Natalie Gomez Dunker

As products of a digital society, you’ve probably been told to ‘go touch some grass’ at some point in your life. And maybe you should because there are actually a lot of great nature spots to check out in Singapore. 

Forget the usual hiking spots that get crowded. Here are some alternative trails that take you to different worlds. 

Learning Forest

Tucked in the corner of the Singapore Botanic Gardens is a century-old forest that has been landscaped to make it accessible to visitors. Though it is hardly a difficult hike, there is lots to learn about this dense forest. Walk through a boardwalk that takes you through freshwater forest wetlands, the canopies of ancient trees, a bamboo forest and a row of fruit trees.

FIND IT

753 Tyersall Ave, Singapore 257700 (nearest entrance is the Tyersall Gate)

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Seletar Fishing Village

More than just a hidden gem, Seletar Fishing Village is only explorable at low tide. Start the hike from the nearby Rower’s Bay Park where you can walk by the waterside of Lower Seletar Reservoir. The actual fishing village, Jenal Jetty is still in operation – you can find huts and boardwalks by the water but it is not accessible to the public unless you sign up for an official tour.

However there are viewing points a few yards from the village and at low tide, many hikers and explorers actually trek down to the beach to walk on the sandbars. It is also the perfect spot to view the sunset and sunrise – that is if the low tide syncs with the timing! Do check timings for the tide before exploring to avoid being disappointed.

FIND IT:
The best way to access the park is to walk from Rower’s Bay Park.

Dover Forest

Sometimes you don’t have to look far for the best trails. They might just be right there in the neighborhood – next to the MRT station for example. Dover Forest is a unique secondary forest in Clementi – and there are two sections: Dover Forest East and Dover Forest West. Though just a few meters away from Dover MRT station, expect to trek through thick vegetation, heritage trees and even a stream. Because there isn’t a clear entrance or proper trails in the forest, it’s well advised to go on a guided tour. Best to check out this not-so-hidden gem before Dover Forest East is cleared in the near future to be used for building HDB flats. 

FIND IT:
The best way to enter Dover Forest East is through Ghim Moh Link, and to enter Dover Forest West, follow the walkway when you exit Dover Station and walk through the field on your left. 

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Thomson Nature Park

Take a trail in this park which takes you through the ruins of a former village and a farm in Singapore. Though the route is relatively short, there’s plenty to see as you stroll through the pages of history. See remnants of houses, outdoor stoves, farmland and even the track where Singapore’s first Grand Prix was held in 1961.

Keep your eyes peeled for wildlife around the park, such as the shy and elusive banded langur, mischievous macaques, monitor lizards, squirrels and birds.

Read more: Secret City: Thomson Nature Park – Singapore’s former farm and Grand Prix track

FIND IT:
Upper Thomson Rd

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Tampines Eco Green

Tampines might be a very dense neighbourhood but this mature estate holds some (green) gems too. Just meters away from a major road and residential blocks is the lush Tampines Eco Green. The hidden park has several rustic trails surrounding a mini marsh and also spots – made from reclaimed timber and old wood – where people can quietly and discreetly birdwatch.

FIND IT:
Tampines Ave 9, Singapore 520491

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Rifle Range Nature Park

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The Lost Ark

Update: Due to the erratic weather in the first quarter of the year, the area is now flooded and difficult to get to. The fallen tree “ark” may not be structurally safe anymore so do be careful when hiking in this area

The dreamy-sounding Alexandra Woodland might sound like something out of storybooks but somewhere tucked on the side of the Green Corridor near Hang Jebat Mosque, is a plot of unprotected and almost untouched land with overgrown vegetation and a natural pond. One of the highlights of trekking in this area is the mysterious ‘Lost Ark’ structure made with fallen trees in the area. There’s a deck which faces the pond where you can stop for a quick thermos coffee break. Not a lot is known about the history of this place but judging from the small estates surrounding the woodlands which are full of colonial-era black and white houses, the clearing was probably a rustic recreational garden or park, similar to the ones in England during the time. 

FIND IT:

Find a manmade dirt path next to the Green Corridor near Hang Jebat Mosque and follow the trail

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Kingfisher Lake

In case you didn’t know, Gardens by the Bay is huge – really, really huge. In the sprawling gardens, there are plenty of mini-gardens within. One of the best ones (and also hidden ones) is the Kingfisher Lake. The main star is the lotus lake but follow the side stream and you’ll find a nice and lush spot – near the giant kingfisher – perfect for a little breather or contemplation. Other worthy spots in Gardens by the Bay include the Chinese Gardens with its landscaped terrain, water features and “moon gate” as well as the Serene Gardens on the far end of the park where there is a mini waterfall feature and is a little quieter and peaceful from the more bustling areas.

FIND IT:

Walk towards Satay by the Bay and you’ll stumble upon the lake.

