Another voice
Venial and Cardinal Sin
Auberon Waugh
Manila, Philippines T do not know whether Graham Greene 1 has ever been to Manila, but he is probably the only Englishman alive who could make sense of this extraordinary capital city, where the Roman Catholic Archbishop is called Cardinal Sin and the taxis are often decorated with pictures of Jesus or the Virgin Mary festooned with rosaries and bearing the sinister message: 'I am counting on You De Colores'. De Colores is a Roman Catholic revivalist or 'born-again' movement, as it was explained to me through a clanking rosary by a taxi driver who had spent the first half of our journey trying to persuade me that it would be a waste of time to keep my embassy appointment for 9.30 in the morning; I would be much better off meeting a cheap, clean, 17-year-old Filipina of his acquaintance.
Another reason for Mr Greene to visit Manila now is that the whole place may be about to explode in bloodshed and horror. There is general agreement — at any rate in the Carousel Bar of Manila's Mandarin Hotel — that after 15 years as elected President, military dictator and now elected President once again, Ferdinand Marcos is dying. At 64, he certainly looks as sick as a cat to me. The trouble is that the same rumours have been going the rounds for the last seven years, and, like all gossip, they are only half believed. As a result, nobody has asked any serious questions about the succession. There is a pious belief that he has taken steps to prevent his wife, Imelda Marcos, succeeding to the Presidency, but this seems based on nothing more solid than that the President did not appoint his First Lady as Prime Minister under the new constitution of last year.
This formidable woman, who enchants all who meet her, is already governor of Metro Manila and head of a curious department called the Human Settlement Agency which employs 1,200 civil servants and runs a computer network throughout the republic which effectively controls most official information about the country her poor husband is trying to govern. However, if the information it controls is of the same standard as most Filipino information one must suppose it is made up of gossip, jokes, special pleading, personal vendettas and occasional wild flights of fanciful rhetoric in about equal measure.
Filipinos embellish the private and public lives of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos as lavishly as they decorate the famous 'Jeepnie' buses which ply the crowded Manila streets in Oliver Messel baroque. Sometimes this gossip creeps into the foreign press, as when Imelda recently bought two beds in a furniture store to read a major scoop in the New York Times a few weeks later that she had salted away $5 million in antiques. A particularly juicy story reached me shortly after my arrival, claiming to come straight from the lips of a Cabinet Minister, that on a recent visit to Tripoli Imelda had so captivated the austere religious maniac who rules Libya, Colonel Gaddafi, that he moved the Philippine delegation to luxurious lodgings, and bombarded the First Lady with flowers and billets doux (whether she succumbed to these blandishments was not recorded).
The press is not so much controlled as officially uninformed of what is going on. It is also grovellingly polite about both the President and his First Lady. This may explain a curious debate which started last, week and looks like dragging on indefinite ly, about whether or not the Republic is a poor country. President Marcos is intensely irritated by any suggestion to this effect, but Imelda's Human Settlement Agency tends to the contrary view, as justifying fur ther increase in the powers which have already led it to be described as a State within a State. Marcos came back from the Cancun Conference in Mexico saying that a thoroughly fruitful time had been had by all, and that he fully agreed with the Reagan administration's decision to end its food aid programme to the Philippines. 'We should stop receiving aid and should be giving it instead. Our people are not dying of starvation', he said.
Cynics pointed out that this food aid was administered by the President's old enemy, Cardinal Sin, and gave the Catholic Church enormous influence in a country where priests and nuns are in the forefront of antigovernment agitation. Predictably enough, the Cardinal issued a statement to UPI threatening 'tragic consequences' if this food aid was discontinued, and UPI backed this up by quoting 'official reports' (presumably Imelda's Human Settlement Agency) that four out of five Filipino children were 'malnourished'.
Who, then, is telling the truth? twenty years ago, if asked to choose between 'a Cardinal and a politician, let alone a Thtrd World dictator, I should not have hesitat:ed to believe the Cardinal. Today I am not .16
sure. Extensive inquires, which included in quiries among anti-government Catholic sources, lead me to believe that in this mat ter it is the Cardinal who is lying. Although there is acute poverty in the Philippines there is very little malnutrition and practically nobody dies from it. I may be wrong about this, of course. A week spent in the air-conditioned luxury of the Mandarin Hotel, with twice-daily excursions outside, is not the best basis for any claim to be an
expert on Philippine affairs. Nor do I doubt that, if, as I believe, the Cardinal is lying he thinks he is lying in a good cause. There is no reason to visit on a remote and friendly republic in the South China Sea any of the suspicions of an English Catholic who, sickened by the antics of Cardinal Hume and Archbishop Worlock in his own coun try, has begun to doubt whether the Catholic Church can automatically be regarded as a good cause anywhere. But if I am right in my conclusion that it is the Car dinal who is lying, the question must arise about what sort of good cause it is which requires its supporters to tell lies in order to convince us of its case.
The same question arose in more acute form during my inquiries last week into the activities of the US-sponsored Drug En forcement Agency in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand. I hope to write about this sinister organisation, which is devastating the economy of the area and removing the livelihood of poppy farmers in three coun tries, as well as creating a worldwide criminal network, in the next issue. But if I am right in my conclusion about the US government's worldwide campaign against the growing of opium poppy, that it is inspired not so much by concern about the misery of heroin addicts as by terror of its own law-and-order problem, its racial tensions and its wretched black population, then the main lesson to be learned is that the campaign is barking up the wrong tree: by trying to suppress the narcotics trade, they are exacerbating the problemg it creates, not alleviating them. My starting point, that a good cause which requires un truthful propaganda to establish its bona fide is automatically suspect, will be peripheral to the main argument. Let us return to the central dilemma of the Philippines, that truth is a question of options, or selection, or the mood of the moment.
The untruths which support the Marcos regime, as I say, take the form of truths which are withheld or quietly suppressed.
The untruths which support its opposition take the form of conscious inventions deliberately propagated. Resentment to the regime divides between those who are humiliated by the Marcos presence and by the pretence of true elections where the ballot is not secret and where the opposition candidate — General Santos — was widely
suspected of having been put up by the Marcos faction, and those who feel that last year's lifting of martial law — under the baleful influence of President Jimmy Carter — was ill-advised and premature. The return of martial law would be widely welcomed outside the universities, the criminal fraternity and the Catholic Church. The fact reveals the central lie of the opposition's posture. The central lie of the government's posture is to suppose that Marcos can go on forever. Now that he has heeded the gossips to the extent of publishing details of his blood pressure and bowel function, I should judge that the Filipinos have cause to be more worried than they appear to be.
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