Forgiven, forgotten

These days Imee Marcos gets better press than Corazon Aquino. Imelda Marcos is still singing and flashing her dazzling jewelry. Ferdinand Marcos might yet get his hero’s burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. And the man who announced the imposition of martial law 33 years ago this week is a senator claiming to be an advocate of good governance.

Sometimes living in this country is like wandering into a world of magic realism. Of course 33 years is a long time, but is it long enough to forget?

Younger generations are growing up confused over what must not be forgotten. Despite all the vilification heaped on them, the Marcoses have retained their political clout, especially in the Ilocos Region, and we just recently saw what can happen when they refuse to cooperate with the opposition.

These days the Marcos best known to young Filipinos is Imee’s son Borgy, a commercial model whose image is plastered on giant advertising billboards. His mom is a hip career woman who is a walking advertisement for the wonders of scientific beauty enhancement – and she’s unabashedly proud of it.

Talk to the younger generations about the Marcos clan and you’ll probably be asked, "What’s not to like about the Marcoses?"

Thirty-three years after martial law was declared, the Marcoses are fully rehabilitated, wooed by both the administration and opposition. A nation notorious for its short memory has largely forgotten, and, in many ways, forgiven.

To forgive, forget and move on can be healthy, especially for a nation badly scarred by divisiveness. To forgive and forget without seeing justice done, however, encourages a repeat of the same abuses, the same corruption and mistakes.

From one of the darkest periods in the nation’s history, many lessons should have been learned and never forgotten.

Instead, if there is any lesson imparted at all to Filipinos by the Marcos years, it is that if you’re going to steal, you have to steal big, because then you can get away with it.

* * *

Those who led the country after Ferdinand Marcos so botched up the job that these days there are Filipinos who look back wistfully to the early years of martial rule when national discipline was enforced.

Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan. For national progress, discipline is needed. Back then there were people who agreed with that martial law slogan, which rings true to this day.

Marcos, unfortunately for the nation, did not follow his own slogan. For a brief period, however, parents, the Church and conservative groups applauded the martial law regime for its crackdown on drug traffickers, and even for bringing down hemlines, forcing long-haired men to sport "white side walls" and crew cuts, banning hardcore porn (bomba) movies and even rock ’n’ roll.

These days few people miss the music of Donny and Marie Osmond in the early martial law years, but there are those who miss the kind of enforced discipline that made Filipinos follow traffic rules and use pedestrian lanes.

Those who came after Marcos bungled even more the task of prosecuting anyone for corruption. Thirty-three years after martial law was declared, starting this country’s long journey into darkness, no one has gone to prison for looting national coffers. And 33 years after, the nation is still embroiled in corruption scandals at the highest levels of government.

Instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, we learned how to get away with murder, human rights abuses and large-scale corruption. Is it any wonder then that over three decades later, we are still unable to resolve questions about lying, cheating and stealing involving top public officials?

* * *

The message sent by the failure to punish anyone is that crime pays in this country, and it pays handsomely.

A foreign diplomat who was posted here in 1986 observed that Filipinos seem to have a problem making anyone pay for crime. It’s not just the enforcers of martial law who have gone unpunished, the diplomat reminded me; even Filipinos who collaborated with the Japanese during World War II were forgiven and their crimes forgotten.

Except for the soldiers sentenced to life for the assassination of former Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. and alleged hit man Rolando Galman, no one has been locked up for crimes committed in furtherance of the martial law regime. To this day we still don’t know precisely who ordered the assassination.

The higher a person’s station in life, it seems, the greater the Filipino reluctance to impose punishment. A petty thief goes straight to jail; a large-scale tax evader hires a topnotch accountant and bribes the revenue collector.

Aggravating the problem is that we can’t tell where reluctance to punish ends and the sheer failure of the criminal justice system begins.

This weakness is on display in the case of Joseph Estrada, the first duly elected president to be arrested and detained without bail for plunder. Erap has been detained for over four years, and there’s still no resolution of his case in sight.

In contrast, the Koreans arrested, prosecuted, sentenced to death, imprisoned and pardoned two of their former presidents – one of whom placed Korea under martial law – for mass murder, treason and large-scale corruption within just two years. Top businessmen were also sent to prison and fined heavily for bribery.

We like leaving loose ends; we are notoriously averse to closure. This is true particularly in Congress, where politicians use parliamentary immunity for character assassination and conduct endless investigations chiefly for publicity but aren’t really interested in seeing justice done.

Not that you can blame the lawmakers. Seeing the leisurely pace of justice in the case of Erap, and seeing that justice may never be rendered in the case of the Marcoses, you can understand why there is lack of interest in taking a case to court.

The failure of the criminal justice system is among the biggest disappointments after EDSA 1 and 2.

On the 33rd anniversary of the declaration of martial law, we are again set to forget if not forgive and move on, with the truth still buried and no one being made to account for wrongdoing.

And we’re referring not just to the Marcoses.