towards the end of his dictatorship, we could not pay our foreign debts and our economic hardships eventually caused his political hold to unravel.
I suspect this renewed demand to recognize Mr. Marcos’s alleged heroism is a way of absolving him and his family of their crimes against our people without repentance and even much less, a proper restitution. This is happening as a preliminary to Bongbong running for the presidency in 2016. If Bongbong and Imee mean what they often say that they have no hidden wealth, they should sign a declaration assigning to the National Treasury all accounts in all banks and financial institutions worldwide that are claimed to be Marcos accounts. That ends all litigations that only enrich lawyers worldwide. Then we can start a clean slate for their generation of Marcoses.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Mr. Marcos was a WW2 hero who deserves to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, he lost that right as he erased the value of his heroic acts during his dictatorship. Senator Saguisag cited the case of the French WW1 hero Marshall Petain, considered a national hero, but who died discredited and in prison for collaborating with the Nazis in WW2. He remains buried in a prison cemetery. That’s how a hero became a heel. That’s how Mr. Marcos ceased to be a hero as well.
Hopefully Veep Jojo decides more as a patriot that he was during the dark years of the dictatorship and not as a typical politician that he might have become.
A Happy Easter to everyone.
Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. He is also on Twitter @boochanco