THE teaching in the educational system of Martial Law as an aspect of Philippine history has not been particularly effective and is fraught with difficulties.
According to educator Pat Ray Dagapioso among the difficulties are: neglect the importance of history in the curricula, access of those in the public school system to adequate educational resources, and the biases of the teachers themselves.
But a more malicious factor is the continuing legacy of what lawyer Ruben Carranza termed the “mutually-reinforcing impunity that came from combining political repression and profit from large-scale corruption” in the time of Marcos in the forum ZFD publication Moving Beyond: Towards Transitional Justice in the Bangsamoro Peace Process.
This mutually-reinforcing impunity has among its consequences “the willingness of those too young to know or to remember the dictatorship to accommodate a version of Marcos that depicts his dictatorship as necessary, its repression justified, its corruption no worse than that of other politicians and his legacy as far better than that of the presidents that followed. This revision of history is clearly tied to the political ambitions of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.”
The real architect and beneficiaries of the intention to bury Marcos at the LNMB are thus the Marcoses and their ilk who have remained unapologetic of the wrongdoings they committed against Filipinos, and are actively seeking to regain full legitimacy and power.
Related to this, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) warned that a hero’s burial “will complete the Marcoses’ political restoration and will complete the whitewash of all the crimes they perpetrated against the people”.
The GPH-NDFP will simultaneously tackle the remaining substantive issues in Oslo starting August 20.
While the Left has taken off the table the LNMB burial as a precondition of the resumption of the peace talks, it is important that the Marcos issue remains part of the substantive discussions, and that there is recognition of the importance of incorporating elements that will enable our society to deal with the violence in our past.
Peace talks are not just the discussion of set agenda items. Effective peacebuilding, of which peace talks are a critical part, rest on a recognition not only of the conflict and its consequences, but also on the acknowledgment and resolution of its roots, and the commitment to transform the conflict.
If the understanding that the Marcos years were a big part of the problem and provided specific dynamics to the conflict is not shared between the Philippine Government and the NDFP, how can both agree on the future that will be shaped in the agreements so that the causes of the conflict are effectively dealt with and violence does not rear its ugly head again?
According to Carranza, “overcoming the Marcoses’ impunity and holding them accountable is therefore not only a matter of dealing with the past; it is equally a matter of ensuring that truth prevails in the present and that justice can still happen in the future.” Surely both GPH and NDFP want truth and justice to prevail in the agreements that will come out of the talks.
As a case in point, the TJRC report acknowledges that the Bangsamoro problem is from a combination mutually reinforcing phenomena of “violence, impunity and State neglect” rooted in the “imposition of a monolithic Filipino identity and Philippine State by force on multiple ethnic groups in Mindanao and Sulu that saw themselves as already pre-existing nations and nations-states”. This analysis provided a robust, inclusive and viable foundation and framework for the comprehensive and viable recommendations. (To be concluded tomorrow)