Communicating with the outside world

LONDON —  Sometimes, that is all it needs  meeting other people in other countries who have access to the mainstream media outside the Philippines.

 Amal Alammuddin is the daughter of Lebanese journalist, Baria Alammuddin, the  foreign editor of Al-Hayat, the largest international Arab newspaper. Baria has been my friend for many years. We met in London where we each fought for advocacies for our countries. She covered not just Lebanon but the whole of the Middle East and I for the Philippines.

Sometimes we talked of our daughters, Veronica at Al-Jazeera and Amal as an up and coming barrister. Although we met on several occasions when I visit London or other capitals in the Middle East I did not know much about her work. It was only last Tuesday that we were able to find each other when Baria brought me to her apartment on Notting Hill Gate.

Here was an example yet again that people meet each other for a purpose. She was not only the daughter of my friend. It may have taken some time but there we were talking about her work and how it fitted with my advocacies in the Philippines. She summed up her work to me:

“I am a barrister based in London specializing in international law, human rights, extradition and criminal law.

I have represented clients in cases before the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. I have also appeared for clients in domestic courts in the UK and US, and international bodies such as the UN Human Rights Committee and Interpol.

I recently represented Cambodia against Thailand at the International Court of Justice, and currently represent Abdullah Al-Senussi (Gaddafi’s former Head of Intelligence) before the International Criminal Court. 

Out of court, I provide advice to governments and individuals on international law, including on human rights, treaties and law of the sea. And I have been appointed to a number of UN commissions.

Last year I was appointed an adviser to Special Envoy Kofi Annan on the Syria peace process and I am currently Counsel to the Inquiry launched by a UN human rights rapporteur into the use of drones in counter-terrorism operations.

I am also the Rapporteur for the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute on the Independence of the Judiciary in Egypt.

I have recently represented Ms Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister of Ukraine who is detained on politically motivated charges, in a case before the European Court of Human Rights. I have also worked on a number of other cases where I represent persons who were state officials and are later charged as part of a campaign of persecution by the new government.

Such cases usually involve various types of representation including before legal bodies but also by engaging diplomatic, media and NGO support where this can be helpful.”

 Bingo! Amal was the person I have been looking for and I knew her when she was still a young student in Oxford.

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For music lovers, it would be a sin not to go to the BBC Proms, a series of well-selected music recitals of what is best and also what is new in the art.

I have a running conversation with a friend about the relation between music and life. Some aficionados become so used to listening to it, it becomes a habit rather than something to be related to life and its expression.

The performance on the evening I attended reminded me yet again of this truth. The first number “A Vision of the Sea.” The composer, David Matthews lived by the sea and experienced its changing colors and moods.

But the highlight of the program was Nobuyuki Tsuji at the piano. He was great and to think that he is only 24 and blind since he was a child.  He swayed his body as he played as if listening to some internal rhythms. The audience gave him a standing ovation and he reciprocated with an encore. He played Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2.         

The last piece was Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 “The Inextinguishable.” It was compelling music.

 When he created this piece Nielsen wrote to  his wife “I have an idea for a new work which has no programme but which should express what we understand by the life-urge or life’s manifestations; that is to say everything that moves, that craves life, that can be called neither good or evil, neither high or low neither great or small but simply that which is life, nothing grandiose or fine and delicate or about warm or cold (powerful maybe) but simply life and movement but varied, very varied but holding together and as though always flowing in one large movement, in a single stream. I need a word or a short title to say it all. That word was inextinguishable.”

What better way to celebrate one’s birthday than to be reminded of that.

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 When I received a post from Honey de Peralta of Flipside Publishing Company that Amazon announced the book was rating third hot seller in the Asian category, I was in a quandary of what title to use when I shared the good news with my Facebook friends.

 The first that came to my mind was “the power of a story” because it is true that the story of Imelda Marcos is heart wrenching. But the story does not end there. It begins there.

I happened to be the writer who would tell the story in the frightful days of martial law in the Philippines when writing against the Marcoses or their wishes was dangerous and risky. Imelda Marcos’s spendthrift ways had become a scandal and people wondered what motivated her to be so crass and indifferent to the poverty of her countrymen while she spent with abandon.

In writing the untold story, I found the reason and Imelda knew that I did. She threw the power and might of the government so the book would never see the light of day.

But it is one thing to have a powerful story of poverty and corruption and another to make sure it is published and becomes known.

From “a powerful story” I changed it to ”a story that would not be killed”...would because I fought back.

But no matter how much I fought back it would have been futile if the forces of fate were not on my side. So finally I accepted “the story that could not be killed.”  What a difference a word makes.