The accidental president –Part 2

After coming to Toronto sometime in 1987, I read a story published in one of the city’s major daily newspapers endorsing General Fidel Ramos as the most likely successor to President Cory Aquino, one who could continue the country’s arduous path toward a full-pledged democracy and stability. The story credited Cory Aquino for restoring democracy in the Philippines after almost 20 years of dictatorship.

Fresh from our experience with the sporadic coups against the Aquino government at that time, and struggling through the repressive Marcos regime, I wrote to the newspaper to demystify the belief that Cory Aquino saved the Philippines from the throes of a dictatorship and delivered a new era of democracy. My main argument was that Cory Aquino was a reluctant leader, who ascended to the presidency by accident, that it was the Filipino people’s sentiment and debt of gratitude to her husband Ninoy for his martyrdom that gave her their vote.

Now, history is repeating itself. Noynoy Aquino, the son, also rises on the strength of his parents’ legacy. An inconsequential and do-nothing member of Congress, both as a congressman and senator, Noynoy is at the cusp of becoming the country’s next president. Early results of last Monday’s election gave Noynoy an insurmountable lead over his opponents.

The present political reality in the Philippines is not a rarity. When Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister of India, was assassinated, party members loyal to him wooed his wife Sonia to succeed him. Sonia refused, perhaps for fear for her life and family. Her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, suffered the same fate that befell her husband Rajiv. Sonia Gandhi later became the president of the Indian National Congress and currently serves as chair of India's ruling United Progressive Alliance.

Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike was the world’s first female head of government, ahead of British PM Margaret Thatcher. Bandaranaike was the widow of a previous Sri Lankan prime minister, and the mother of Sri Lanka’s third president, Chandrika Kumaratunga.

When Kim Sung-il passed away, his son Kim Jong-il ascended to the leadership of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Everyone in North Korea now considers Kim Jong-il as their “Supreme Leader.”

Even former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yee of Singapore did not leave his post quietly. He ensured that his eldest son Lee Hsien Loong would become the country’s third prime minister when he stepped down from power.

This is the same narrative of politics in the Philippines. It runs in and around the family. Almost every congressman or senator is a member of a political dynasty. Noynoy Aquino happens to be the most recent of scions of a political family to assume the reins of government. He will be succeeding another president who came to power on the coat tails of her father’s name and tenure in Malacanang.

But what is so different in the case of Noynoy Aquino?

Prominent among Noynoy’s serious shortcomings is his continuous self-denial of the right of the thousands of farm workers to own their piece of land at Hacienda Luisita. Because of the Cojuangco family’s intransigence, Hacienda Luisita has earned an infamous place in the history of agrarian reform in the Philippines.

The Cojuangco family took ownership of Hacienda Luisita from Tabacalera y Compania in 1958 through a loan from the Government Service Insurance System and a private loan from the Manufacturers Trust Company of New York under a guarantee by the Central Bank of the Philippines. It was President Ramon Magsaysay who offered the sale of the hacienda to the Cojuangcos through his protégé, Ninoy Aquino, a Cojuangco son-in-law. The sale was consummated during the term of President Carlos P. Garcia.

One of the terms of the loan agreement between the Cojuangcos and their creditors was the transfer of the hacienda to the hands of the farmers by 1967. This never happened.

When Cory Aquino ran for president, she promised to redistribute the hacienda’s land to its farmers under a comprehensive land reform program. After assuming the presidency, Cory Aquino changed her heart and the Cojuangcos continued to hold ownership under a stock distribution option, which meant that the farmers would be considered co-owners through stock ownership and the hacienda would be exempt from land reform because it was now a corporation. Stock options were never distributed and the farmers were never considered co-owners.

Noynoy Aquino insists that there are no tenants or farmers in Hacienda Luisita based on the stock option plan, hence there is no need to redistribute the land. If there were any land, according to Noynoy, it would be too inefficiently small to distribute among more than 5,000 farmers. Thus, it was unrealistic to give every farmer one hectare of land to till. But Noynoy Aquino doesn’t understand that the farmers can still own the land as members of a farmer’s co-operative, which is in existence and operates in Hacienda Luisita.

To insist and to deny that there are no tenants or farmers in Hacienda Luisita reveal something is definitely awry in Noynoy’s frame of mind. Some of his opponents voiced their concerns about reports that Noynoy was seeing a psychiatrist and raised the issue of competence. There is nothing wrong about consulting a psychiatrist, and even if this were true, would not prove Noynoy’s incompetence for the highest position in the land.

What could be more damning evidence of incompetence than Noynoy’s continuing resolute defence of his family’s stake in Hacienda Luisita? The father of one of the victims of the massacre during the farm workers’ picket at Hacienda Luisita on November 16, 2006, aptly summed up Noynoy Aquino's incompetence when he said: “How can Noynoy lead the country when he cannot manage to solve our problem here at Hacienda Luisita? This is a small piece of land, a very small problem compared to running the country. Yet, he can’t do anything about it.”

For the farmers who have been tilling the hectares of land at Hacienda Luisita, the continuing ownership of the Cojuangco family mirrors the oligarchic control of the country by its powerful few. To them, the agrarian dispute at Hacienda Luisita stands out as an issue of competence for Noynoy Aquino.

But the presidential election would soon be over in a few days, and when all the votes have been counted, Noynoy Aquino will be proclaimed the country’s new president. Just as reluctant as his mother Cory to lead the country, expect Noynoy and his accidental presidency to yield nothing more than a mandate of false hopes and empty rhetoric to Filipinos.

