Dinner with the Iron Butterfly

Press, 11 September 1989, Page 20

Dinner with the Iron Butterfly

Attended by a staff of 40 and living in a SNZS million Mansion in Honolulu, the wife of the deposed President of the Philippines is living in a state of relative penury. Mrs Imelda Marcos, awaiting 1 trial; on United States Federal racketeering charges, pours out her troubles to JOHN j HISCOCK of the “Daily Telegraph.”

FOR Imelda Marcos, once owner of the world’s biggest shoe cupboard (3000 pairs, size shopping is not what it was. It is not that the urge has gone: the former First Lady of the Philippines still allows herself the odd surprise. But she is, it seems, a little short of cash.

“I have no money at all,” she insists. “We rely on other people for money and loans, but I don’t know how much longer we can do it ... Sometimes I don’t know how I am going to survive through the next day.” It was a lament repeated frequently as she held forth for five hours from the patio of her new home in Makiki Heights, Honolulu — on her achievements, on the failing health of her husband, the deposed President Ferdinand Marcos, and on the U.S. Federal racketeering charges hanging over both of them.

“People tell me I live in a mansion here,” she said, “but I tell them I used to live in a palace. It is all relative.” It isyt must be said, relatively comfortable. In her ‘new home: (SNZS million, rented from a former retainer) she is attended by a staff of 40; split three shifts. Volunteers from the Filipino community in maintain a 24-hour watch at the gates. As we talked a security guard sat just out of: earshot and servants hovered, awaiting her polite but firm command.

Of the 96 members of the entourage who fled with the Marcoses from Manila, 10 live in the house and another 40 in homes nearby? Twenty .or 30 Marcos loyalists a day call in to pledge , their support, and a couple of hundred at week-ends. Tables and chairs are set up under a canvas roof in the garden to accommodate them, and at every meal a buffet is laid out to feed those who cannot be seated at the table.

After paying their respects to Mrs Marcos, some dally in the garden; others visit the chapel in the grounds to pray for the recovery of their former President. Many bring food for the buffet tables, giving a week-end at the Marcoses the ambience of a pot-luck picnic. The couple have lived in Hawaii since they were toppled in the February 1986 uprising that ended two decades of despotic rule and brought Corazon Aquino to power. Both are barred from leaving the island, but if Imelda, the “Iron Butterfly,” feels caged here, she does at least have a little more freedom than her husband. Ferdinand Marcos has been in

the intensive care unit of St Francis Medical Centre in Honolulu since January 15 with heart, kidney and respiratory ailments. He undergoes daily dialysis treatment. He and his wife are under U.S. indictment on charges of looting more than SNZIBO million from the Philippines to buy art and property in New York, but proceedings against him have been deferred because of his ill-health. Mrs Marcos, 60, who is free on SNZ9 million bail, will be tried next month.

“I will ask for a'speedy trial,” she says indignantly. “This has been dragging on for so long. I want it al to be over with quickly. Justice delayed is justice denied; The truth will prevail arid the'truth will set us free.” .There was plenty more in the same vein. She is fond of quoting her husband’s favourite sayings: “He says that justice grinds exceedingly;? slow, but it will grind exceedingly well.” And: “He saySs we are here in exile more fori bur virtues than our sins.” '

An evening with Imelda Marcos is akin to visiting a great aunt who <is also a school teachef. Sometimes she is jovial and laughs easily; at other times she raps on the table, to ensure undivided attention. She showed off the family photograph album: “That’s a picture of Ferdinand’s bachelor house in the North. And that one there, that was my ancestral home in the South.” Then, turning the pages of a glossy, coffee-table style book entitled “Imelda Marcos — a Biography of Deeds,” she proudly pointed out: “There’s me with Princess Margaret, and that’s me with James Callaghan when I was invited to tea at 10 Downing Street. That’s Mother Teresa, Chairman Mao, Nixon. And that’s me 20 pounds lighter than I am today.” While we ate dinner of oyster stew and roast 'duck, served from the buffet table on the patio by a white-jacketed waiter, a videotape of speeches given by the Marcoses played on a television. Conversation tended to be somewhat one-sided, as she switched without pause from subject to subject.

