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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Rewarding Revolution By Antonio C. Abaya July 23, 2003 The recent ruling by the Supreme Court that the $682 million (about P36.4 billion) seized from the Swiss bank accounts of the Marcoses, and held in escrow by the Philippine National Bank, constitute illegally acquired wealth that must be forfeited in favor of the state, has triggered a stampede in media and Congress on how best to utilize that windfall. As I understand it, a law specifically provides that any money realized from the seizure of the Marcoses� ill-gotten wealth must be used exclusively to finance agrarian reform. But there is a groundswell of orchestrated brouhaha that wants that law to be amended so that the hoped-for P36.4 billion would be used instead to compensate the less than 10,000 alleged victims of human rights abuses committed by the Marcos regime. This would be in addition to the $2 billion (or P106.6 billion) which the very same alleged victims won in a US federal court in Hawaii a few years ago. That�s a total of P143 billion for less than 10,000 alleged victims, or a whopping P14.3 million for each victim or his/her survivors. As the cable TV commercial of Dick Gordon�s Wow! Philippines brags of this country, �It�s more than the usual!� It certainly is. Only in a surreal place like the Philippines can anything as weird as this happen. Someone should forward this piece to that naive and uninformed federal judge Manuel Real in Honolulu. Let me explain. Since most � though certainly not all � the alleged victims of human rights abuses were communist militants under Joma Sison and the late Popoy Lagman waging bloody socialist revolution against the bourgeois state, it can be argued that giving a theoretical P14.3 million to each victim or his/her survivors is not just compensating them for their physical and psychological traumas but is actually rewarding them for waging revolution, for trying to overthrow the bourgeois state. And let us be clear about one thing that bleeding heart liberals in media and Congress and ignorant federal judges in Hawaii seem to be blissfully unaware of: communist militants, then and now, wage bloody socialist revolution against the bourgeois state not because they want to set up a more perfect Jeffersonian democracy (for which they actually have nothing but contempt), but to establish a Maoist �dictatorship of the proletariat� in which monopoly of power is wielded only by the Communist Party and its clones. In this Maoist paradise of Joma Sison (Sandinista, in the case of Popoy Lagman), there is no freedom of expression (except in the service of the state), no free press, no free elections (except for candidates of the Communist Party), no private enterprise (until a Deng Xiaoping emerges later to undo the Maoist mess), no human rights (like those enjoyed by na�ve and ignorant federal judges in Hawaii). In this Maoist paradise, all schools and universities, all newspapers and magazines, all radio and TV stations, all book publishing, all banks, all utilities, all modes of transport, all the means of production, all the agricultural and industrial infrastructure, would be in the hands of the socialist state as represented by the Communist Party, to ensure a rigid egalitarianism (as in Maoist China), eradicate greed and exploitation (as defined by Marx�s theory of surplus value), and pave the way for the allegedly inevitable triumph of Communism. We want to compensate each communist militant (or his/her survivors) P14.3 million for the violation of his/her rights while in detention by the Marcos military, for the traumas they suffered while they were trying to ram this Maoist paradise down our throats? Would Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin have shelled out 14.3 million rubles for each of the 40 million (estimate of dissident Soviet historian Roy Medvedev) Soviet citizens (or their survivors) whose human rights were violated by Stalin and his NKVD in Lubyanka Prison and the gulags from 1923 to 1953? And what about the tens of thousands of demonstrating students massed in Tienanmen Square in May-June 1989, who were swept off the place by the blazing machine-guns and roaring APCs of the People�s Liberation Army, on orders of the otherwise reformist Deng Xiao-ping? Weren�t their human rights worth 14.3 million yuans each also? ***** On the other hand, I am not totally against giving some compensation for victims of human rights violations if it is to be part of an overall healing or reconciliation process that will put a closure to the senseless armed struggle. But it must be even-handed. Both communist victims of human rights abuses by the military, and military and civilian victims of human rights abuses by communist militants, deserve equal compensation. In the late 1980s, communist hitmen assassinated more than 200 policemen and soldiers in Metro Manila in non-combat situations, such as while the victims were directing traffic, or eating in a restaurant, or washing their cars, or sleeping in their front porch. In the 1990s, communist militants machine-gunned to death some 30 members of a religious cult in Davao while they were praying in their chapel. Surely these were violations of human rights as dastardly and inexcusable as those suffered by communist militants in the hands of the military. And do not forget the human rights violations committed by communist leaders against their own cadres in Southern Luzon and Mindanao in 1989-1991 as they panicked to flush out suspected military deep penetration agents in their ranks. Communist ideologue Walden Bello himself wrote in the Diliman journal Kasarinlan that he