Military documents related to martial law have been declassified 39 years after the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos put the nation under military rule to stay in power.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) voluntarily declassified its martial law documents from the time Marcos signed Proclamation No. 1081 on Sept. 21, 1972 (but announced it only two days later), until Feb. 25, 1986, when he was ousted in the Edsa People Power Revolution.
The military is to start turning over the documents, which reportedly take up one big room in the compound of the Intelligence Service of the AFP in Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City, to the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) as soon as the latter finds a suitable storage place.
Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin and CHR Chairperson Loretta Rosales signed the turnover agreement on Wednesday at Camp Aguinaldo.
For the symbolic turnover, Gazmin handed to Rosales a pile of folders about two feet thick that included “reports, leaflets and newspaper clippings” about the late former Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. and the late Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin, then leading Marcos critics.
The military agreed to turn over the declassified martial law records to the CHR “to make them available for historical and other public purposes and thereby start a process of healing based on truth, transparency, fairness and justice.”
The signing was witnessed by Representative Rene Relampagos, who chairs the House committee on human rights, Teodoro de Mesa of the Philippine Human Rights Advocates, and Lieutenant General Anthony Alcantara, the AFP deputy chief of staff.
Closure
Gazmin, a retired Army general, said the “end objective” of making the military documents from 1972 to 1986 available to the public was “to bring closure” and to ensure that “[we will] never commit the same mistakes again.”
He claimed that he had not read the documents.
Rosales said the CHR would open the documents to historians, academicians, researchers and the surviving victims of martial law.
She said she expected to find records of victims of torture, summary killings and forced disappearances.
“[D]efinitely we will see [who were the] victims of torture. If we have such a list, for sure they will also have a list,” said Rosales, who was among the thousands imprisoned and tortured by soldiers during martial law.
“Definitely it will help the victims. I think I have a thick dossier because they made many reports about me when they arrested me,” she said.
While a proposed compensation law for martial law victims is still pending in Congress, the 1995 class suit ruling of a US district court in Hawaii awarding damages to some 7,000 victims is already being enforced.
Rosales said the number of those who were illegally imprisoned during martial law was estimated at more than 40,000.
“What is most important is that [the military] has opened up to accept the truth that there are these documents that reflect the violence that occurred during martial law. This is part of the paradigm shift in the military,” she said.
Excesses
Gazmin, who was the jailer of Ninoy Aquino in Laur, Nueva Ecija province, during martial law, said he would let the documents speak on the extent of military abuse at the time.
But he washed his hands of the issue on abuse, saying: “As far as our unit was concerned, there were no excesses. I guess the abuses were because I was involved in the detention of people. I was the commander of the Ipil Detention Center [in Fort Bonifacio].
“The first two years of martial law were good until there were excesses later on. It will be good to study the system, what happened. Why was it good, why did it fail.”
Rosales said she had seen with her own eyes the “very big” room that held the military documents.
“It’s not true that they are burning the documents. It’s not true that they are selling and shredding these.” she said.
Rosales said the record custodians had an area for sorting the documents and for placing these on computer scans to make digital copies.
She said the hard copies were now bound and stacked in big cabinets.
Rosales also said the CHR would involve the National Defense College of the Philippines, National Archives, University of the Philippines Archives, National Historical Commission and House committee on human rights in the handling of the documents.