We remember, we grieve

TODAY reminded me I once wrote a poem addressing Imee Marcos. It was October of last year, when she had that magazine cover.

Dear Imee,

I saw you on a magazine and cover and you were beautiful. But I also saw how charcoal-black and blood-stained your hands were, how your—funnily enough—dress was woven with blood, too. I saw the dead hovering the ground beneath your too pale feet (they looked delicate and I thought of porcelain glass) their ashen mouths screaming and yelling but all you hear is the muted buzzing of light bulbs and air conditioners.

I probably shouldn’t judge you, because what have you done to be deserving of judgment? The sins of the father are not yours, neither are your mother’s. Perhaps it’s the poison you and your brother and mother continue to feed us. It came from lethe and smelled like freshly pressed money, tasted the iron of civilian blood. perhaps because you are taking your mother’s place, just as your brother is taking your father’s.

Perhaps, it is because I see you, and I see stubborn persistent ghosts, the lives your father took without dirtying his hands—why should he when he has people for that, when he can pay and pay and promise them a quick road to the easy life. i see you and your mother’s and your brother’s quiet disregard, wrapping yourselves in an intricately woven illusion as fine as spider webs and as lasting.

And it would make sense for anyone to think, “Ah, what a beautiful woman,” upon the first time they see your face. But there are people like me, people who outlived your father with fear clutched to their chest like precious rosaries. We spat out the amnesiac a long time ago. We remember, and we grieve, and we stopped waiting for the knight to defeat the monsters who parade and insist on a dead man’s bloody glory.–Saquina Karla Cagoco Guiam, 26, full-time graduate school student, General Santos City

Sneaking Pain

AS a young Moro boy, I heard stories of captured rebels and sympathizers who were brought to military camps never to be seen again to this day. I heard stories of unimaginable tortures–electrocution was common, directly or through extremities soaked in water, of cuticles pulled out by a pair of pliers, being hacked gradually, men thrown into barrels full of cement and of excavating their own graves. I heard stories of women molested, abused and raped, and of children taken from the safety of their mother’s womb. Horrendous tortures that will define my perception of the military, of the government and the so-called home defense.

Perhaps it is lame to be told to swallow pork knowing you are a Muslim or be denied to pray on your own, or your faith verbally abused as the devil’s? Shall I tell you of my mother’s island village suspected of coddling MNLF (Moro National Liberation Front) rebels so it was decided to decimate the entire village with military bombs? Shall I tell you of my father’s home village that was to become part of the infamous 1974 Jolocaust? Shall I tell you of my childhood in Bongao where we spent hours under our houses on stilt because the military and the rebels were playing cat and mouse?

I thought I heard it all, until I became old enough to read, travel and interact more around Bangsamoro. The horrific tales just kept growing like an acacia tree. That whole community who sought refuge in a mosque only to be massacred continues to haunt me.

Why should I continue with this lingering pain? How shall I as a Filipino-Moro get healed of this pain? What shall be my position forward, not for me, but for my children and children’s children? For sure, I do not want them to go through what my elders and I went through. This kind of pain we did not and do not deserve as human beings. —Noor Saada, Tausug, Zamboanga City

No Change

WE joined the widespread calls for justice on the commemoration of the seventh-year anniversary of the gruesome Amapatuan massacre while asserting that social conditions that allowed the occurrence of what is considered the single deadliest attack on the press persists to this day.

As the Filipino youth calls for justice for the 58 victims of the Ampatuan massacre, we also decry the continuing reign of impunity and fascism under the Duterte regime which is epitomized by the giving of a hero’s burial for the dictator Marcos.

The Duterte regime’s continuation of Noynoy Aquino’s counterinsurgency campaign Oplan Bayanihan is a perpetuation of fascist rule, a reign of terror and impunity, and human rights violations that characterized the Marcos dictatorship.

Batas militar noon, Oplan Bayanihan ngayon. Giving a hero’s honors to Marcos just shows the persistence of fascism in the country. More than three decades after Marcos fall, state terror and human rights abuses continue with impunity.

Military operations under the Oplan Bayanihan that targets civilian communities has continued in the countryside despite the overhyped ceasefire declaration and peace negotiations between the Duterte government and the NDFP.

The AFP is continuing military operations and occupation of civilian communities, hence disrupting the peace and livelihood and causing fear among the rural folk. Illegal arrests, killings, harassment, and surveillance of peasant and Lumad leaders continue.

The military has continued its offensive posturing in rural areas under the guise of “peace and development” operations and the “war on drugs,” hence trampling on the essence of the GRP-NDFP peace talks and the unilateral ceasefire declared by both sides.

Duterte is silent on the crimes of former President Gloria-Macapagal Arroyo, under whose term the Ampatuan massacre occurred under the behest of the Arroyo ally and dreaded warlord clan Ampatuan.

The Arroyos and Aquinos are not held answerable for their crimes. The corrupt dictator Marcos is given a hero’s burial. Change has not come. We only see Duterte’s preservation of the rotten system of bureaucrat capitalism and political accommodation among ruling elites.

Duterte should hear the outraged cries of the Filipino youth and people. The continuing reign of impunity and human rights violations will only prove his declarations of “change” to be empty rhetoric and stoke rage against his regime.

In conclusion, Anakbayan calls on the Filipino youth and people to join the Nov. 25 protest at Luneta Park not only to condemn the hero’s burial for Marcos but also to call for an immediate end to Oplan Bayanihan and the continuing reign of fascism and impunity in the country. —Vencer Crisostomo, chairperson, Anakbayan