personally investigated this sad episode �to find some meaning in my 20 years involvement in the movement�, and came to the conclusion that to flush out five (yes, five) suspected DPAs, NPA commanders executed 700 cadres, without due process even by perfunctory communist standards. Other ex-rebels have put that estimate as high as 2,000. To this day, mass graves are still being dug up that bear witness to these blatant communist violations of the human rights of their own people. Surely these victims of communist atrocities have an equal claim to the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses. Their widows and orphaned children should be organized into pressure groups, as the communists have organized theirs, so that they also get compensation for the physical and psychological traumas that they and their loved ones suffered. ***** TAPATT WEBSITE. I would like to apologize to those who tried to access www.tapatt.org in May-June but drew error messages. Our website was disabled during this period, whether maliciously or only coincidentally, I do not know, while my computer was subjected to virus attacks at least three times. We are now operating normally again. Welcome back. COMMERCIAL. I am selling my collection of outstanding films on VHS videotapes to make way for DVDs. Those who want to have copies of the list may email their request to [email protected]. ***** The bulk of this article appears in the August 2, 2003 issue of the Philippines Free Press. |
| OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �Rewarding Revolution� most impressive, keep up the good work Anthony Dangelo, [email protected] July 30, 2003 ��������������������������� Nice job, Mr. Abaya, for this well-written and profound article. I for one had thought all these years that the money seized from the Marcoses must and should necessarily go to the victims of the dictatorship if only to compensate them for their suffering under that regime. But with your argument that it is practically an inane thing to do to give even a small part of the money to communists like Sison and Co. whose main purpose for existence is to topple our country's democratic institutions and do away with all its democratic traditions as we know them - this is not to say that the Marcos regime was a democratic one - hey, this is quite a novel perspective that I, and I'm sure many of our countrymen, had not really thought of. Yes, indeed, giving even a part of the money to Sison and Co. is like rewarding would-be rapists who got caught, imprisoned and tortured before they could carry out their evil plans on some poor innocent maidens! Thus, I cannot but agree with your argument in this particular respect. Thank you for this very enlightening article, Tony, and more power to you. Sincerely, Wilfredo C. Derequito, [email protected] July 31, 2003 Saudi Arabian Oil Co. P.O. Box 2995 Dhahran, Saudi Arabia P.S. On second thought, do we have the assurance from the government that not even a portion of the money will end up as pork barrel for our greedy legislators to be spent building basketball courts and other useless projects, in the process further fattening up their already bulging purses through kickbacks? We should all be vigilant not to let this particular scenario to happen which is just as bad, huh? MY REPLY. To reply to your concern in your PS, this money cannot be diverted to the general fund of the government, and hence to the pork barrel of congressman, because its transfer to Philippine hands would be under strict oversight by the Swiss Government. ���������������������������� Dear Antonio C. Abaya, I enjoy receiving your articles. Would you direct them to my other email address please? [email protected] Thanks, Dean Jorge Bocobo Manila, August 01, 2003 ....................................................................................... Tony, Once again, a brilliant piece of insight on the subject. When I become the Benevolent Dictator of the Philippines, I shall harness your intellect on Policy Issues and appoint you National Security Adviser. By the way, there is now a Power Crisis in Western Visayas. It is worse in iloilo than negros. Remember the study we did in 1993 Rick Ramos, [email protected] Bacolod City, August 02, 2003 MY REPLY. I can�t wait until you become benevolent dictator. I have a vague idea of that study in 1993. I think the conditions are now different. The present developing energy crisis is caused by the fact that not enough generating plants have been or are going to be built to meet increasing demand. And that is so because financiers are hesitant to finance power plants in this country because of public protests over PPA, protests which are and have been orchestrated by the communist movement and their na�ve allies in media, the Church and Congress. Protesters cannot accept the fact of life that when you contract to build a power plant, you have to pay for it based on the full capacity of the plant, whether or not you actually use it to its full capacity or you actually use it at all. Protesters should be tasked or deputized by the government, with substantial finders� bounty, to look for financiers to finance power plant projects, who will not require this admittedly onerous condition. Otherwise they should just shut up because they really discourage the building of new power plants. The power shortage began yesterday in the Visayas. It is expected to hit Mindanao next year, and Luzon in 2006 or 2007. So start reconditioning your emergency generators. A 600mw power plant takes about four years to build and commission. So even if ground is broken today for it, it will not go on stream until 2007. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO . |