TERROR IN THE PLANTATIONS
Richard West finds
rebellion and oppression on a Philippine island
Bacolod AS OUR boat moved out of Iloilo, bound for the island of Negros, the purser greeted the passengers on the public address sys- tem, told us the name of the skipper, and then recited the Lord's Prayer. Apparently it was normal practice on this vessel, and nothing to do with the typhoon season, when travel by boat can be hazardous in the Philippines; but from what I had read in the recent newspapers, we might be needing a few extra prayers on Negros. 'Three dead, eight wounded in Negros clash'. . Communist rebels seize a military camp. . . . Three thousand villa- gers flee mortar bombardment. . . Chil- dren dying of hunger on Negros.' The editor of the main Manila newspaper, Luis Beltran, reported last month: 'Some friends of mine in Negros are worried sick about the sudden open activities of the New Popular Army.' At Silay, in North Negros province, an inquiry is being held into the massacre last year of 20 villagers by. private troops of a sugar plantation owner. The Catholic weekly Veritas says that survivors and relatives of the dead 'complain of being intimidated and. . . the presence of goons sowing fear and terror in the mountain areas'.
Negros used to grow half the Philippines sugar, which in turn comprised more than half the country's exports. The profit from sugar was systematically filched by Presi- dent Ferdinand Marcos and his associates through a corrupt state monopoly, the Philippines Sugar Commission. This was controlled by a few of the richest planters who rigged the price of the crop, embez- zled loans from bodies such as the World Bank, and took huge bribes on the purch- ase from abroad of generally useless sugar machinery. They employed private armies to beat and kill the plantation workers, some of whom lived scarcely better than slaves in the West Indies 200 years ago. An American student of Philippine matters, Richard J. Kessler, has estimated that Marcos personally 'may have stripped away $1.2 billion (£800,000,000) from the sugar industry alone', of which at least half would have come from Negros, an island about the size of Ulster.
As the boat approaches Negros, one sees that the island has been physically, as well as financially, stripped bare. The once green rain forest that covered the coast land and the slopes of Mount Kanlaon has given way to cane or to barren rock and dust. Illegal loggers, charcoal makers and slash-and-burn farmers continue their de- predation on what remains of the primeval trees, now barely six per cent of the land surface. Rain and flash floods wash away the once rich volcanic soil. Pests called jumping lice have attacked the ipil-ipil tree which is used in the Philippines to bind together eroded soil. Like Haiti, another sugar island, Negros is both an ecological and a human disaster, a perfect site for the people who make those dismal television documentaries on the 'Third World'.
Bacolod, the largest town on Negros, is mournful after the bustle and affluence of Iloilo, only 30 miles away. Outside the cathedral on the plaza, church ladies are doling out sugar and rice, as advertised on the placard: 'Daily feeding of the mal- nourished children. Sponsored by Mgr Antonio Y. Fortich and Concerned Citizens. Compliments of Pepsi Cola'. (Oddly enough, a nearby drink stall adver- tises the rival Coca Cola). Mgr Fortich's palace beside the cathedral is blackened and largely burnt out by a fire last year. 'The fire took place at a quarter past midnight,' said a woman who works at the diocesan community centre. 'The author- ities said it was due to an electrical fault. But there happened to be a brown-out (power cut) at the time.' Bishop Fortich led the island's opposition to Marcos and the sugar barons.
In the plaza, there is a stone erected by Bacolod Press Club to some of the journal- ists murdered during the Marcos regime. 'Let them who feel in the right, with the pen as their might, be not forgotten.' The columnist of the Bacolod Daily Star ex- presses the sadness of many Filipinos about their lost leader: 'Once upon a time, in our own plaza here in Bacolod, when Marcos was running for President the first time (1966), I was startled to hear him cite Argos, Ulysses's dog, as the first to recog- nise him home from his fabled adventures. Politicians, as a rule, do not delve into Greek mythology; but here was a man who obviously had read his Homer. The guy had his chance for historical immortality — he exchanged it for the glitter of gold.'
The import during the early Eighties of giant mechanical harvesters put thousands of Negros workers out of a job and further increased the misery of the island. Then in August 1983, the opposition leader Benig- no Aquino was shot dead at Manila air- port; there was a flight of capital, and the peso collapsed. Since then, the Negros planters have not been able to buy replace- ment parts for their new-fangled machin- ery. 'There was a great return to the buffalo, which costs only P5,000 (£170), needs no spare parts, and runs on grass,' said Luis Gibe, manager of the Hawaiian Philippine Sugar Mill, at Silay. Their mill had just beaten off a challenge to take over the labour force by the extreme left-wing National Federation of Sugar Workers, who are demanding a trebled minimum wage, a 20 per cent share of the profits, and free education up through college.
