Ninoy, the assassination and Oakwood
By Alejandro Lichauco
Recalling the death of Ninoy, one invariably turns to two related questions. First: What did he really stand for? Second: Who could have had the strongest reason and the power to have him liquidated?

The truth behind these two questions, unfortunately, has been obscured by the nourished impression that, first, he was primarily a freedom fighter dedicated to the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship; and, second, since he was, among all freedom fighters, the figure who constituted the strongest threat to Marcos, then it was Marcos, with the power to do so, who had the strongest reason to do him in.

Both answers are simplistic and conceal a deeper reality.

First, Ninoy was too intelligent a political leader to believe that freedom is the be-all and end-all of statecraft, and that all that was necessary to bring welfare and progress about was to resurrect the democratic institutions which martial law had killed. He was first and foremost a leader in the mold of Jawarhal Nehru and other democratic socialists who believed that unless the poverty that enveloped society were eliminated, there would be no peace in the land, and, certainly, no democracy either.

To Ninoy, there never was any democracy in the Philippines to begin with, and so merely eliminating the dictatorship wouldn’t necessarily bring about real freedom for the people, much less eliminate the mass poverty, which he considered incompatible with genuine democracy.

And what, according to Ninoy, accounts for mass poverty?

Ninoy answered that in his Testament From A Prison Cell. And these were his words: “Underdevelopment is the consequence of a capitalist system that perpetuates poverty and attendant human misery, of social structures based on gross inequalities in social well-being, privilege and power. This system must be replaced.”

Ninoy was referring in particular to laissez-faire capitalism, which, as he put it, “created a political situation that violated the canons of democracy.” Explaining that, he said: “The owners of capital wielded powers so far-reaching -- over the employees, over the public -- without being accountable to the community, without being responsible for those whose fate they determined with their vital economic and political decisions.”

What alternative did he propose? He proposed what he described as democratic socialism under which, in his words, “All basic and strategic means of production must come under social ownership to ensure the equitable proration of the national wealth and to safeguard the national interest.” He was talking of nationalization.

All these may be found in Chapter 6 of his Testament, which he wrote under solitary confinement.

That particular chapter constitutes, in the view of this piece, the essential Ninoy. It represented the substance of what he stood for and what he had intended to undertake had he survived his ordeal. It wasn’t the war against dictatorship that principally preoccupied him. He was preoccupied mainly by the war against poverty, which he felt he must wage on his people’s behalf and that war, he was convinced, could be won only by replacing laissez-faire capitalism with democratic socialism akin to India’s. He recognized that the real enemy wasn’t Marcos but the system, which, by keeping the masses poor, had made a force of Philippine democracy and individual freedom an illusion.

In turning then to the question of who could have had the strongest reason to eliminate Ninoy, one must inescapably look not so much to Marcos as to the powerful forces -- certainly far more powerful than Marcos -- that constitute the global guardians of the system which Ninoy was determined to replace. With Marcos dying and Ninoy the figure most likely to succeed him, those forces, far more than Marcos, had the stronger reason to eliminate Ninoy and they certainly were far more powerful than Marcos to accomplish that end.

And who, specifically, might those forces be? Those are the forces behind the international agencies, which today dictate the terms of our national existence and force us to live under the creed of laissez-faire capitalism, whose latest name is globalism. If Ninoy had succeeded Marcos, the IMF, the World Bank and WTO would, at most, be an annoying nuisance in our lives instead of the all-dictating and pervasive presence that they are today.

These considerations should be taken to account by Ninoy’s devotees who complain that to this day the mastermind behind the assassination still has to be identified. If the mastermind hasn’t yet been identified, it is because the search for him has focused excessively on Marcos rather than on the global forces that have always made plaything of our leaders, including Marcos, just to make sure that the regime of laissez-faire capitalism is preserved.

How does this take us to Oakwood? The most revealing and significant remark made by the rebel leaders during the Senate investigation came from Capt. Milo Maestrecampo. Denying that Oakwood was a case of military adventurism, Mae­stre­campo said of their movement: “This is about a dying society, a society that favors the rich over the poor.”

In Maestrecampo, one could hear Ninoy talking. Ninoy’s social grievances against a system loaded in favor of the rich against the poor has now become the grievance of the youthful rebels and his cause is now their cause. The corruption of the generals was merely the immediate pretext for the rebellion. The ultimate agenda is the reconstruction of the society, as Ninoy had dreamed, in order to rid the land of the scourge of poverty.

Ninoy returned from the comforts of exile not so much to free Filipinos from dictatorship -- he would have established a dictatorship if that were necessary to achieve his real mission -- as to rid the land of a social system that had kept his people chained to a poverty that dehumanizes, even if that meant risking death by defying the international gods of that system, who were far more powerful than Marcos.

In that, lay the essence of Ninoy’s martyrdom and should cast new light on his assassination. As for Oakwood, in declaring that their movement is really about this “dying society . . . that favors the rich over the poor,” the military rebels have served notice that although they may not have necessarily read Ninoy’s Testament, Ninoy’s grievance and his cause didn’t die with his assassination, and now live in the heart and will of the nation’s idealists in the Armed Forces. It is they who will wage the war for the reconstruction of Philippine society, which Ninoy dreamed of accomplishing and one can imagine some of their models: Nasser, Park Chung Hee and Suharto, all of whom made military governments synonymous with modernization and the conquest of poverty in the Third World.

The political establishment has every reason to be disturbed