Asia Times: Rights victims live with Marcos's legacy



	June 19, 1999	atimes.com

Southeast Asia

Rights victims live with Marcos's legacy
By Radha Basu

MANILA - Time has not healed the wounds of thousandsof Filipinos who say they were tortured, raped or lived throughthe murder of loved ones during the regime of President FerdinandMarcos. Even as their legal battle for justice drags on in an Americancourt, these victims are still learning to cope with the legacy ofnightmares that they claim a dictator's whim thrust on their livesmore than 20 years ago.

On April 29, a Hawaii court approved a settlement under whichthe Marcos family agreed to pay $150 million to 9,539victims of human rights violations during the Marcos regime, whichran from 1965 until the strongman's ouster in a civilian-backedmilitary revolt in 1986. Marcos died in exile in Hawaii in 1989, but his family waslater allowed back into the Philippines.

The Hawaii settlement was reached after some victims agreed to the watering down of an earlier judgment awarding them damagesworth $1.9 billion. Despite the dilution, the judgment is of tremendous politicalsignificance. This is the first time in the world that a dictatoror his family will be paying damages for human rights violationsunder his regime.

The U.S. court ordered that the money be transferred by May 10to a Hawaii bank by the Philippine government, which is holdingthe Marcos funds in escrow. But with the funds yet to be transferred, the victims' lawyershave filed a motion asking the court to vacate the settlement. Thecourt is yet to decide on the motion.

To many victims, the court proceedings offer little solace.''Money cannot compensate our heartache or give us back our peaceof mind. To the poor people who were tortured during the Marcosregime, however, the compensation will serve as a means to makeends meet,'' reasoned Mila Gerardino, whose brother Andre waskilled in 1979 in Negros, central Philippines. ''It all depends, of course, on how soon we get the money,'' she added. The family alleges that Andre was shot in the hip at arestaurant, then tortured for a week by the PhilippineConstabulary before being buried alive.

''They tied my father to a coconut tree and shot him dead. Hewas a carpenter at the local church,'' remembered 25-year-old AlethOclima, who was five when her father left home one day in May 1979and was later killed by the Philippine Constabulary. ''His only crime was that he had seen my uncle abducted by the military and was going home to inform the family. My mother slavedas a domestic help in Oriental Mindoro (province) to bring me andmy sister up,'' she whispered.

The settlement and the Marcos family's refusal to accept anyliability for human rights violations during the late dictator'sregime have angered many victims. ''The settlement gives a clear signal to dictators that it iseasy to loot billions of dollars, torture and murder thousands andthen get away by paying token damages,'' fumed Aurora Parong ofthe Task Force Detainees of the Philippines. ''Besides, there is not a single word of remorse on the Marcoses' part,'' added Parong, a medical doctor detained under theMarcos government for inciting patients to rebel against it.

Congresswoman Etta Rosales, who took the initiative to settlefor $150 million, explains the reasons for the controversial move that has split factions of human rights plaintiffs. ''We feared that since the Marcos wealth was still concealed,the victims would never get the entire sum of $1.9 billion asdamages. Many of the victims were already dying penniless, sorather than drag the case on endlessly, we decided to go in forthe $150 million settlement,'' she said. Rosales, who says she was tortured by the military during the Marcos years, adds that the local anti-graft court has yet toclear the release of the funds.

The victims, meanwhile, are left with memories. When arrested in 1983, Hilda Narciso was a teacher and a church worker in her mid-30s who recalls being ''handcuffed, blindfoldedand gangraped for two days by hooting and jeering military men.'' Hilda remembered, ''I felt utterly dehumanized, humiliated, dirty - even a rag would be cleaner. I begged them to shoot me. I was molested even during my interrogation [at the military safehouse].'' She added, ''I get so angry when I see the Marcoses trying to regain credibility. They ruined our lives. They tortured and killed thousands, looted the country. They should all really be injail."

But the fact that the Marcoses are not in jail is the very argumentthat Imelda, Ferdinand's widow, uses to bolster her claims ofinnocence. ''If Ferdinand Marcos was indeed guilty of human rightsviolations, why wasn't he charged in any court anywhere in theworld? Why weren't we thrown in jail?'' she querried. ''We have committed no crime. If I lie, may God strike me dead at this very moment,'' added Imelda, whose conviction on corruptionby a Philippine court was reversed last year by the Supreme Court.

She called the move by the victims to extract damages from theMarcos estate a ''conspiracy of vultures.'' Still, Marcos says shehas agreed to pay the $150 million in the interests of''peace, unity and reconciliation'' and ''not [as] damages but adonation."

''The very fact that the court asked the Marcoses to pay up isan indictment,'' countered Rosales. ''And Imelda's agreeing to payis itself a tacit admission of guilt, though she mayeuphemistically choose to call the damages a donation."

The case in Hawaii is the furthest that human rights victimsand opponents of Marcos have been able to go by way of getting aconviction, either on rights violations or corruption. Racketeering charges in New York against the Marcoses failed to succeed many years ago, and a string of some 30 cases in thePhilippines have been dismissed in recent months.

Lawyer Neri Colmenares, arrested as an 18-year-old and detainedfor four years, remains deeply upset about the court settlement: ''Can you imagine the Jewish people signing an agreement with the Nazis where the Nazis stated they had done no wrong?'' He added, ''This case is going to be used as a benchmark for similarcases in the future - such as General Pinochet in Chile and evena case filed by Holocaust survivors.'' In that case, he wondered, ''What kind ofsignals are we sending them?"

(Inter Press Service)

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