After 10 months of ambiguity, President Aquino announced at the foreign correspondents forum with the President on Oct. 12 that he had decided against the burial of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. With that, the president hoped to extinguish the most contentious issue that had confronted his administration. He failed.
By putting his foot down on the petition of the Marcos family and die-hard political supporters to honor him with a state funeral, the President at the same time tried to show his decisiveness and rejection of the anti-democratic culture of the Marcos regime.
The President also turned down a recommendation of Vice President Jejomar Binay that Marcos be buried in his hometown, Batac, Ilocos Norte—not in the Libingan—but with military honors. At the beginning, the President did not show his true colors, when in March, 216 congressmen signed a resolution—initiated by Sorsogon Rep. Salvador Escudero, a former Marcos cabinet member—urging President Aquino to allow a state burial for Marcos.
In an effort to show he was not biased in an issue in which the President’s parents—both father and mother—were locked in a life-and-death struggle for power with the Marcos dictatorship, he delegated the task of deciding the fate of the petition to Vice President Binay.
The public sentiment at the time appeared to be that the political situation needed political guidance from the President about his stand over whether or not Marcos deserved a state funeral. That he had to shift to Binay the burden of making a decision in an issue in which the public needed an authoritative decision from the President—not from his second in command—the President abdicated his duty to provide leadership for public opinion.
Perceiving that the President was playing to the gallery and was reluctant to antagonize the undercurrent of support for Marcos, Binay played his own game of trying to please all sides. When he recommended that Marcos be buried in his hometown with military honors, he pleased Marcos supporters. But he did not please a broad constituency of victims of human rights abuses under the dictatorship. But the recommendation did not win applause for the President. That did not please the President. Binay was not happy. He thought he had been used to shield the President from any fall-out coming from an unpopular decision.
At the Focap forum last week, the President found his conviction and after much second thought, he decided the right thing to do after all is that there should not be a state burial for Marcos. “Not under my watch!” he emphatically told the Focap, “I will not be sanctioning a burial” for Marcos.
In explaining his decision to the foreign correspondents, the President said: “We have so many victims of the martial law years… They have not been accorded an apology, the compensation bill is pending, and it would be really, I think, the height of injustice to render any honors to the person who was the direct mastermind of all their suffering.”
You cannot divorce what happened during the martial law years with the totality of his public life. And it serves a wrong message—demeans the honors given to others of a similar nature—to render to the same person who has inflicted such suffering on our people after having promised to serve them.”
With this explanation, the President wrapped up all the arguments against giving Marcos a state funeral and demolished claims that Marcos was entitled to a state burial because he was not only a soldier who fought in the resistance during World War II and had served his country as President of the Republic. True, many of those who had been buried at the Libingan had also been soldiers and state functionaries, but the President’s argument highlighted the overarching point that makes the Marcos case a cut above all the rest.
Marcos dismantled Philippine democracy, and replaced it with a dictatorship. That regime witnessed the worst human rights abuses in the country since it became a republic and spawned the most rapacious corruption resulting in a slew of ill-gotten wealth litigations here and abroad following the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. Marcos was the first post-war Filipino president ever to be toppled by a people power revolution as an expression of popular outrage over the excesses and abuses of the dictatorship.
Human rights abuses and violations are an insufficient argument to single out Marcos for exclusion from a state funeral. Most of the victims of human rights cited by the President were activists of the Left and political opponents of the Marcos regime. As shown by records of human rights organizations and evidence seized from the Marcos entourage and cronies when they fled with their loot in the wake of the People Power revolution, the Marcos regime is unmatched in scale of its plunder of public wealth by any previous administration.
The most damning charge against the Marcos regime is that it destroyed Philippine democracy. To ignore this argument is to trivialize the issue of Marcos’ entitlement to state burial.
If Aquino did not highlight the totality of Marcos’ political legacy, he would have missed the point of all these outpourings of outrage against the petition of the Marcos heirs. The heirs have not even apologized to the victims of the regime’s human-rights abuses. The say there’s nothing to apologize for. From this position, there can never be reconciliation.
As a consequence, the President’s declaration has not closed the deep cleavages created by the abuses of the dictatorship. The division will continue to fester.