The right to know what happened

A generation born after the people power revolt in February 1986 has entered adulthood. What does this generation see?

There’s people power fatigue, born of disappointment over the unfulfilled promises of two unfinished revolutions. These days people would rather not remember EDSA II, and every year the crowd at the commemoration of the 1986 revolt becomes sparser.

There’s Ferdinand Marcos’ widow, the enduring half of the conjugal dictatorship, serving a fresh term as an honorable member of the House of Representatives. Our taxes continue to pay for her upkeep, including a coterie of bodyguards.

Ditto for their only son and Marcos’ namesake, now an honorable senator of the republic. Bongbong Marcos has not ruled out a run for the presidency, following in the footsteps of dad.

The clan remains in firm control of Marcos’ bailiwick, Ilocos Norte, where the current governor is eldest child Imee.

A shrine has been built in honor of Marcos while the family waits for official permission to transfer his well-preserved remains to the heroes’ cemetery.

Enforcers of the martial law regime, during which thousands of political dissidents, communist rebels and left-leaning activists were detained without charges, kidnapped, tortured, executed and “disappeared,” were never made to account for their atrocities.

A generation has grown up with little or no awareness of stories of waterboarding Pinoy style, of electric shocks applied to the genitals, of being raped and repeatedly beaten and burned with cigarettes.

The man who signed all the so-called ASSOs – arrest, search and seizure orders – has not lost a single bid for Congress, and is currently the most senior member of the Senate.

Only the members of the Aviation Security Command team that greeted Ninoy Aquino upon his return from exile in 1983 have been sent to prison for his assassination. To this day we don’t know who gave the order to kill. The Aquinos are still waiting for one of the soldiers to reveal if a grievously wounded Ninoy, instead of being rushed to a hospital, was finished off in the van that took him on a leisurely, hour-long drive around Manila.

Will we ever know the truth? Are we still interested in knowing?

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Perhaps forgiving and forgetting is the Christian thing to do. It can prevent crippling divisiveness and foster national unity to hasten progress. Bongbong Marcos has said it’s time to move on.

But forgiving and forgetting, and the failure to hold anyone accountable for atrocious human rights violations and world-class corruption can also foster impunity. We’ve been warned that the sins and errors of the past, if forgotten, tend to be repeated.

Our failure to bring to justice those responsible for the abuses of a dictatorship has to be one of the principal reasons for continuing widespread corruption, both petty and large-scale, and extrajudicial executions nearly 28 years after the collapse of the Marcos regime.

Law enforcement is so weak Pinoy voters actually like politicians who make no excuses about their readiness to take shortcuts in dealing with criminals and other troublemakers.

We not only have failed to bring human rights violators and plunderers to justice, we have also rewarded them richly with high office. And we’re not talking only of the Marcoses and their cronies.

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Corazon Aquino often said she wanted reconciliation with justice. We got neither, unless you consider shifting political alliances, forged out of expediency, to be reconciliation.

There is such a thing as transitional justice, but it seems we skipped the process after the fall of Marcos. Pinoys probably thought seeing him die in exile was enough and it was time to move on. His loyal military chief Fabian Ver is also dead.

Dictatorship and oppression are not unique to the Philippines. Several countries with similar experiences, however, have managed to bring former oppressors to justice, or continue the process of holding people accountable for human rights violations and plunder.

“It’s a long process,” Sebastian Rosales of Argentina’s Human Rights Division told me the other night.

Rosales is in Manila together with about 30 participants from about seven countries, attending a weeklong regional workshop on “dealing with the past.”

The workshop is sponsored by the Swiss government in cooperation with the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights. CHR chief Loretta Ann Rosales told me they are working mainly on documenting individual stories of human rights abuses, initially focusing on the Marcos regime.

An archive that will be set up can be accessed by the public and used to develop a curriculum so the history of martial law can be taught in schools. Education Secretary Armin Luistro has told the CHR his department will be involved in the project.

“People have a right to know what happened,” Jonathan Sisson told me. Sisson is the senior adviser for dealing with the past (yes, it’s an official designation) in the Swiss foreign affairs department’s human security division.

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“Human security,” in the Swiss context, refers to peace, human rights, humanitarian policy and migration.

Swiss Ambassador Ivo Sieber explained to me that his government’s foreign policy used to be focused mainly on financial and monetary aspects and “good services” such as neutral mediation in international issues.

After the end of the cold war, their policy shifted to the promotion of “human security.”

Victims of internal conflicts, Sisson said, have a right to truth, justice and reparations. The pursuit of those objectives continues for victims of state terrorism during Argentina’s “Dirty War,” according to Rosales.

It’s the same in South Africa, where holding the human rights offenders during apartheid accountable is an “unfinished business,” according to another participant in the workshop, Yasmin Sooka, a lawyer and expert in transitional justice.

Sooka, executive director of the Foundation for Human Rights in her country, served as commissioner of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The late Nelson Mandela created the commission, which was chaired by another Nobel Peace laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Mandela managed to strike a delicate balance between national reconciliation and justice when he assumed power. But his country’s search for truth, accountability and justice, and South Africans’ desire to come to terms with their past, continued beyond his presidency.

Not too long ago, Filipinos aimed for those same goals. Etta Rosales, herself a victim of martial law, believes it’s not too late to revive interest in the pursuit of those goals.

The process starts with the truth, by letting the victims tell their story.