Seven weeks ago the Philippines truth-telling martial law film Katips was basking in the limelight in the country’s national FAMAS academy movie awards, winning best picture and a total of six other awards.

Last week it began a four month “world tour” of 10 countries starting in the Middle East followed by Aotearoa New Zealand today – hosted simultaneously at AUT South campus and in Wellington and Christchurch.

The screening of Vincent Tañada’s harrowing – especially the graphic torture scenes – yet also joyful and poignant musical drama touched a raw nerve among many in the audience who shared tears and their experiences of living in fear, or in hiding, during the hate-filled Marcos dictatorship.

The martial law denunciations, arbitrary arrests, desaparecidos (“disappeared”), brutal tortures and murders by state assassins in the 1970s made the McCarthy era red-baiting witchhunts in the US seem like Sunday School picnics.

Amnesty International says more than 3200 people were killed, 35,000 tortured and 70,000 detained during the martial law period.

Tañada has brushed off claims that the film has a political objective in an attempt to sabotage the leadership of the dictator’s son, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr, who won the presidency in a landslide victory in the May elections to return the Marcos family to the Malacañang.

He has insisted in many interviews — and he repeated this in a live exchange with the audiences in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch — that the film is educational and his intention is to counter disinformation and to ensure history is remembered.

Telling youth about atrocities
Tañada, from one of the Philippines’ great political and legal families and grandson of former Senator Lorenzo Tañada, a celebrated human rights lawyer, says he wanted to tell the youth about the atrocities that happened during the imposition of martial law under Marcos.

He wanted to tell history to those who had forgotten and those who aren’t yet aware.

The Katips movie trailer.

“You know, as an artist it is also our objective not just to entertain people but more important than that, we are here to educate,” he says.

“We also want to educate the young people about the atrocities – the reality of martial law.

“History is slowly being forgotten. We have forgotten it during the last elections and I guess we also have the responsibility to educate and let the youth know what happened during those times.”

It is rare that such brutal torture scenes are seen on the big screen, and before the main screening at AUT the organisers — Banyuhay Aotearoa, Migrante Aotearoa and Auckland Philippine Solidarity — showed two shorts made by the University of the Philippines and Santo Tomas University of Manila featuring martial law survivors describing their horrifying treatment  during the Marcos years to contemporary students.

Some of the students broke down in tears while others, surprisingly, remained impassive, sometimes with an air of disbelief.

The film evolved from the 2016 stage musical Katips: Mga Bagong Katipunero – Katips: The New Freedom Fighters, which won Aliw Awards for best musical performance that year.

Freedom fighter love story
In a nutshell, Katips tells the love story of Greg, a medical student and leader of the National Unions of Students in the Philippines (NUSP), who with other freedom fighting protesters stage a demonstration against martial law on a mountainside called Mendiola.

His professor is abducted by the state Metropol police, murdered and his body dumped in a remote location.

The protesters begin a vigil and the police brutally suppress the protest and arrest and kidnap other freedom fighters. They are subjected to atrocious torture and their bodies dumped.

A safehouse branded “Katips House” takes in Lara, a New York actress and the daughter of the murdered professor who is visiting Manila but doesn’t yet know about the fate of her father. Lara and Greg form an unlikely relationship and their lives are thrown into upheaval when the safehouse “mother” Alet is abducted and tortured to death.

Greg and another protester, Ka Panyong, a writer for the underground newspaper Ang Bayan, are forced to flee into the jungle for the safety and become rebels. Both get shot while on the run, but manage to survive.

When Greg returns to Lara at the “Katips House” during the Edsa Revolution in 1986, he finds he has a son.

The film has a stirring end featuring the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, a memorial wall to the fallen heroes struggling against martial law– a fitting antidote to the Marcoses and their crass attempts to rewrite Philippine history.

Ironically, the same month that Katips was released in public cinemas, another film, the self-serving Maid of Malaçanang, was launched in a bid to perpetuate the Marcos myths.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Sadly, the Philippines has sold its soul. Thirty six years ago a People Power revolution ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos after two decades of harsh authoritarian rule.

Yesterday, in spite of a rousing and inspiring Pink Power would-be revolution, the dictator’s only son and namesake “Bongbong” Marcos Jr seems headed to be elected 17th president of the Philippines.

And protests have broken out after the provisional tallies that give Marcos a “lead of millions” with more than 97 percent of the cote counted. Official results could still take some days.

Along with Bongbong, his running mate Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte, daughter of strongman Rodrigo Duterte, president for the past six years and who has been accused of human rights violations over the killings of thousands of alleged suspects in a so-called “war in drugs”, is decisively in the lead as vice-president.

On the eve of the republic’s most “consequential election” in decades, Filipina journalism professor Sheila Coronel, director of practice at the Columbia University’s Toni Stabile School of Investigative Journalism in New York, said the choice was really simple.

