Oblations

I STARTED and finished the book while waiting for class.

Yet, in the space of that hour or so, “Macli-ing Dulag” (UP Press, 2015) brought me to so many places: our family’s reading of Sunday newspapers in bed, martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos, and my high school discovery of journalism in the pages of a Sunday newspaper supplement.

Deceptively slim, “Macli-ing Dulag” combines two books: Ma. Ceres P. Doyo’s expanded article, and “A Peek into Cordilleran History, Culture and Society” by Nestor P. Castro.

I was in high school when Doyo’s article on Macli-ing Dulag was featured in “Panorama,” a magazine that came with “Bulletin Today”. My father did not think highly of the newspaper. Of the three national dailies, though, he thought the Bulletin had the thickest main section devoted to news.

While my sister and I flipped through the supplements, my father read the news section from front page to back. He often pronounced the news was the “usual propaganda.” As we had several mutts that resisted housebreaking, propaganda served a purpose.

On June 29, 1980, my father asked me if I read this “Panorama” article. Edited then by the legendary Leticia Jimenez Magsanoc, the magazine offered little to interest a teenager.

In Doyo’s account, I read Macli-ing Dulag’s response to a government official belittling his people’s lack of land titles that could have “legitimized” their opposition to the Chico River Dam Project: “How can you own that which will outlive you? Only the race owns the land because the race lives forever.”


Only in college would the sacrifice that saved the Kalinga way of life sink in. Only during the recent reading of Doyo’s book did I realize that we have no lack of heroes: the tribal leader who gave up his life to defend his people’s culture, which Marcos would have traded for 1,010 megawatts of electricity; the untried journalists (Doyo and Rene O. Villanueva) who went through arduous travel and a military interrogation to write the reports that led to the first face-of between the media and the state since martial law was imposed eight years before.

The Filipinos’ heroism does not belong to the past; it manifests in the struggles to assert self-determination being waged by the indigenous peoples, non-government workers, students, and other citizens.

Asked during the military hearing why she only carried “one side” of the story, Doyo explained that the government had unlimited access to the media. “My article is a challenge to the government to print the truth.”

My father pointed me to my earliest memory of journalism’s oblation. As custodians of our shared memory, have we discharged our duty?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 12, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Footnotes for post-truth

LIBRARIES open their doors. What would be the value of collections if the doors were closed?

During an afternoon’s aimless browsing, I was nonplussed to discover a library that, to become the “unofficial archives of the political underworld,” also went “underground” for 30 years or so.

So wrote professor Francisco Nemenzo in the foreword to the “Philippine Radical Papers in the University of the Philippines Diliman Main Library: A Subject Guide,” (UP Press, 1998).

The book was compiled by the Filipiniana Special Collections Project staff of UP Diliman, which collaborated with the Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin in 1996-97 to catalogue and microfilm the Radical Papers.

According to project leader Verna Lee, the UPD Main Library became the repository of a collection, ranging from underground periodicals to protest poetry, that became contraband after martial law was imposed by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.

After executing the “autogolpe (coup),” Marcos consolidated his dictatorship by rounding up his critics and seizing all means of transportation and communication. Nemenzo observed that Marcos should have then gone for the “secondary targets”: “libraries and bookshops”.

He did not. This wasn't due to dictator’s remorse or oversight. “(Marcos) probably reckoned that the Filipinos are not book readers,” wrote Nemenzo.

Marcos passed an edict against even the mere possession of “subversive documents”. The ultimate cost of criticism against the despot was “disappearance”.
Nemenzo commented that so great was the “nervousness” of UP librarians they removed from the shelves all books about communism AND anti-communism. Only fear of the state auditor stayed their hands from burning the incriminating collections.

Yet, “radical papers” kept turning up in the library, were left on the tables or discreetly deposited on the service desk of the Filipiniana Reading Room, he wrote. Through the cooperation of the three universities, the Radical Papers is now organized and accessible for all.

For keeping these records during an epoch that burned truth and murdered to enshrine lies, the UP Diliman Main librarians deserve the respect of the nation, not just its scholars.

The accounts written by the Left do not constitute truth. Yet, their preservation makes it possible for anyone to scrutinize and test these versions against information contained in other documents.

Through cross-checking, which involves validation or rejection, a semblance of truth emerges. In the post-truth era, that is essential to remember: knowledge comes from sifting through, not stifling the flow.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 15, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Ear to the ground

WHAT is “the situation on the ground”?

Today is the 60th day martial law was imposed by President Duterte in Mindanao.

Last May 23, the President reacted swiftly to the Maute Group’s occupation of Marawi City.

As commander-in-chief, the President can suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus or impose martial law “in case of invasion or rebellion,” based on Section 18, Article VII of the 1987 Philippine Constitution.

However, the 1987 Constitution is more specific than the 1935 version, which President Ferdinand Marcos used as the basis for passing Proclamation 1081 and putting the country for the first time under martial law.

As amended by the 1986 Constitutional Commission created by President Corazon Aquino, the 1987 Constitution imposes a limit on martial law: no more than 60 days.

Today is the deadline. Will martial law be lifted or extended?

Two weeks ago, House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez proposed a five-year extension of martial law.

The 1987 Constitution permits the Congress to extend martial law if “the invasion or rebellion persists and public safety requires it”.

Yesterday, the two houses of Congress were expected to hold a special session to decide on the President’s request for extension of martial law in Mindanao. (Update: During the joint session on July 22, the Senate and the House voted to extend martial law until December 31: 261 for, 18 against.)

Sixty days ago, the Maute Group and Abu Sayyaf terrorists torched Marawi; robbed, raped, and killed civilians; and tried to create a “province of the Middle East-based Islamic State (IS) jihadist group in Southeast Asia.”

The deadline to suppress the rebellion has lapsed many times. Yesterday, the military again said it expected to retake Marawi “in a few more days.”

But lawlessness and the IS threat are apparently still serious enough for the military. National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. said martial law will prevent some 700 jihadists from entering the country.

Despite its jingoistic rhetoric, the military says something that must be repeated: what is the “situation on the ground”?

Yesterday, in Iligan City, Tindeg Maranao (Stand Up Maranao) gathered some 100 evacuees to oppose the extension of martial law.

It is an opening salvo for the July 24 protests being organized by civil society groups around the country. On this day, a day after the 60-day deadline of martial law in Mindanao lapses, President Duterte will deliver his State of the Nation Address.

The evacuees call for an end to martial law and the end of military airstrikes in Marawi City.

On July 24, some 260,000 evacuees vow to return to Marawi City. “We will go home!”

What is the “situation on the ground”?



(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in the July 23, 2017 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”