Will Marcos follow the Shah?
By JOHN ’ OAKES, of the New York Times” Manila
Is Ferdinand Marcos, now in the sixteenth year of his presidency and the eighth year of the martial-law under which he gave himself absolute powers, destined to go the way of the Shah of Iran? While the differences are great, the resemblance between President Marcos’s position today and that of the Shah the day before yesterday are even greater. Marcos is the dictator of a country whose population of 47 million is 30 per cent bigger than Iran’s, but just as poor. ’ Like the Shah, he and his wife . pursue . an ostentatiously luxurious style of life,--as do their families and friends,' while an estimated 40 per cent of their i people, live in extreme poverty, some approaching the starvation level. Like- the Shah, Mr Marcos is accused of paying more attention to the trappings of power than to the basic needs of the mass of the people. The minimum wage, even with added “allowances,” comes to less than $2.90 a day, . real... wages have dropped by 30 per cent in less than a decade, the aver-
age caloric intake is said to be the second lowest in Asia, only Bangladesh is worse off. The top 20 per cent of the population takes more than half the national income, while the lowest 40 per cent barely exists with less than 12 per cent of the nation’s income. Unemployment is officially only about 5 per cent, but if the number of under-employed is taken into account, the figure rises to 25 per cent or more of the labour force. The need for new housing is growing more desperate from year to year while government programmes meet only a small fraction of the requirements.
. Like the Shah, Mr Marcos must take responsibility for gross violations of human rights, subversion of the electoral process, and the spectacular enrichment through favouritism, graft and corruption of his and his wife’s coterie of family and friends. Like the Shah, who had to cope with the Kurds’ secessionist movement, Marcos has to deal with a Muslim secessionist movement, as well as sporadic armed outbreaks, partly Communistled, in rural areas. Like the Shah. Mr Marcos relies on American-supplied
arms to keep himself in power and on the American tendency to support almost any authoritarian regime so long as it is strategically placed and professedly antiSoviet.
“We are your real friends,” Mrs Imelda Marcos says to an American visitor. “We believe in development and free enterprise.”Like the Shah, Mr Marcos has to contend with rising opposition among many middle-class intellectuals, business and professionl men and women, plus — in a country more than 80 per cent Roman Catholic and 90 per cent' literate — several Roman Catholic priests and, at the very least, a dozen bishops.
, Some of these opponents are direct victims of the Marcos regime, squeezed out of respected leadership positions in commerce and banking, teaching and writing, by influential friends of Mr Marcos or his wife.
Some, like the priests and bishops, have become all too familiar in recent years with cases of arrest without warrant, imprisonment without charge, torture without mercy, murder without cause. While they might well agree that things are improving, they would disagree with Mr Marcos’s airy comment that "there are one or two, at the very most four,-charges of torture and several cases of alleged illegal arrest without warrant. That is a pretty good batting average.”
But, respond the priests, the lawyers, the civil libertarians, it is not true. They describe senseless murders, “disappearances,” tortures conducted in “safe houses” by army personnel or militia members that have gone unpunished with few exceptions. One of the more pointed exceptions occurred when the victim turned out to be the activist daughter of an Army officer. Estimates of political prisoners now in jail range from 200 to 2000.
“The situation isn’t yet explosive,” one lawyer says in the privacy of his office, where he hopes he is not "bugged.”
"But there is no question that the anger of the people is building up. My problem is that I believe in democracy, in ballots, not bullets, but after seven-and-a-half years of martial-law ar ’. no relief in sight, I am beginning to believe there is no alternative to violence or at least the threat of violence.” The Filipinos like to compare themselves with their national symbol, the carabao, or water buffalo. “It’s a gentle and patient animal,” they say, “but watch out when the carabao runs amok.”
Although the press is controlled, a few small dissident newspapers, are permitted to appear, just because they are small.
One of the best-known ones, called “We,” with a maximum of 20,000 copies, is “like a pebble dropped in Manila Bay,” one of its backers said.
Freedom of speech exists, to a large degree. “Oh, yes, we do have freedom of speech,” a Roman Catholic cleric wryly ramarks.
“But what we don’t have! is freedom after'speedi.”
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