Inquirer Editorial

Editorial : Poorer and poorer

DURING a protest rally in the Makati business district last July 8, Rep. Imee Marcos of Ilocos Norte province asked the crowd if they would tolerate liars, cheats and thieves. The crowd bellowed, "No!"

She could ask such a question with a straight face, not only because she is a politician, but also because she knows we are a forgetful people incapable of appreciating irony -- not to mention the fact that aside from exile and the confiscation of some of their worldly goods, the Marcoses have never really been held accountable to the people.

The ousting of discredited regimes, if it doesn't immediately result in the execution of the leading personalities of the fallen government, often results in some sort of permanent ban on an expelled dynasty. For this reason, Austria expelled their former imperial family, the Hapsburgs; the Italians to this day do not permit the return of the discredited royal house of Savoy; Egypt forbids the return of the descendants of King Farouk; and the Iranians bar the return of the family of the disgraced Shah. The world is populated with roving former dictators, stripped of power but usually not all their wealth, maintaining a shadowy existence far from their former domains. Look at the Duvaliers, the dictatorial dynasty of Haiti, and contemporary of the Marcoses in terms of being vomited out by their people.

The loss of absolute power usually results in absolute disgrace, including a ban on political participation in the nations that rejected them. In the case of the first family that benefited from martial law, hoping to turn itself into a homegrown royal family, the kindest thing that can be said is that their countrymen are so kind they have allowed them to reassert a social and political status other nations would consider not only improper but unjust.

It is said that the sins of the father shouldn't be visited upon the son, and Representative Marcos has been circumspect, most of the time, in commenting on her father's regime. But what of the sins of both the father and the mother? And of their friends? The dockets of courts are clogged with cases concerning Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, including cases in which their children acted as the direct beneficiaries of their looting, or administrators of the many, layered accounts meant to keep the loot firmly in their family's hands. Many other cases concerning the Marcos cronies continue to gather dust in the courts. Very few have been resolved -- and then all too often not in the people's favor. Government agencies tasked not just with recovering the Marcos wealth, but by so doing with firmly establishing the verdict of history have made too little progress in the 19 years since the Marcoses fled for their lives.

Once again, Sept. 21, a date chosen by Ferdinand Marcos because of his obsession with numerology, and not because it bears any relevance to factual truth, has rolled around. In the days of the dictatorship, this date was proclaimed a "Day of Thanksgiving," a time for praising the "New Society." It was a national festival to praise a lie, for Proclamation 1081 was signed on Sept. 22, supposedly in reaction to another lie, the faked assassination attempt against Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile. The arrests that truly heralded martial law took place on Sept. 23: the real date of martial law.

Here again, we are shown up as a nation incapable of appreciating irony. Perpetuating the date Marcos chose, instead of the date when the country felt the full, brutal force of his ambitions, only fosters his delusions of grandeur and not the sinister reality of his actions.

Our country remains deprived of closure, when it comes to martial law. To add irony upon irony, the truest believers and admirers of Marcos, Joseph Estrada and Fernando Poe Jr., have caused divisions and have traumatized the nation to the extent that our society needs closure in terms of their controversial political fates, as well.

In every major political controversy since 1986, there has been no definitive legal resolution to exalt right over wrong. Everything remains clouded by accommodation, delay and inconclusive efforts resulting in unsatisfactory compromises. The result is a country that gets poorer by the day, progressively impoverished by its inability to get justice. Without justice, there is no hope. Without hope, there is no possibility of salvation for the poor.