“The election is a battle between remembering and forgetting, a choice between the future and the past.”

Significantly more than half of the 67.5 million voters have apparently chosen to forget – including a generation that never experienced the brutal crackdowns under martial law in 1972-1981, and doesn’t want to know about it. Yet 70,000 people were jailed, 35,000 were tortured, 4000 were killed and free speech was gagged.

Duterte’s erosion of democracy
After six years of steady erosion of democracy under Duterte, is the country now about to face a fatal blow to accountability and transparency with a kleptomaniac family at the helm?

Dictator Marcos is believed to have accumulated $10 billion while in power and while Philippine authorities have only been able to recover about a third of this though ongoing lawsuits, the family refuses to pay a tax bill totalling $3.9 billion, including penalties.

In many countries the tax violations would have disqualified Marcos Jr from even standing for the presidency.

“A handful of other autocrats were also busy stealing from their people in that era – in Haiti, Nicaragua, Iran – but Marcos stole more and he stole better,” according to The Guardian’s Nick Davies.

“Ultimately, he emerges as a laboratory specimen from the early stages of a contemporary epidemic: the global contagion of corruption that has since spread through Africa and South America, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Marcos was a model of the politician as thief.”

Tensions were running high outside the main office of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in Intramuros, Manila, today as protests erupted over the “unjust” election process and the expected return of the Marcoses to the Malacañang Palace.

The Comelec today affirmed its dismissal of two sets of cases – or a total four appeals – seeking to bar Marcos Jr. from the elections due to his tax conviction in the 1990s.

Ruling after the elections
The ruling was released a day after the elections, when the partial, unofficial tally showed that the former senator was on the brink of winning the presidency.

It wasn’t entirely surprising, as five of the seven-member Comelec bench had earlier voted in favour of the former senator in at least one of the four anti-Marcos petitions that had already been dismissed

One further appeal can be made before the Supreme Court.

As mounting allegations of election fraud and cheating greeted the provisional ballot trends, groups began filing formal complaints.

One watchdog, Bakla Bantay Boto, said it had received “numerous reports of illegal campaigning, militarised polling precincts, and an absurd [number] of broken vote counting machines (VCMs)” throughout the Philippines.

STATEMENT ON THE MAY 9, 2022 PHILIPPINE ELECTIONS – Fraud, violence, electioneering, and unreliable voting machines have stained the 2022 Philippine national elections#BaklaBantayBoto2022 pic.twitter.com/vWqhmVgwii

— Bakla Bantay Boto (@baklabantayboto) May 9, 2022

“Intensified violence has also marked today’s election. Poll watchers have been tragically killed in Buluan, Maguindanao and Binidayan, Lanao del Sur, while an explosive was detonated in a voting centre in Kobacan, Cotabato.

“The violent red-tagging of several candidates and party lists [was] also in full force, with text blasts to constituents and posters posted within polling precincts, insinuating that they are linked to the CPP-NPA-NDFP [Communist Party of the Philippines and allies].”

Social media disinformation
Explaining the polling in the face of a massive social media disinformation campaign by Marcos supporters, Rappler’s livestream anchor Bea Cupin noted how the Duterte administration had denied a renewal of a franchise for ABS-CBN, the largest and most influential free-to-air television station two years ago.

This act denied millions of Filipinos access to accurate and unbiased news coverage. Rappler itself and its Nobel Peace laureate chief executive Maria Ressa, were also under constant legal attack and the target of social media trolls.

A BBC report interviewed a typical professional troll who managed hundreds of Facebook pages and fake profiles for his clients, saying his customers for fake stories “included governors, congressmen and mayors.”

Meta — owners of Facebook — reported that its Philippines subsidiary had removed many networks that were attempting to manipulate people and media. They were believed to have included a cluster of more than 400 accounts, pages, and groups that were violated the platform’s codes of conduct.

Pink Power candidate human rights lawyer Leni Robredo, who defeated Marcos for the vice-presidency in the last election in 2016, and who was a target for many of the troll attacks, said: “Lies repeated again and again become the truth.”

Academics have warned the risks that the country is taking in not heeding warnings of the past about the Marcos family. An associate professor of the University of Philippines, Dr Aries Arugay, reflects: “We just don’t jail our politicians or make them accountable … we don’t punish them, unlike South Korean presidents.”

As Winston Churchill famously said in 1948: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The University of the Philippines Visayas (UPV) will continue to stand against any threats to human rights, chancellor Clement Camposano has declared in response to the termination of a long-standing accord preventing military incursion on campus.

In a Facebook post, Camposano said the academic freedom in the university was “not something anyone can abrogate”.

“The University of the Philippines Visayas like the rest of the UP System, will remain a bastion of academic freedom,” he wrote.