She blames her present plight on a conspiracy between "bureaucrats here and in my country.” She claims she and her husband were “kidnapped” from Clark Airbase in the Philippines and flown to Guam, and then to Hawaii in a U.S. Air Force plane, without their consent.

“We thought we were going to Ilocos Norte. We would never have left our country voluntarily. The palace was being attacked by rockets, and Nancy Reagan called and said: ‘Why don’t you come to America?’” “Instead we were taken to Guam, and then Hawaii, where we spent a month living at the airbase before we rented this house. It was a shocking reception. They took all our possessions at Customs and they are still holding them even now.

“We still don’t know what we are doing here. My husband was re-elected President, and he is a rational, constitutional, moral and humane human being. Mrs Aquino cannot prove to the world she was ever elected, and yet she has usurped the Presidency and stolen the will of the Philippine people. “I have written to Mrs Aquino twice and tried to telephone her several times asking for human compassion, but she never answered me or acknowledged my calls. All Ferdinand and I want is to be allowed to return home to our country. It is unconstitutional, illegal and cruel to bar us from our homeland forever.”

What, I asked about President Marcos’s declaration of martial law in the Philippines, and the numerous allegations of human rights violations under his rule? Mrs Marcos looked blank. “If we put card-carrying communists in jail, it was to preserve the rights of the people who believed in democracy. “It was all done very nicely. They were educated and politicised in jail. If you check with Amnesty International, there are more violations of human rights now than there were in the 20 years of the Marcoses (abuses were ‘serious’ under Marcos, and are ‘still serious” under Aquino, according to Al).

“In the 20 years he was President, my husband had never implemented a death sentence. He has been called a tyrant, but he is a great humanist. The reason we are here is because we did not do a Tiananmen Square ... “When they talk of Tiananmen Square, I smile. At least there, one shot and you were dead. This is much worse. It is an unbelievable cruelty and inhumanity.” Immediately the dinner plates were cleared away, Mrs Marcos called for a writing pad and felttipped pen, and attempted, by sketching out a map of the world, to prove her husband had been right to declare martial law to stop the spread of communism. On other pages she scribbled out what she called “the ideology of President Marcos” and a diagram of “the pyramid of politics” showing that there had been 284,000 elected officials in the Philippines.

She talked of her success in rehabilitating hardened criminals by giving them animals, the cultural centre she built in Manila — “It was better than the Kennedy Centre” — and the unsuitability of Corazon Aquino for the role of President: “She is just a little housewife and knows nothing.” As for posterity: “Water seeks its own level, and I know that history will be very, very gener-

ous to the President and myself.” Every day Mrs Marcos and an entourage journey in convoy down the hill into Honolulu to visit her husband. Marcos has 12 of his own staff at the hospital at all times, and Filipino doctors and nurses fly in regularly from the American mainland. “It was a bit difficult for the hospital at first, dealing with all the people, but now they are used to it,” said Mrs Marcos. “The President is getting the best possible care. Sylvester Stallone’s doctor has been to see him, and so has Clint Eastwood’s.

“Ferdinand is sick of a broken heart, but he is very strong. His spirit, his love, God and my conscience keep me strong too. When people say I am a racketeer and a thief, my conscience says in a louder voice that I am not guilty. “The legal problems are overwhelming. I had the best lawyer in my country as my husband, and he shielded me for all this time, but now suddenly I find myself in the real world. For most of iny life I have been protected and lived in a beautiful fantasy world he creatred for me. ?ut now I am by myself.” . As she stands in the driveway, a solitary figure watching her visitors leave, it is easy to believe that, for the first time in her life, the Iron Butterfly is lonely.