Here perhaps I should, so to speak, declare an interest. The Hawaiian Philip- pine Sugar Mill, which used to be owned by Americans, was purchased in 1973 by the eminent Hongkong-Scottish entrep- reneur or taipan, Mr Henry Keswick, who went on in 1975 to buy the Spectator. Thus for six years, until Mr Keswick sold this magazine to another taipan, Mr Algy Cluff, we who scribbled for the Spectator and they who milled sugar at Silay, were in a sense on the same pay-roll. Needless to say, Mr Keswick never attempted to influ- ence what we wrote about countries where he enjoyed a financial interest; any more than Mr Cluff tried to adjust our attitude to those countries where he was looking for oil or gold; any more than our new Australian owners, the Fairfax group, would lean on us, should it come to light that they own a platinum mine or groves of coconuts on the remote New Lancashire Islands.
At the town of Silay, I called at the local offices of the National Federation of Sugar Workers. Five pretty but fierce young women expressed their chagrin at having lost the vote to gain control of Mr Kes- wick's work-force. They did not rejoice that Marcos had been replaced as Presi- dent by Mrs Corazon 'Cory' Aquino. 'She's no different. Just another President. We've still got militarisation in Negros. The army is still attacking us in the hills. 'The speaker did not conceal her sympathy for the communists of the New People's Army. Yet the only slogan on the wall of the union office came from St Paul to the Thessalonians: 'Pray without ceasing'.
The Catholic Chuch is the power be- hind this union. The Hawaiian Philippine managers told me that their former priest on the compound was ultra left-wing, and had now been replaced by 'an older, mellow man'. The bishop of Negros, Anto- nio Fortich, has led the struggle of sugar workers for better pay and conditions, and in southern Negros he started a mill on co-operative lines for the benefit of the small peasant farmers. Some of the priests on Negros have taken up the ideas and the jargon of 'liberation theology' for instance the concept of 'structural sin'. One became a fighting guerrilla. Two Columban mis- sionaries, the Irishman Fr Niall O'Brian and the Australian Fr Brian Gore, were jailed and accused of murder here at Bacolod. From Alfred W.McCoy's Priests on Trial (Penguin, £2.95), which has pro- vided much of my information on Panay and Negros islands, we gain a vivid im- pression of Fr Gore's attitude to his minis- try as well as his manner of speech: 'We were tired of the numbers game — getting masses of people into catechism classes and into churches, getting them cleaned up for Heaven. As [Fr] Mickey Martin once said "shoving the sacraments up their arse": Although the poor on Negros are under- standably left-wing, most of them still want the Church to perform the traditional duties of cleaning and shoving. 'I tell these priests they should stick to saving souls,' 'It must be some mole to get into Wapping.' said one lady, admittedly one of the bourgeoisie. The liberation theologians constantly cite Nicaragua, where two of their number sit in the Marxist cabinet, but anyone who has been to that country knows that the overwhelming majority of the faithful stand by their cardinal and the Pope. And in the Philippines, unlike Nicar- agua, the Church managed to get rid of a despot by peaceful methods.
Some of the liberation priests, especially the Irish Columbans, are strangely violent in their language and even actions. They have an obsessive dislike for Pope john Paul II, partly, I think, because he is Polish. The Poles who have suffered five years under the Nazis and nearly 50 under the communists, have never resorted to terrorism. The Polish clergy, needless to say, do not go in for 'liberation theology', still less for a 'Christian-Marxist dialogue'. Nor do they advocate planting bombs in dance-halls patronised by the Red Army.
The liberation theologians, like the Col- umbans on Negros, rather resemble, though they would not admit it, the Span- ish friars who held sway in the Philippines in the 19th century, who indeed provoked the national insurrection. The Dominicans, the Augustinians and the Franciscans also despised the parish priests, most of them Filipinos, who did the humdrum job of 'shoving the sacraments up the arse' of the peasantry. The friars ran the sugar planta- tions, advised and even controlled the colonial governors, and laid down the law about morals and ideology. These Spa- niards thought they knew what was good for the Filipinos. In short, they used their spiritual office to gain and enjoy political power.
When the Filipinos rebelled in 1896 and 1898, they slaughtered every friar they could get their hands on, burning some of them over slow fires. Yet they did not lose their love of the Church and the Christian religion. Their Catholic belief is still largely untainted by the fads, the sociological cant, the feminism, the racial humbug and the assorted grievances that obsess the Chuch in Britain, Ireland and the United States.
In Silay City Hall there is a notice board for the Women's Association of Govern- ment Employees, the equivalent of our civil service or local government unions, such as Nalgo and Nupe. On a similar notice-board in the town hall of Liverpool, Manchester and the London boroughs of Brent or Islington, one would expect to find a proclamation on sexual harassment at work, the plight of lesbian mothers, or the need to erect a statue of Winnie Mandela, the Necklace Lady. At Silay city Hall, a woman had chalked on the notice- board these words: 'Every problem in my life is an opportunity to give forth more love. If people seem to be difficult, I silently bless them until even enemies become friends — friends who have caused me to experience more love.' Not the sentiments of a liberation theologian.
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