“This is not something anyone can abrogate. We will stand firm against any and all attempts to deprive us of our democratic rights.”

The brief statement was posted on Monday, hours after news broke of Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana’s decision to unilaterally terminate the decades-old pact between the University of the Philippines and the Department of National Defence preventing military and police presence in all UP System campuses.

In his official statement posted yesterday, the UP Visayas chancellor pointed to the tumultuous history between UP and the DND as the cause of the university’s apprehension.

“Historical events that have shaped the relationship of UP and the country’s security forces—many of these leaving wounds that have yet to heal—explain the university’s strong apprehensio,” he wrote.

‘Sordid reality of recent killings’
“While the Department of National Defence has given assurances that constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms would not be suppressed, these historical events and the sordid reality of recent killings, abductions, and other forms of human rights abuses widely believed to have been perpetrated by security forces cannot but leave us unassured.”

Seven senators filed for a resolution expressing their opposition to the unilateral termination of the UP-DND accord

The proposed resolution mentions the violent dispersal of the peaceful protest against the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 in UP Cebu back in June 2020 pic.twitter.com/QMWUgD8g64

— UP Cebu (@UPCebuOfficial) January 20, 2021

Even before the scrapping of the accord, UP System universities in the Visayas have long decried unwarranted military and police presence in their campuses.

One of the most recent instances was the arrest of 8 protestors, collectively known as Cebu 8, during a picket rally against the then anti-terror bill held in front of the UP Cebu campus last June.

Videos of the arrest in social media showed police breaching the walls of UP Cebu to chase students and activists seeking refuge inside the campus.

And despite the government’s assurance that the accord’s termination was not meant to suppress activism and academic freedom in UP, students, faculty, and staff from UP Cebu said they have not forgotten about the arrest of Cebu 8.

The Unified Student Organisations of UP Cebu, along with the University Student Council, the All UP Academic Employees Union, and the university’s student publication Tug-ani came out with a joint statement condemning the termination.

“We remember the violent dispersal of the June 5th protest against the then Anti-Terrorism Bill last year, wherein armed non-uniformed PNP personnel chased protesters inside the campus and groundlessly detained 8 individuals, including a bystander, now collectively known as the Cebu 8,” the statement reads.

“Protect academic freedom” and “maintain UP as a safe haven for all beliefs and forms of democratic expression”: UP President Danilo Concepcion responds to DND Secretary Lorenzana’s unilateral abrogation of the UP-DND Accord.

Read in full: https://t.co/e48sUoEqqz pic.twitter.com/xmdVDOr7hN

— University of the Philippines (@upsystem) January 19, 2021

Death threats against union president
The unified organisations also pointed out the arrest of UP Cebu alumna Myles Albasin of Mabinay 6 and the death threats received by faculty union president Regletto Imbong earlier this month as “one of one of the many UP-DND Accord violations and harassments” that had been committed.

They added the termination of the UP-DND agreement was a disrespect to the martyrs from the university who died in the pursuit of democracy during martial law, and enjoined the administration to remain firm against any threats academic freedom.

“For the DND to end this accord is already an admission of either their ignorance of the country’s history or their blatant disrespect of the martyrs who fought for the freedoms we enjoy today and now the Duterte administration is desperately trying to snatch away from us again,” they said.

“We collectively call upon the UP administration, UP board of regents to affirm their mandate in ensuring that UP shall remain a zone of peace and refuge; to defend the university against the DND’s attempt of militarising our schools, and to stand and fight against all fascist manoeuvres that threaten our academic freedom and basic rights,” they added.

In her official statement, UP Cebu chancellor Liza Corro said the abrogation without consultation of the agreement was “deeply concerning to say the least,” considering the many threats faced by UP Cebu.

“Especially for us here in UP Cebu, as it came at a time, when our students and faculty members have been subjected to direct intimidation and threats, including red-tagging… We strongly condemned such acts of transgression and bullying,” Corro wrote.

She went on to defend Imbong, describing him as an “academic scholar of good standing” who was active not only in the academe but also in campaigning for social justice.

“His active engagements to help elevate social ills, is inherent in his basic task as a UP constituent, in fact as a good and responsible Filipino citizen. This does not make him an insurgent or a terrorist.

“We strongly condemn any and all forms of baseless accusations and red-tagging among our constituents, faculty and students alike. They deserve our respect, not harassment,” she added.

Asia Pacific Report republishes Rappler articles with permission.

To quote from the news feature: “In a tweet, UP Professor Danilo Arao said it was the 1989 abduction of Donato Continente, former staffer of campus paper Philippine Collegian, that led to the signing.” https://t.co/kkP7nVOSAJ

— Danilo Arao (@dannyarao) January 19, 2021

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz