Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 19:09:00 01/19/2008
MANILA, Philippines--SOMETIMES A REVOLUTION DOES NOT DEVOUR its children; sometimes it is the revolution that is consumed, by its own fattened children.
This, more or less, is how many Filipinos regard the series of historic events we call Edsa II. While the second epiphany of people power was not a revolution but a limited and direct democratic action, it is now understood by many to have been devoured at the table of history—that is to say, de-legitimated—by the greed of its own beneficiaries.
Is it any wonder that President Macapagal-Arroyo has declined to celebrate her own accession to power? (The transition took place seven years ago today.) The refusal has been couched in the usual language of reconciliation, but in truth the Arroyo administration has betrayed the ideals that brought it to power. It prefers that the people forget.
Edsa II, in the first place, was the response of a moral people repulsed by the ugly scheming that sought to undermine the very system designed to hold even the presidency itself to account. When pro-Estrada senators engineered to block the use of potentially incriminating evidence at the impeachment trial, public outrage exploded. A people in the process of being educated on the responsibilities and accountabilities of public officials (live coverage of the impeachment trial was that season’s must-see TV) suddenly found themselves face to face with blithely irresponsible officials, discouraging accountability.
In the seven years since then, of course, the Arroyo administration has schemed to protect the presidency from all accountability—and with markedly greater success. It compromised all impeachment drives in the House of Representatives, emptied the streets with a repressive anti-assembly policy, prevented officials of the Executive and the armed services from testifying on controversial issues before Congress, ignored the import of investigative reports it had itself commissioned.
No wonder it prefers official amnesia.
But Edsa II was also the response of a moral people outraged by the large-scale larceny, the every-man-for-himself-and-his mistress ethos that marked the Estrada administration. That “weather-weather” quote from one of his underlings, essentially describing politics as a wheel of fortune, captures the character of the Estrada years: an easy manner, a blithe assumption that it is the right of incumbent officials to make hay while the political sun shines, an un-ironic view that governance is reducible to politics.
The Sandiganbayan decision last September, convicting Estrada of two of four plunder charges, plumbs the official decadence of those years: the virtual centralization of jueteng, the illegal numbers game, right in Malacañang; the creation of billion-peso accounts under fictitious names; the use of official pressure to force government agencies to help crony companies and earn a tidy profit in the process. (Indeed, it can be argued that other allegations that were not proven to judicial standards had enough evidence to support a finding of moral certainty.)
This is why Estrada himself is engaged in an all-out effort to make people forget the events that led to Edsa II. He is doing that, in part, by attacking the historical nature of Edsa II itself. Consider, for instance, the full-page newspaper advertisement his political party took out the other day, reproducing adverse international commentary on his people-powered ouster. Or consider his battle cry of the last seven years, that he was the victim of a conspiracy.
But the political schemes of the Arroyo administration do not constitute proof of conspiracy. (We should not misread this to mean that no organized political group set out to seize the political opportunity in January 2001. There were, in fact, several efforts, but in the end we have to account for the emergence of people power itself. If there is anything we have learned since the democratic restoration in 1986, it is that people power cannot be summoned at will.)
Seven lean years on, it is hard to recall the heady days of Edsa II. But we must struggle to remember, in part because of those who want us to forget.
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