SAN FRANCISCO—The Philippine military is handing over a huge collection of records from the martial law era.
It’s a tiny step toward coming to grips with a dark chapter in our history. But now comes the tough part for the Commission on Human Rights.
What do you do with a collection so massive they take up one big room in the intelligence service section of the AFP compound in Camp Aguinaldo?
“We intend to have the files organized and archived for public consumption,” CHR Etta Rosales told me in an e-mail. “But to get there, the CHR must link up with some experts and trusted friends who know all about archiving and digitizing the documents, while ensuring their preservation and protection.”
“I’ve had calls from the media and some museum people,” she added.
She should also reach out to a non-profit Washington D.C. group called the National Security Archives.
For more than 25 years, the group has done an incredible job collecting, preserving and making available to the public key documents of American foreign policy. The records relate to such matters as the Vietnam War, the U.S.-backed 1973 coup that toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende and the invasion of Iraq.
In fact, the archive, now based at George Washington University, began partly because of the Philippines. In 1990, the group published over 3,400 declassified U.S. documents covering the Marcos Years.
Kate Doyle was one of the lead staff members who helped set up the National Security Archives’ collection on the Marcos years. Today, she’s in another key position to help the Philippines.
She helped set up the Evidence Project, the National Security Archive’s effort to assist other countries that went through periods of military repression set up their own archives of those terrible chapters in their histories.
The list of countries includes Guatemala, Peru, Argentina and Chile, places that, like the Philippines, went through a period of state brutality, and are still struggling to make sense of what happened.
Getting access to official records is key, Kate told me.
“I see the recovery of these records as important for the ability to read the official record of what happened, as part of being able to fit together a story that finally made sense,” she told me in an interview.
“After having worked with families of the disappeared, and testifying in human rights cases, I believe the recovery of historical memory, as they say in Latin America, is fundamental for a society to really step up and acknowledge what happened and be able to carry on a real collective discussion on how and why it happened.”
It’s typically not an easy process, she said.
“This kind of declassification is just as powerful, just as significant,” she said of the AFP’s turning over of documents. “And yet, there may be minefields to walk through.”
For one thing, some of the people responsible for past crimes may still be around. Perhaps the most important issue the CHR may have to wrestle with, Kate said, is how to make the materials eventually accessible to the public.
Her chief advice to the CHR is to set up a group with individual members with expertise on different aspects of the collection: a historian, a military officer, a human rights advocate.
“That kind of diverse group of people to accompany the commission and the military in this process would bring a lot of legitimacy to the process itself,” she said.
“The other recommendation is: I would urge the commission to get in touch with people who have worked on these kinds of archives around the world,” she added.
And there are a growing number of them.
Some of them are in countries in which democratic change happened, but the institutions responsible for the repression—the military and the police—remained intact.
Just like in the Philippines.
Kate cited the example of Guatemala where the national police “was notoriously brutal.”
The archive of the Guatemalan National Police was discovered accidentally by the human rights prosecutor, she said. Government leaders and advocates had to push hard to make the country’s security forces release more information.
These efforts paid off.
In June, a report on the Guatemalan police archive was formally released to the public. It’s title: “Memory of Silence”
In her speech in Guatemala at the presentation of the report, Kate said the title refers to “one of the thorniest problems the commission faced – the lack of official information.”
“Not the lack of testimony from survivors,” she said. “Not the lack of bones, unearthed in exhumations. Not the lack of publications of human rights organizations, or the decisions of inter-American institutions. Not the lack of press clippings, reports of the church, the family requests or eyewitness testimony. Only the lack of official government information in Guatemala: from the Army and from its accomplice and subordinate institution, the National Police.”
“For too long the Guatemalan State institutions have been able to use silence, denial, and secrecy to cover up the violations committed by their own agents without fear of sanction,” she added.
The report, she said, “is a direct challenge to this dark legacy.”
Compared to the Guatemalan experience, it’s significant that the Philippine military appeared to be stepping up to the challenge of trying to deal with the country’s dark past.
In the symbolic turnover of the first batch of documents, Defense Secretary Voltaire was quoted as saying that the objective is to “to bring closure” and to ensure that “[we will] never commit the same mistakes again.”
It’s up to the CHR and the DND to make sure that indeed happens.
There’s still much skepticism, to be sure. And there’s that frequent refrain: Why worry about military and police abuses that took place decades ago, when there are more pressing, recent cases to deal with?
“It seems like this hangover of impunity doesn’t go away with time,” Kate said, referring to the experiences of other countries.
“These are ghosts that do not go away. And society has to reckon with them. It’s not surprising at all that the Philippines has taken so long.”
Dealing with the past is important, for if you don’t, she said, “that impunity trails you into the next government and the one after that.”
My previous column on the martial law years drew reactions from readers who argued that while, yes, the Marcos years were bad, the current system under the current crop of leaders hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses for most Filipinos.
A fair point. But another point typically gets lost in this debate.
Most of the presidents who rose to power after Marcos looked for ways, maneuvered, schemed, lobbied to stay in office longer.
But unlike Marcos, who clearly planned on staying in Malacañang forever, and nearly managed to do just that, not one of the presidents who came after him managed to stay on top indefinitely.
For those of us who grew up thinking that the Philippines was meant to be ruled by one and only one man, that’s a big step forward.
And that also leads to key questions that a martial law archive can help Filipinos deal with.
How in the world did Marcos and his gang get away with plunder, murder, and torture for so many years? And what can we do to prevent that from happening again?
As Rosales, herself a torture victim during the Marcos regime, told me, “We see this as part of a difficult process of healing, albeit a concrete step in a long journey to end impunity and make human rights a household word and a way of life for our communities.”
Amen.
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