Sunday, August 19, 2007 Mercado: Struggle against forgetting By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
OUR paths crossed, for the last time, at San Francisco’s International Airport. The family and I were heading for our Bangkok flight gate. We bumped into former senator Benigno Aquino, striding toward his Boston plane.
The years have blurred most of our chat that day. But we laughed over my securing a “carrier pigeon”---a sympathetic Air India manager---to sneak his article, smuggled from a Fort Bonifacio prison cell, under martial law censor noses, to Bangkok Post editor Theh Chongkadikhij.
February 1973, the Post ran “The Aquino Papers.” This three-part series proved the first direct challenge to the dictatorship. Press information minister Francisco Tatad cabled a furious 8,000 word reply.
Reprisals followed. Aquino and senator Jose Diokno were hustled into solitary confinement—and almost starved to death—in Fort Magsaysay. For 43 days, Corazon Aquino and family were turned away by prison guards. So were Carmen Diokno and children.
“Only when Cory asked deputy defense minister Carmelo Barbero why did she learn it was ‘punishment’ for the Post series,” Miriam Grace Go reported.
The airport loudspeakers called for boarding, cutting our chat short. "Why didn't you introduce me?” my then 13-year old son, Francis, groused: “That's the next Philippine president."
It was not to be.
Twenty-four years ago, this Tuesday, the 52-year old Aquino returned to Manila onboard a China Airlines flight. Amidst military guards, a single bullet tore into his jaw, on the service gangway.
The censors suppressed the arrival statement that Aquino never got to read.
"I have returned of my own free will to join the ranks of those struggling to recover our rights and freedoms through non-violence," Aquino planned to say. "I seek no confrontation.”
He hoped that a direct appeal to the ailing dictator could help usher in peaceful change.
Ninoy saw the danger. "If they kill me, they're out in two years," he predicted. That forecast fell short of People Power Revolt by two years. Was that stupidity? Or principled stubbornness?
The Duke of Norfolk badgered the imprisoned Thomas More to heed Henry VIII's demand for consent to his divorce.
"Think Master More," the Duke urged. “Indignatio principis mors est. (The prince's anger is death.)” To which More calmly replied: "Is that all my Lord? In good faith then, there's no difference between your Grace and me---but that I shall die today, and you tomorrow."
Under the dictator’s thumb, Military Commission No. 2 found Aquino “guilty” of subversion. They sentenced him to death. Censorship ensured that few heard what Aquino said after the sentence.
A military tribunal had no jurisdiction when civilian courts functioned, he stressed. Could the commission recall the names of military judges who tried Andres Bonifacio? They could not. Aquino ticked off the names. “Today, nobody remembers the names of those judges. But we meet in a fort that is named in honor of the very man they sentenced to death.”
The nation today honors Aquino, as we will on Tuesday. Places are named after him. So is the Manila International Airport. His features grace our currency. And his family never demanded a Libingan ng mga Bayani plot. The Marcoses, in contrast, have wheedled, unsuccessfully so far, for such a plot.
Now a 37-year old Northwest Airlines pilot, Francis never got to meet Ninoy.
But the old questions fester: Who were the mastermind(s) in Aquino’s assassination? Why have they managed to escape accounting? Do people care? And who remembers the judges of Military Commission No. 2?
Indeed, the “struggle of man against power,” as Czech novelist Milan Kundera once said,” is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
