SKETCHES
By Ana
Marie Pamintuan
One
of the most memorable revelations of Juan Ponce Enrile when he turned
his back on the Marcos regime was that he staged an ambush on his own
convoy in 1972, giving Ferdinand Marcos a pretext to declare martial
law.
Enrile
disclosed this in 1986 when Marcos was still around to refute the
story. The fallen dictator never did.
Now
that Marcos’ remains are preserved like an exhibit at Madame
Tussauds, Enrile has changed his tune, saying the ambush was real.
He
has also washed his hands of the ruinous coups staged during the
first Aquino administration by his protégés in the military
reformist movement.
We
don’t know if Enrile is an incorrigible liar, or if this is finally
the truth and nothing but… or if this is a manifestation of
Alzheimer’s. I’ll just wait for his unauthorized biography to be
written. Anyway, for those of us whose reading fare these days is
limited to Harry Potter and The Hunger
Games, 700 pages of one man’s version of history is a heavy
read.
If
the Senate president wants to downplay his responsibility for the
atrocities perpetrated during martial law, it may be better for him
to shepherd the passage of Senate Bill 2615 in his chamber. This is
the counterpart of House Bill 5990, which the larger chamber passed
on March 21 this year.
Enactment
of this measure will pave the way for the payment of $200 million as
compensation to victims of human rights abuses during the Marcos
regime.
SB
2615 was filed way back in November 2010 by Sen. Sergio Osmeña III,
himself a martial law victim. The $200 million is to be sourced from
$623 million ($685 million with interest) in Marcos deposits returned
to the Philippines by Swiss banks. The money will be divided among
10,000 registered human rights victims, although authorities believe
the number can go up to 30,000.
That’s
$68,500 each (more than P2.8 million at current rates) for 10,000
victims.
It’s
unfortunate that the Americans beat us to the award of compensation
for Filipino human rights victims. Judge Manuel Real of the US
District Court of Hawaii ordered the payment last year of $7.5
million to 7,526 claimants. The money came from the settlement of a
case with a Marcos crony over properties in Colorado and Texas. While
each claimant received only $1,000, it was the first case of
compensation for victims of the Marcos dictatorship.
*
* *
Significantly,
the compensation bill was not among the priority measures announced
by President Aquino in his State of the Nation Address last July.
Maybe the government is reluctant to forgo earnings on the funds.
When
the Swiss government made an emergency decision to freeze suspicious
Marcos deposits on March 24, 1986, shortly after the people power
revolt, the amount covered was $535 million. Actual return or
restitution of the funds had to wait for a final determination by
Philippine courts that the deposits were ill-gotten. This is required
in international legal assistance cases.
In
December 1997, the Swiss Supreme Court cleared the way for the fund
transfer. But the final Philippine ruling on the nature of the wealth
was handed down only in 2003. By that time, the funds had grown to
$685 million.
In
January 2004, the money was transferred to the National Treasury from
the Philippine National Bank.
By
2007, the amount stood at $718 million with interest. According to
data from the Department of Budget and Management at the time,
$598.299 million of the amount was invested in bonds and $23.337
million in stocks.
The
Philippines informed Switzerland that using the $200 million to
compensate the victims required legislation.
*
* *
Human
rights victims aren’t the only ones waiting for the release of the
funds.
Swiss
authorities also find it significant that the Marcos case was the
first time that their country, long seen as a haven for the money of
despots, Nazis and their kindred spirits, restituted to a foreign
government a dictator’s bank deposits confirmed to be ill-gotten.
The
Marcos deposits and the $700 million traced to Nigerian military
dictator Sani Abacha and returned to that country are considered by
the Swiss to be their most significant restitution cases.
Abacha
and Marcos are classified as “politically exposed persons” or PEP
by the Swiss. That’s the same term you heard during the impeachment
trial of former chief justice Renato Corona. For PEPs, the world is
getting smaller for laundering dirty money, thanks to tighter
international regulation.
Over
the past 15 years, Switzerland has restituted a total of $1.7 billion
in PEP assets to the countries of origin.
Based
on the same constitutional emergency provision used in the Marcos
case in 1986, Swiss authorities froze the assets of relatives and
entourage of Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali ($65 million) and
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak ($700 million) at the start of the Arab
Spring. As in the Marcos case, the illegal nature of the funds must
first be established by the country of origin before the Swiss can
restitute the money.
Another
$106 million in Syrian and Libyan assets have been frozen by the
Swiss.
The
precedent set by the Marcos case laid the groundwork for future
restitutions and was incorporated in the provisions of the United
Nations Convention Against Corruption, Swiss Ambassador Ivo Sieber
told me last week.
“Today
these principles reverberate more relevant than ever in the context
of the recent revolutions in Northern Africa,” he said.
“The
Marcos case was the first time the Swiss authorities froze the funds
held by a former dictator in Switzerland and then restituted it to
the country where it was looted,” he told me. “In doing so while
at the same time arranging that funds would also be used to
compensate the human rights victims that suffered under the regime,
the Philippine-Swiss cooperation set a compelling international
precedent.”
The
idea that you can’t take the money and run, and worse, that your
dirty money could end up in the pockets of your victims, should
discourage the emergence of corrupt despots.
In
the Philippines, victims are still waiting for that message to sink
in, even as there are attempts to rewrite the history of the
oppressive years.
No comments:
Post a Comment