Part Seven
Martial-law period poorly misunderstood
“To this day, the martial-law period remains poorly understood, to put it mildly. There are still many who feel strongly that it was a period of unjustified cruelty, the main purpose of which, supposedly, was to keep Marcos in power,” said noted historians Karla Sohmer, Salvador Escalante and J. Augustus Y. de la Paz, of the Truth and Justice Foundation (TJF).
“Had it truly been such,” they argued, “then Marcos would not have brooked any opposition nor tolerated any criticism. Thousands would have perished in February 1986 at Edsa, Ninoy’s funeral in 1983 would have been much more modest, Ninoy would probably have died earlier and more quietly, of heart failure, in his cell as a death convict. History would have proceeded differently.”
In their Hubris, the comprehensive historical book on the persecution of the Marcoses published in 2000 by the TJF, they said: “Record showed that Marcos imposed martial law not to exterminate his critics, but to save the majority—critics included—from the triple menace of the communists, the rightist oligarchs and warlords and the Muslim-led separatists. Marcos had no delusion that martial law was going to make him politically fragrant; he knew that the political cost would be high, that he would be risking his place in history. But it had to be done, and he alone had the power under the 1935 Constitution to do it.”
The martial-law regime, despite the increase in detention centers, the setting up of checkpoints and the increased visibility of the military, did not result in the “garrison state” that Ninoy had warned about, except in the hotbeds of insurgency. But it was undeniable—inasmuch as it was necessary—that the regime assumed the trappings of a police state.
Marcos recalled that the application of the state’s police power was calibrated: “Every step taken in the martial-law situation was measured according to the recognized desires and wishes of the greater number of the Filipino people. Dismantling the leftist rebellion and the rightist conspiracy, for example, took the “classical” form of surveillance, apprehension, detention, and public trial, although I immediately granted amnesty to those accepting it…
“We had to restore civil order as the bedrock of any constitutional survival. Civil order is merely the rationale of all societies: enforcement of and obedience to the law. When I placed the entire country under martial law, my first concern was to secure the Republic against any uprising, politically motivated or otherwise, and to secure the entire citizenry from the criminal elements, the private armies bred by local politics, and the outlaw bands in the countryside, who might either take advantage of the temporary panic or undermine our efforts to assert the authority of our police forces. It was imperative that we dismantle the apparatus of the insurgency movement and the whole system of violence and criminality that had virtually imprisoned out society in fear and anarchy.”
Critics have accused the martial- law regime of incarcerating up to 70,000 people, making it sound that all of those persons became prisoners of conscience, or “political detainees.” In fact, most of them were detainees either for crimes against the state, such as rebellion and subversion, and a great many others were jailed for common crimes, including 12,000 suspected involvement in crimes ranging from theft to murder. Also, thousands of those detained, mainly for subversion, were released when they availed themselves of amnesty, which required pledging of loyalty to the Constitution or on purely humanitarian grounds.
“Are surveillance, apprehension, detention and public trial incompatible with democracy? Did they make martial law the antithesis of democracy? Hardly. The US and Philippine governments jointly detained the Marcoses in America, and neither regime was denounced for being undemocratic. Martial law forms part of the survival mechanisms of democratic governments; provision for it in the 1935 Constitution was proof of that,” they said.
They added: “Much as Cory Aquino and other anti-Marcos figures denounced these tactics as dictatorial, they would be adopted by the Aquino regime on an even bigger scale, albeit without declaring martial law. And the Aquino-appointed Supreme Court, mostly composed of self-styled civil libertarians, would uphold the regime’s recourse to these tactics. If the same practices were held to be legitimate during the “democratic” Aquino regime, why should the Marcos administration be denounced for applying them? For applying them less?”
To be continued
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.