Martial law ‘golden age’ for Marcos family, not for Filipinos —Diokno

Human rights lawyer Jose Manuel “Chel” Diokno said Tuesday that the Martial law regime of the late dictator President Ferdinand Marcos marked golden years for the family, but not for the Filipinos.

Diokno, whose father, former opposition Senator Jose Diokno was sent to jail by Marcos, made the statement in commemoration of the 49th year since Marcos issued Proclamation 1081 placing the entire country under martial law.

“Those years were golden years for them, not the country. They had absolute and ultimate power over anything, and that allowed them to accumulate so much resources for their benefit, not the Filipino people,” Diokno said in an ANC interview.

“Recently, a group of young economists did a study which showed that we lost two decades of development, and we became the Sick Man of Asia, because of how the Marcoses managed the economy. Our national debt reached so high of an amount and it is not them who are paying for that. It is us,” Diokno added.

The Asia Pacific Research Network (APRN), a coalition of non-government research groups, backed Diokno.

The group cited that in the 21-year period of the Marcos regime, global rights watchdog Amnesty International documented an estimate of 70,000 incarcerated individuals, 34,000 torture victims and 3,240 murdered Filipinos by state forces.

“The Marcoses never apologized and were not made accountable for their crimes against Filipinos. Instead, they have callously asked the public to “move on” from martial law and went as far as petitioning that facts about the dictatorship be removed from history books,” APRN said in a statement.

Likewise, APRN lamented that President Rodrigo Duterte has supported such efforts by the Marcos family by allowing Marcos to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani in November 2016 and by signing into law a holiday memorializing Marcos.

“The Philippines under Marcos is in fact far from golden. We have to remember that even truth-seeking and journalism have also become dangerous jobs under the late ousted dictator. It was Marcos who authorized the military takeover of media outlets and the mass arrest of journalists, editors and media workers,” APRN said.

“We in the advocacy research community underline the direct hand of Duterte in the rose-tinted depiction of the Marcoses. Despite massive literature and verifiable sources on the Marcos atrocities, Duterte has helped the dictator’s family to peddle a different version of history,” APRN added.

In 2012, then President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III signed the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act into law, a measure mandating the Philippine government to compensate the victims of human rights violations during the Martial Law years—violations that include summary executions, enforced disappearances and torture —using the P10 billion ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses retrieved by the Philippine government from a Swiss bank.

Prior to this, the US Federal Court in Hawaii ruled to grant 10,000 victims of human rights violations during the Marcos regime, as well as their families, $1.96 billion dollars worth of compensation in 1995.—LDF, GMA News