Giving the lie

THE DISTRIBUTION last Monday of the first checks to the thousands of listed Marcos human rights victims brought a lump to the throat—and raised not a few eyebrows. Can $1,000 possibly be equal to the unspeakable suffering that the victims and their kin went through during the dark days of the dictatorship? The answer, of course, is no. But then no amount of money can ever be satisfactory compensation. As many of the victims said themselves, they endured the torture, the enforced disappearances, the sexual assault, the long days in prison or in the underground, because they were fighting for freedom. To put it in blunt terms: They did it for country, not money.

But in our day, in our system, money is a necessary symbol. We invest it with both social and personal meaning. A paycheck, for instance, represents not merely the cash value written on it; it symbolizes the worker’s own hard work, it is a sign that the money was earned, it represents the purchases—the new appliance, the much-needed vacation, the last installment of a child’s tuition—that the worker intends to use it for.

The checks that were distributed last Monday, part of a settlement involving one (and only one) set of Marcos cases resolved in a United States court, represent not merely the peso value of each listed victim’s portion. They also symbolize the pain that the victims and their kin went through during the martial law years, as well as the interminable wait for legal clarity and judicial resolve they endured in the years after the institutions of democracy, and the possibility of hope, were restored. Above all, they serve as proof that, contrary to Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s revisionist version of history, his father the dictator was not in the process of transforming the Philippines into another Singapore. He had another island in mind: Alcatraz.

The stories that saw print in the wake of the distribution of checks were truly heartwarming. As it happens, P43,200 (the peso equivalent of the individual settlement) can be stretched to meet certain basic needs: repairing the roof of a house, paying for tuition, buying necessary medicines. The portion each victim received seems small by present standards, but the uses each can be put to are real, tangible, necessary. The simple gratitude that many of the victims expressed upon receiving the money was a bracing reminder, of the things that really matter.

But more than the cash value, each check, each act of compensation, stands as a living rebuttal to the offensive attempts of the Marcos family to deny personal responsibility for the horrors of the Marcos era. Each time a Marcos or his minion will be tempted to rewrite history, or argue the case for the dictator’s burial in the national heroes’ cemetery, or claim that life was better under Marcos’ increasingly heavy hand, we can point to photocopies of the checks, or to the repaired roof, or to the child’s diploma, and say: Here is proof of what the Marcoses did.

We can only hope that other cases, involving greater sums of money, will be resolved soon, and a compromise with the Philippine government’s position as the only legal beneficiary of any settlement will be struck with the assistance of Congress. Perhaps a law can be passed apportioning a certain proportion of any settlement money as compensation for human rights victims; perhaps the mandate to use any settlement money to fund agrarian reform can be modified.

And we should consider the checks distributed last Monday as a sign, too, that the national government should take the lead, and not merely play reluctant catch-up, in the issue of human rights compensation.

In fact, we should also encourage all claimants to include an additional legal demand: The Marcoses should be made to subsidize a memory fund, as it were. We need to remind ourselves of what really happened during the dark days of the dictatorship, and those who profited during the dictatorship should be made to fund this necessary and sustained act of reminding. A Martial Law Museum, a series of books on the atrocities of the era, a documentary of our very own holocaust—the possibilities, like the checks themselves, are bracing.