The defiant ones

The Ramon Magsaysay Awards, the “Nobel for Asia,” have been handed out yearly to Asian exemplars of service and excellence for the past half-century. Not for nothing is the award named after a Filipino president who became the most beloved leader of his country and inspired many before dying too early.

This year, the Magsaysay Awards were given to six recipients: former envoy Howard Dee of the Philippines, genocide survivor-historian Youk Chhang of Cambodia, nun-turned-activist Maria de Lourdes Martins Cruz of East Timor, psychiatrist Bharat Vatwani of India, teacher Sonam Wangchuk of India, and inclusion advocate Vo Thi Hoang Yen of Vietnam.

Ramon Magsaysay Awards Foundation president Carmencita Abella hailed the awardees as representing the “defiant declaration of hope” in Asia. “All have refused to give up, despite meager resources, daunting adversity and strong opposition. Their approaches are all deeply anchored on a respect for human dignity.”

Two awardees, in particular, offer instructive inspiration to Filipinos in the laborious task of nation-building and historical remembering.

Dee, 87, who served five different Philippine presidents under various capacities, was recognized for his “quietly heroic half-century of service to the Filipino people, his abiding dedication to the pursuit of social justice and peace in achieving dignity and progress for the poor, and his being, by his deeds, a true servant of his faith and an exemplary citizen of his nation.”

He was Corazon Aquino’s ambassador to the Holy See, Fidel V. Ramos’ lead negotiator with the communist rebels, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s adviser for indigenous peoples’ affairs and a member of Benigno Aquino III’s Bangsamoro Basic Law Peace Council. He also founded the Philippine Business for Social Progress in 1970—a consortium in which member corporations donate 2 percent of their profits to social development—and in 1972 the Assisi Development Foundation, which has aided 10.5 million needy Filipinos.

In 2006, Dee received the Aurora Aragon Quezon Peace Award. In his remarks, he said: “The important thing is not to be a success. The important thing is to be in history, bearing witness. This is not the time to lose heart. Rather, it is in the darkness that our lamps should be lit and our hearts set ablaze.”

Bearing witness to history has also been the hallmark of Cambodian activist Youk Chhang’s lifetime work.

Born into a country wracked by the Cambodian genocide from 1975-1979, Chhang saw his family dragged to hard labor in a Khmer Rogue commune, where his father, five siblings and some 60 relatives died—just some of the over 2 million Cambodians killed in an unprecedented orgy of class and political cleansing. He managed to escape to the United States as a refugee, studied political science, and returned to Cambodia to study human rights and democracy.

He resolved to record the truth behind his country’s “killing fields,” first as the head of Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program’s Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) and later as the project’s executive director. Against all odds and in the face of much resistance, Chhang has worked to assemble over a million documents, conducting thousands of interviews, making all these documents available digitally and using them as evidence in war crime trials. He is now engaged in building the Sleuk Rith Institute, which will house a museum and library, a research center and a graduate program on crimes against humanity that seeks to continue DC-Cam’s vital work.

The Magsaysay Award recognized Chhang’s “great, unstinting labor in preserving the memory of the Cambodian genocide, and his leadership and vision in transforming the memory of horror into a process of attaining and preserving justice in his nation and the world.”

Chhang’s steadfast project to keep the painful historical lessons of his country alive bears emulating by Filipinos. As Jose K. Tirol, associate professor in the history department of Ateneo de Manila University, laments: “The typical Filipino has a nasty habit of forgetting the tragedies of our history and preferring to move on, to the detriment of justice and the resultant naïveté of younger generations about what had really happened in decades and centuries past.”

Howard Dee and Youk Chhang will receive their awards in ceremonies on Aug. 31 in Pasay City. Together with the four others, they are worthy winners of an award that celebrates the best—the most defiant—in men and women of Asia.