The point is justice
The point is justice
Posted 00:14am (Mla time) Feb 10, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 10, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
FRANKLY, I can't understand why Imelda Marcos should be elated at the recent US appeals court ruling saying it could not overturn the Philippine Supreme Court decision on their Swiss deposits. As Jovito Salonga pointed out the other day, the US court ruling had become moot and academic when in November 2003 the Philippine Supreme Court ruled to forfeit the $683-million Marcos Swiss deposits in favor of the Philippine government.
The government then apportioned the money as follows: (1) the bulk to go to agrarian reform, (2) a portion to go to attorney's fees, and (3) $150 million to the indemnification of the martial law torture victims. The US appeals court ruling doesn't change one bit of this. The torture victims will still be compensated for their (literal) pains, something Congress has been working on this past year or so.
Imelda's elation is incomprehensible-unless former peasant organizer and now Anakpawis Rep. Rafael Mariano is right to suspect that the former First Lady hopes to make a deal with the Arroyo government over a division of spoils, which this ruling presumably signals, or can be made to signal. A suspicion that may not be unfounded. Salonga noted that only last month, on Jan. 13, Imelda visited Malacañang for the first time since she fled the country and came away expressing support for the Arroyo administration.
Years ago, in 1993, the Presidential Commission on Good Government sought to strike a deal with the Marcoses, proposing a 75-25 sharing of the Marcos loot, the government to get the 75 percent and the Marcoses to get immunity in addition to the 25 percent. The Supreme Court voided the deal. The possibility that the Arroyo administration is reopening it, given particularly that it is cash-strapped and facing a fiscal crisis, looms large.
But whether or not there's a plot underlying Imelda's interpretation of the US court ruling, my unhappiness over all this is that the whole question of the remuneration of the victims has been lost in a blaze of legal fireworks. I do appreciate the fact that many years ago Robert Swift undertook, at much expense to himself though also with the expectation of much reward if he was successful, to prosecute the class suit in the United States against the Marcoses on behalf of the torture victims. But I remember that, from the start, I expressed the hope that the legal aspects of the case would not bury the moral, or indeed political, aspects of it.
The danger was there. The torture victims stood to be portrayed as money-mad, particularly where the talk boiled down to dollars and cents or how much went to whom. And they were, particularly when they began to squabble among themselves, having fallen into two rival groups. The ideological aspects of the division were lost on the media, the proprietary aspects of it were not, as both groups claimed to be the true representative of the victims. The media had a field day caricaturing the spat between those who believed in Robert Swift and those who did not.
I did, and do, think the torture victims ought to be compensated. I've always argued against the idea, put forward by many quarters particularly after the Supreme Court ruled to give the Marcos Swiss deposits to government, that since all Filipinos suffered during martial law, no single group has any special claim to the money in full or part. My position then, as now, is that the torture victims were not just victims, they were also heroes. They were tortured because they raised a fist against martial law, many of them well before it became fashionable-and safe-to do so. The least we can do for them is ease their pain -- nothing could ever pay for their monumental losses -- and pay tribute to their heroism literally by paying tribute to them. The torture victims do not owe government for designating a part of the Marcos loot to them, government owes it to them.
Quite apart from that, indemnifying the victims reminds this forgetful country forcefully of what took place during martial law. Martial law did not just rob the country of its money, it robbed the country of its people. Many of them the youth, who died shouting freedom in their loud and pure voices in places God and government forgot. Indemnifying the victims is seizing this country by the scruff of its neck and forcing it to look at itself through a mirror.
But I've always thought, and said, that for that to happen, the victims needed to raise the political and moral dimensions of their ordeal far higher than its financial and legal possibilities. Remuneration was gravy, not meat and potatoes. Elsewhere in the civilized world, or among countries that were once enslaved and struggled to regain their self-respect, the legal flows from the moral, law draws its strength from right and wrong. That is as it should be, the moral is the foundation of the legal, not the other way around. Look at the way the Jews have carried out their long and implacable search to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice. Of course, it has legal and financial aspects, too, but above all it is a moral quest. It resonates with right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice.
The legal strength of quests like this depends on their moral force, not the other way around. In the case of the class suit of the torture victims of martial law, the law has become the ultimate arbiter of moral soundness, the scale upon which everything is weighed. Somehow you wonder, however the compensation turns out, however the courts judge partially or impartially, if Ferdinand Marcos isn't laughing beyond the grave, his favorite preoccupation of containing life in neat legal boxes finding loud echoes in all this.
Justice demands compensation, not compensation justice. You put the cart before the horse, you'll never move.
