Resting place for Marcos may not be final, says ex-solon

Should the burial of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos proceed as planned at Libingan ng mga Bayani in Taguig City next month, his family should not remain confident that this will be his final resting place.

Former Akbayan Rep. Walden Bello issued this warning to the Marcos family in the wake of government preparations for a hero’s burial of the dictator possibly on Sept. 18, a week after Marcos’ 99th birth anniversary.

“They should not assume that Libingan ng mga Bayani will be the final resting place of the remains of Marcos. There might be a lot of really aggrieved people who might take the initiative of transferring the remains [of the dictator] to a much more congenial site outside Libingan,” Bello told reporters in an interview.

Given the atrocities committed by Marcos during his two-decade rule in the country, such scenario isn’t impossible as historically shown by what an oppressed people can do to tyrants. In 2012, Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s corpse was paraded through the city of Misrata’s streets.

A BBC report quoted Libya’s Minister for Information Mahmoud Shamman as saying that the country’s National Transitional Council was following a “fatwa” or religious ruling which states that Gaddafi’s remains “should not be buried in a known place to avoid any sedition.”

Bello, who was part of the House committee that drafted and approved in 2013 the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act, however, pointed out that such desecration may not happen in the next few months but “sometime long after that.”