Racism 2010

Many have condemned Arizona’s new immigration law for betraying America’s deeply held values of justice and compassion. The law is so draconian because it empowers police officers acting as border patrol agents to commit racial profiling. While the primary purpose of Arizona’s law is to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants, it is obvious that it will only be enforced against brown and other coloured folks, mostly Mexicans and other Latinos who have used Arizona as their gateway to the United States.

TV talk show host David Letterman had joked that a number of Dutch people visiting the Grand Canyon were already afraid they might be targeted under the new law. Of course, this will never happen. There isn’t any Arizonan alive who gives a damn about the legal status of Dutch, Swedes, Brits, Germans or white people, basically. They only care and carp about their neighbours south of the border.

U.S. President Obama has joined those who have criticized the Arizona law by saying that it threatened “to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

In the meantime, America’s toughest law enforcer, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Arizona, has already been making rounds praising the new law which he says will give his men more authority to detain illegal immigrants. You would recall Arpaio, not of Mexican descent, became world-famous on the web for requiring prison inmates to wear pink underwear.

I was recently talking with an Italian woman from Milan who is on a working visa in Toronto, and this surge of anti-immigrant hysteria, not only in Arizona but also elsewhere, came up as a topic of our conversation. She said Arizona’s law is not new. As an Italian she had experienced being stopped by the police who demanded her identification document which Italians are supposed to carry with them. This was also true on subways and public places in France and other countries in Europe. It wasn’t by happenstance that European countries allow their cops to be overzealous sometimes in demanding documents from people they suspect as terrorists – but as an aftermath of 9/11 and the fear that terrorism has instilled in our minds.

Yet the Arizona immigration law and the upswing in opposition to immigrants in the developed world today had nothing to do with the trepidation against terrorism. Multiculturalism, for example, is being blamed in Canada by some quarters for divisions and strife between ethnic groups that they claimed prevent these people from integrating in mainstream Canada. Liberal Member of Parliament Ujjal Dosanjh has blamed multiculturalism-supporters for allowing an extremist faction of Sikhs to grow and nurture old grudges they brought from their homelands, making them difficult to assimilate into the Canadian mainstream.

What is mainstream Canada in the first place but a forced acceptance of the belief that Canada’s dominant cultural fabric is woven by English and French traditions and values and that the rest of society’s pining for their cultural heritage is only of secondary importance, although they are allowed to celebrate their values, their religion and their past.

Canada’s immigration law and proposed innovations in its screening of refugees and foreign workers are not to be envied at all. By and large, these initiatives are designed to stem the tide of newcomers who potentially bring to Canada a different set of cultural traditions and beliefs, and partly to placate the critical mass of naysayers who believe that immigrants and refugees are imposing a heavy strain on the country’s social and health services.

Recently, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was captured on open microphone slamming a voter he’d just been trying to win over. Forgetting that he’d left a television microphone pinned to his chest, Brown called the voter a “bigoted woman” for needling him on immigration. The woman voter, a supporter of Brown’s Labour Party, was complaining that immigrants from eastern Europe are taking jobs at a time when Britain’s unemployment level is rising. What she didn’t realize is the fact that although more than 1 million of these immigrants have moved to Britain since the European Union expanded its membership, many have left during the bruising recession. British pundits are already saying comments such as this one by Brown would cost him the election.

President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, however, is stoking the national debate about a controversial legislation forbidding wearing of Islamic veils that cover the face on grounds that they don’t respect French values or women’s dignity. While such law might not pass constitutional muster, in France or in the European Union, Sarkozy whose popularity has sank in the polls needed this political opportunity to boost his image and his conservative party which was trashed during the March regional elections.

Quebec Premier Jean Charest has found himself in similar waters. His government has proposed a bill to ban women donning the niqab or face veil for purposes of identification, communication and access to government services. Charest said, “This is about stressing the values that unite us... An accommodation cannot be granted unless it respects the principle of equality of men and women, and the religious neutrality of the state.”

Isn’t that self-contradictory? Quebec would abide by the equality of its subjects and the religious neutrality of the state, yet it would not allow a woman to wear a veil because of her religious belief. Or is it because the law targets and prohibits Islamic women from wearing their niqabs and professing their faith?

“Show me your face” or “show me your papers” is a degenerate act. To do such a thing is like recycling the evils of the past that we have fought and defeated. We have enshrined our new freedoms and rights in our constitutions and ratified them through international agreements. Underlying all these freedoms and rights is the respect for the dignity of the human being. We cannot tell our immigrants what to worship or whom to pray, or what to eat and how to eat. We take our immigrants as they are, with all their traditions and values from their cultures, including their eccentricities like wearing a niqab or a ceremonial kirpan.

The Arizona law allowing police officers to demand anyone to show his or her identity documents conjures ghosts from the past. If you were a black man in the South during the Reconstruction and unable to show proof of your employment on demand to the police, you could be arrested and spend time in jail, or eventually be sold to a farming or mining operation. During those times, the violation was known as vagrancy. Since only black people were subjected to this “show me your papers” demand, it was like being delivered into a new form of slavery. In Arizona, it’s now the law to arrest people, citizen or not, simply for appearing Hispanic.

The state has always been complicit in exploiting inequality. This type of inequality has its roots in slavery. The history of U.S. immigration is littered with a litany of policies aimed in creating unequal status for different groups of people, like the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Alien Land Act, anti-miscegenation laws, Public Law 78 and the Bracero Program. Canada likewise has its share of offensive laws, such as the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act, the War Measures Act that gave the federal government the power to intern all persons of Japanese racial origin during the second World War, the Indian Act which created the Canadian Indian residential school system, and the current Live-in Caregiver Program.

The Arizona immigration law, anti-niqab legislations, and other similar immigration initiatives are all designed to create an unequal status based on race and national origin. Despite their alleged good intentions, such laws also engender xenophobia and nativistic fear of immigrants.