Posted 00:14am (Mla time) Feb 10, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 10, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
FRANKLY, I can't understand why Imelda Marcos should be elated at the recent US appeals court ruling saying it could not overturn the Philippine Supreme Court decision on their Swiss deposits. As Jovito Salonga pointed out the other day, the US court ruling had become moot and academic when in November 2003 the Philippine Supreme Court ruled to forfeit the $683-million Marcos Swiss deposits in favor of the Philippine government.
The government then apportioned the money as follows: (1) the bulk to go to agrarian reform, (2) a portion to go to attorney's fees, and (3) $150 million to the indemnification of the martial law torture victims. The US appeals court ruling doesn't change one bit of this. The torture victims will still be compensated for their (literal) pains, something Congress has been working on this past year or so.
Imelda's elation is incomprehensible-unless former peasant organizer and now Anakpawis Rep. Rafael Mariano is right to suspect that the former First Lady hopes to make a deal with the Arroyo government over a division of spoils, which this ruling presumably signals, or can be made to signal. A suspicion that may not be unfounded. Salonga noted that only last month, on Jan. 13, Imelda visited Malacañang for the first time since she fled the country and came away expressing support for the Arroyo administration.
Years ago, in 1993, the Presidential Commission on Good Government sought to strike a deal with the Marcoses, proposing a 75-25 sharing of the Marcos loot, the government to get the 75 percent and the Marcoses to get immunity in addition to the 25 percent. The Supreme Court voided the deal. The possibility that the Arroyo administration is reopening it, given particularly that it is cash-strapped and facing a fiscal crisis, looms large.
But whether or not there's a plot underlying Imelda's interpretation of the US court ruling, my unhappiness over all this is that the whole question of the remuneration of the victims has been lost in a blaze of legal fireworks. I do appreciate the fact that many years ago Robert Swift undertook, at much expense to himself though also with the expectation of much reward if he was successful, to prosecute the class suit in the United States against the Marcoses on behalf of the torture victims. But I remember that, from the start, I expressed the hope that the legal aspects of the case would not bury the moral, or indeed political, aspects of it.
The danger was there. The torture victims stood to be portrayed as money-mad, particularly where the talk boiled down to dollars and cents or how much went to whom. And they were, particularly when they began to squabble among themselves, having fallen into two rival groups. The ideological aspects of the division were lost on the media, the proprietary aspects of it were not, as both groups claimed to be the true representative of the victims. The media had a field day caricaturing the spat between those who believed in Robert Swift and those who did not.
I did, and do, think the torture victims ought to be compensated. I've always argued against the idea, put forward by many quarters particularly after the Supreme Court ruled to give the Marcos Swiss deposits to government, that since all Filipinos suffered during martial law, no single group has any special claim to the money in full or part. My position then, as now, is that the torture victims were not just victims, they were also heroes. They were tortured because they raised a fist against martial law, many of them well before it became fashionable-and safe-to do so. The least we can do for them is ease their pain -- nothing could ever pay for their monumental losses -- and pay tribute to their heroism literally by paying tribute to them. The torture victims do not owe government for designating a part of the Marcos loot to them, government owes it to them.
Quite apart from that, indemnifying the victims reminds this forgetful country forcefully of what took place during martial law. Martial law did not just rob the country of its money, it robbed the country of its people. Many of them the youth, who died shouting freedom in their loud and pure voices in places God and government forgot. Indemnifying the victims is seizing this country by the scruff of its neck and forcing it to look at itself through a mirror.
But I've always thought, and said, that for that to happen, the victims needed to raise the political and moral dimensions of their ordeal far higher than its financial and legal possibilities. Remuneration was gravy, not meat and potatoes. Elsewhere in the civilized world, or among countries that were once enslaved and struggled to regain their self-respect, the legal flows from the moral, law draws its strength from right and wrong. That is as it should be, the moral is the foundation of the legal, not the other way around. Look at the way the Jews have carried out their long and implacable search to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice. Of course, it has legal and financial aspects, too, but above all it is a moral quest. It resonates with right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice.
The legal strength of quests like this depends on their moral force, not the other way around. In the case of the class suit of the torture victims of martial law, the law has become the ultimate arbiter of moral soundness, the scale upon which everything is weighed. Somehow you wonder, however the compensation turns out, however the courts judge partially or impartially, if Ferdinand Marcos isn't laughing beyond the grave, his favorite preoccupation of containing life in neat legal boxes finding loud echoes in all this.
Justice demands compensation, not compensation justice. You put the cart before the horse, you'll never move.
posted by Dante at 12:14 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home