EDITORIAL - We cannot forget

After 33 years, memories have dimmed, and a generation has grown up with no personal knowledge of the momentous events that would culminate in the collapse of an entrenched dictatorship.

The assassination of former senator Benigno Aquino Jr. on Aug. 21, 1983, however, is worth recalling today because the murder has a bearing on the debate over the planned burial of Ferdinand Marcos next month at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

Ninoy Aquino was the most prominent victim of the Marcos dictatorship. And like the thousands of other victims of human rights violations during the authoritarian regime, justice and closure have eluded the Aquino family. The foot soldiers of the Aviation Security Command – the only ones punished for what was described at the time as the crime of the century – have been freed after two decades behind bars without answering a question that still dogs Aquino’s family: was he still alive when tossed into a government van, but beaten and finished off as the vehicle made its way slowly around Manila for about an hour from the international airport?

Another question on everyone’s mind also begs for an answer: who ordered the assassination of Ninoy Aquino and the hired gun tagged by the dictatorship as his killer, Rolando Galman? The mystery was not solved even during the presidencies of Aquino’s widow and only son.

The nation cannot afford to forget life under military rule. People lived in fear of government forces. The press was controlled and lucrative private enterprises seized and given as rewards to cronies. For the conjugal dictatorship, there was no transparency or accountability; the lines between public and private funds disappeared. The legislature was a rubberstamp and a compliant Supreme Court legitimized the abuses, with a chief justice famously serving as the umbrella boy of the first lady.

The Aquino-Galman murders were among the numerous atrocities perpetrated during the dictatorship, which was also marked by large-scale plunder. Thousands of political dissidents were arrested without warrant, tortured, beaten, raped and killed. Many remain missing.

Those were the abuses that Ninoy Aquino and other freedom lovers fought to end, at great risk to their lives and livelihoods. Those were the abuses that still wait for an accounting. The nation forgets this dark period at its own peril. Honoring with a hero’s burial the man whose regime was responsible for the abuses will be his ultimate reward.