Declare Ninoy a hero
By DAN MARIANO

Sen. Aquilino Pimentel Jr. has introduced Senate Bill 2356, which seeks to declare August 21 of every year as a national holiday in honor of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.

Pimentel’s proposal stops short of declaring the former senator a hero, which he still isn’t yet -- to the surprise of many. Naming Ninoy a hero would require perhaps another piece of legislation. Is this, therefore, an instance of placing the cart before the horse? At a recent press forum, Pimentel cited the case of Martin Luther King Jr., for whom the United States first set aside a special day every year to commemorate his leadership of the civil-rights movement in America before his heroism was officially acknowledged. Official acknowledgment or no, Ninoy became a hero the moment he sustained a gunshot wound to the back of his head at the tarmac of the airport that now bears his name. That was 20 years ago.

Yet even that magnificent sacrifice is in real danger of fading from our national memory. Already an entire generation has risen with practically no recollection of the assassination, much less the conditions that gave rise to the tragedy. How much longer should we wait before Ninoy is declared a hero?

Other major figures in our history have suffered, needlessly, from official sloth and collective amnesia, denied the honor they deserve. Pimentel pointed out the example of the country’s first president, Emilio Aguinaldo. The cause for Aguinaldo’s heroism has been smothered by the unresolved -- and ultimately unresolvable -- controversy over his role in the execution of Katipunan founder Andres Bonifacio.

(Ideologically inspired historians have played fast and loose with facts in a bid to portray the Aguinaldo-Bonifacio conflict as the apogee of the contradiction between the land-owning principalia to which the Caviteño general belonged and the proletariat as represented by the supposedly plebeian Bonifacio. Talk about applying contemporary standards to the past.)

As a result, while homage is paid to Aguinaldo yearly, especially on June 12, the man who led the First Republic is not officially recognized as a hero. Ninoy needs to be officially declared a hero if only to arrest the rapid rate of memory loss Filipinos have been suffering with regard to the regime whose excesses he at- tempted to temper. While many regarded him as Marcos’s strongest political rival, Ninoy actually decided to return from exile in Boston to deliver what Pimentel calls a “message of peace” to the dictator.

Ninoy, said Pimentel, “intended to persuade Mr. Marcos to restore freedom and democracy to the land because of his apprehension that unless [the dictator did] so voluntarily, a violent national upheaval would overturn Mr. Marcos’s authoritarian rule and cause widespread death and destruction to the nation.”

Indeed, public frustration with the Marcos government had been mounting before Ninoy’s homecoming.

In 1978 Marcos called for elections to an “interim” parliament. On the eve of the polls, however, Filipinos staged a noise barrage, the boldest protest ever staged until then since he declared martial law in 1972. The massive demonstration, especially in the capital region, preempted in the popular mind the election results, which, unsurprisingly, showed the ticket led by Imelda Marcos swamping the opposition lineup of Ninoy, Pimentel, Charito Planas, Alex Boncayao and others. The sham elections of 1978 resulted in greater polarization. Thereafter, Filipinos -- especially the middle class -- became more ready to resort to violence.

On October 19, 1980, a bomb was planted on the podium of the Philippine International Convention Center, moments before Marcos was to address a group of American tour operators. The daughter of a former chief of the Philippine Navy, who ironically belonged to Marcos’s inner circle, was arrested for planting the bomb, along with several others. At about the same time, the Light A Fire Movement, led by a former newspaper executive, was born to engage in sabotage.

Meanwhile, the communist-led New People’s Army was growing at an unprecedented rate, turning several provinces into guerrillas zones and “liberated areas.” NPA operatives would soon be gunning down soldiers and officials in the streets of Manila as the movement stepped up its campaign of urban guerrilla and explosives warfare. That the NPA would later show tendencies reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge illustrated the truly perilous crossroads the country had reached before Ninoy ended his self-exile.

What Ninoy was unable to do in life, he accomplished in death. His brazen murder was such an outrage that it emboldened Filipinos to express -- openly, and not just behind closed doors or at coffee shops -- their dissatisfaction with dictatorship. But instead of just accelerating the recruitment of organizations waging armed struggle against Marcos, the assassination also encouraged civil disobedience and the growth of a movement that eventually found a less bloody way of toppling the dictator.

With his death, Ninoy pulled the nation away from the brink of civil war. And that, most certainly, was a heroic achievement.