Remembering

I felt this deserved another post.  I cannot underscore how tragic it was to read about the gunning down of Ka Rene Penas.  My heart goes out to all the Sumilao farmers and agrarian reform advocates who must feel terribly sad, incensed, and yet helpless at the situation.  It is a sad, sad day to find our country has not changed one bit since 1984, since the time of ambushes on opposition voices.  How tragic to find that we are going down the route (if we are not already somewhat there) of China, Burma, North Korea, and all those other states where the threat of being silenced has kept opposition to a minimum.

Whether or not the government had to do with the gunning down of the symbolic figurehead of agrarian reform in the country today, they are accountable for it.  Human rights violations of this sort — the senseless silencing of advocates — have never stopped occuring over the past two decades. But for someone like Ka Rene to be assassinated is a disturbing sign that perhaps our democracy as we know it is on the verge of crumbling.  When the day comes that people become afraid to speak up because they fear for the lives of their families, we no longer live in a democracy, but in a bastardized mafia-run state version of it.

I don’t think I am overreacting.  If I’ve said many things about the state of affairs back home lately, it is only because I love the country, with a fierce intensity that I think everyone who’s ever had to leave feels for the hometown of his memories.  And that is why all of this — the thought that our congressmen could so blatantly abuse their power and get away with it, the thought that an honest man who believed in changing the system should have to die fighting for it — makes me terribly sad about everything.

Filed under: philippines

Bastusan

By Pat Roque,  AP Photo

It was incredibly sickening to watch the events of Tuesday’s vote in Manila’s House of Representatives unfold, even andespecially from far away, where the actions of the pompous House majority only seem to gain a more glaring, unflattering clarity.  It is an absolute contempt for the democracy that our congressmen even think they can pull off something like this and get away with it.  And how Malacanang can keep claiming it had nothing to do with the vote – nothing whatsoever — is disgusting.

It is insulting to us as a Filipino people that our very own leaders — people who we elected — think that we won’t mind the fact that they would vote for an amendment that is clearly not in the best interest of the country.  In what parallel universe can a system which allows for a strongman rule (be it in the hands of the president or a prime minister) be acceptable?  

What infuriates me most is the fact that these politicians all vowed once upon a time never to forget the lessons of Edsa.  It is a complete mockery of the democratic ideals which our republic is founded on and a great betrayal against every single Filipino who believed that the system could work.  Every single one of these congressmen should be utterly ashamed.  Shame on every single one of you.  If I could only list down every single one of the 174 congressmen who voted for the sham of a bill, I would.  But our ridiculous, red-taped congressional website doesn’t even post records of votes.  So many expletives I could hurl at the mockery of a legislative system we have right now.  Well thank you, Congress.  Thank you for finally convincing me of something that others have tried to get me to understand in the past: our government is not worth believing in.  It has absolutely no shreds of credibility left to its name.  And people wonder why so much talent, so many idealists choose to put all their efforts towards nation-building elsewhere.  

This is why.

Filed under: philippines

The curious case of Benazir Bhutto

Filipinos may find the story of Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto familiar.  Bhutto, to date the only female prime minister Pakistan has ever had, directly opposed the Musharraf regime and was exiled for her party leadership, on charges of corruption.  She returned in December 2007 to run against Musharraf in the 2008 elections, defiant and stubborn about her resolve to come home in the face of assassination threats.

As far as political assassinations go, Bhutto was not the first to go the way that she did.  I wrote my thesis on another assassinated political figure–the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino, who in 1984 was shot dead as he took his first few steps back in the country from a period of exile.  At the time, Aquino was largely regarded in the Philippines as the leader of the opposition to the martial-law Marcos government, even as he lived for much of the time in prison and in exile.

When Aquino was assassinated, public outrage over the incident was tremendous.  To this day, the downfall of Marcos is  ironically credited to this event as it sparked a national protest culminating in the 1986 Edsa Revolution.

I recall getting a text message from my dad the day Bhutto was assassinated and running to e-mail my thesis advisor, David Eisenhower, about it, only to find that he’d already sent me a note.  Months ago, we had spoken about the similarities between Pakistan under Musharraf and the Philippines under the Marcos regime.  Bhutto, he said, would be assassinated if she went home.  The day that news broke out of her death, we both thought of the conversation and wondered about the wider repercussions.

It is interesting to note that her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, now holds the presidency, just as Corazon Aquino did after the revolution.  And the Philippines, more than twenty years after the revolution and another ousted leader down, continues to be a hotbed of corruption and traditional politicians.  The similarities are chilling.  It is disquieting to think that Philippine politics today remains close to Pakistan’s.

*   *   *

The AP reports that Benazir Bhutto has just been posthumously awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights.  It is hard to know what to make of this.  While I may admire Bhutto for many things, her human rights record is not one of them.

Filed under: Politics, philippines, south asia

Why study the Internet?

It is difficult to articulate what fascinates me so much about the Internet and politics, the Internet and democracy.   But allow me to dream for a minute.  For months now, I’ve been itching to put together a project or write something — anything — on everything from the initial discussion to the unprecedented election of Obama as president and the role that the Internet had to play in it, even if everyone’s written about it already.

By now, it is a given, uncontested, soberly accepted fact that the key to Obama’s success was not just the message, but the medium.  Marshall McLuhan might have spoken convincingly about light bulbs and television in arguing that “the medium is the message,” but never has this been more clear than in the case of the Internet and Barack Obama.  ”Al Gore may have ‘invented’ the Internet (as his critics occasionally charged) but there is no question that Barack Obama is the first successful presidential nominee to fully exploit the medium’s potential,” reports O’Reilly.

To try to account for the roots of the Obama victory online and see just how far-reaching his message was would entail a massive study into archived Internet matter.  And in the ever-evolving space that is the online commons, who knows how different the world wide web will be when you emerge from the annals of pre-Obama campaign fodder?  By now, we know who won and grasp the significance of the collective efforts that it took to make it happen.

But here’s where it matters — in 2010, the Philippines will elect its next president.  And in this critical election, you have the whole host of characters meeting again and more than just the distant possibility of the country taking more than just a few steps backwards.  But in 2010, there is that chance to make things right.

Where all of this matters, is if the Philippines manages to go the same route — and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, with how technologically savvy and irrepressibly imitative of success we are as a people — then we might actually be able to pull off what just happened here.

I’ve been studying the Internet for different reasons over the past few years.  The first research paper I ever wrote, I did on how the Internet was being used for education, back in the days of Geocities and Yahoo.  But it is the thought of the 2010 elections back home that feeds this interest today.

Filed under: Politics, philippines