Empty apology
Ihad not planned of joining the conversation on Ms. Imee Marcos asking Filipinos to move on. If two Aquino Presidents could not give justice to the most prominent victim of Martial Law, their husband and father, I figured something was overpoweringly amiss and I might as well move on.
But when I heard her apologize only to those that, in her words, “were inadvertently hurt” by Martial Law, something inside me boiled in protest. This her latest insult rubbed old wounds raw again and I decided to vent the anger that simmered inside me.
She apparently used the adverb “inadvertently” to convey the message that only a few were hurt by her late father’s Martial Law to whom alone she is apologizing. But this is a lie, a blatant distortion of the truth that a whole nation was hurt by a Martial Law which was anything but inadvertent.
The plundered billions that government has only partially recovered from the Marcos family could not have been inadvertently stolen by her father and his cronies. But, inadvertent or not, the plunder hurt the whole country’s economy and impoverished a lot of people.
The behest loans, like for the now-mothballed Nuclear Power Plant (Luzon) and the opened-and-shut Sabena Copper Mine (Mindanao) among others, could not have been inadvertently taken. Again, inadvertent or not, these loans went to the pockets of Marcos’s cronies and away from the people who could have used them to improve their lives.
According to Amnesty International, 3240 were killed extrajudicially, 34,000 tortured, and 70,000 incarcerated. (No figures on desaparecidos). Historian Alfred McCoy, writing about Marcos’ elite torture units, tells us that of those killed, “some 2520, or 77% of all victims, were salvaged-that is tortured, mutilated, and dumped on a roadside for public display.” Such savagery could not have been inadvertent. Their victims could not have been inadvertently hurt.
My kidnap cum arrest and five or so terrifying days and nights of non-stop interrogation in an undisclosed military safe house could not have been inadvertent. The military could not have picked me up and brazenly violated my human rights inadvertently.
No, there is just no way the warrantless arrests, torture, and death of thousands and the plunder that impoverished a whole nation were inadvertently inflicted. They were part of a megalomaniac’s evil scheme to attain the absolute power that he wielded to gain, for family and cronies, ownership of the country that he thus plunged into political, economic, and moral darkness.
Dogs, cats, and chicken run over by military vehicles are the only creatures that I know Martial Law hurt inadvertently. These certainly have no use for Ms. Marcos’s anyway empty apology.