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Coney Island

Sure it’s a popular jogging track and outdoor spot for the weekend crowd but Coney Island has its little hidden and secret spots too if you veer just a little away from the main track that cuts through the island. Explore the hidden beaches – each beach area has a different feel to it – and if you’re up for it, you can try to find the abandoned beach villa which used to belong to the Aw Brothers of Haw Par Villa fame.

Read more: Did you know that Coney Island used to be a leisure resort?

FIND IT:
Head to Punggol Point Park and follow the boardwalk to the West Entrance of the island.

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Windsor Nature Park 

Everyone goes to MacRitchie Reservoir for its views and diverse trails – which is also why it’s one of the most crowded places on weekends. If you don’t fancy your jungle walk to be disrupted by a bunch of young adults discussing how to do a proposal (true story), check out one of MacRitchie’s “side” parks, Windsor Nature Park. With streams, an eco pond and several trails where you can catch a glimpse of birds and other wildlife, you can still get your hiking fix without all the extra noise. 

FIND IT:
30 Venus Drive, Singapore 573858

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Hampstead Wetlands Park

Another result of the colonial hangover are names of streets and things named after actual places in England. Well, this place in Seletar is one of them. Though it’s been revamped quite recently, the park still retains a bit of its rustic charms. A dedicated trail takes you into the mini woods before you view the pond. There’s an observation deck on the boardwalk where you take a closer look at the pond and even spot some birds in the area. 

FIND IT:

1 Baker Street, Singapore 799977

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Keppel Hill Reservoir 

There’s a lot of history that surrounds this spot that it should be something everyone visits at least once while in Singapore. The start of the trail is a spectacle in itself. Start at the Seah Im Carpark near the food centre to check out an abandoned WWII bunker before climbing up the steep slope next to it for the second highlight. Don’t worry, there are ropes for you to hold on to as you make your way up. Keppel Hill Reservoir is located just around the corner from where you climb up. Formerly used as a source of water, and then later as a private swimming pool, the reservoir today has probably seen better days. But it’s still a sight to see, hidden for years and unmarked on most maps. 

FIND IT:

Start from the carpark at 2 Seah Im Road, Singapore 099114.

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Seng Chew Quarry

You’d never think you’ll find a lake with magical water, but there’s one right in Bukit Gombak. This disused quarry was a product of Singapore’s quarrying days which ceased by the 90s. Over the years, it’s been filled with rainwater and just sitting there casually behind some residential flats. To get there you just have to take a short walk from Bukit Gombak MRT to Block 383 and climb up the slopes facing the block. Follow the longkang and it will lead you to the quarry. You’ll be surprised at the size of it – it’s much bigger than Keppel Hill Reservoir. In the past, the water of the quarry is said to bring luck so taxi drivers would park near the drainage to wash their cars with the water. 

FIND IT:

Start from Bukit Gombak MRT and walk through Bukit Batok West Ave 5 until you reach Block 383.

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Yunnan Garden

Universities are hardly the place you’d think of going for a hike but planted within Nanyang Technological Univesity (NTU) is a beautifully manicured park inspired by classical Chinese gardens. There are gazebos, mini ponds, rock sculptures, and even a man-made lake, but the main highlight of the park is the picturesque waterfall feature. 

FIND IT:
1 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637721

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A whole lifetime isn’t sufficient to get a full grasp of the vast archipelago that is Indonesia — home to over 270 million people. It’s a country of incalculable diversity, with deep historic roots and idiosyncrasies befitting of the fourth most populous nation in the world

So how does one even begin to comprehend Indonesia? The answer may just lie in written accounts of the country covering its rich — and, at times, violent — history, as well as those that try to make sense of the present and look ahead to the future.

If you are an Indonesian who wants to truly bleed red and white, or an outsider who is curious about this wondrous nation, below are 7 essential non-fiction books in the English language that will send you on a path to Indo-lightenment.

A History of Modern Indonesia — Adrian Vickers, 2005

Adrian Vickers is a professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Sydney. His 2005 book, A History of Modern Indonesia, serves as the perfect crash course on contemporary Indonesia, covering pre-1945 Dutch colonial rule, anti-communist massacres, Soeharto’s New Order rule and its fall.

Soeharto: My thoughts, Words, and Deeds: An Autobiography — G. Dwipayana, Ramadhan K.H., 1989

Soeharto had the country in his dictatorial grip for 32 years. While few look back on his reign with fondness, his autobiography, which has been translated into English, offers intimate and deeply personal insight into Indonesia’s longest-serving president at the height of his powers — long before his New Order era ended with democratic reforms in 1998.

The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World — Vincent Bevins, 2020

Soeharto played a key role in eliminating the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), then the largest communist party outside of China. In The Jakarta Method, journalist Vincent Bevins combed through declassified documents and eyewitness testimonies to establish how the US government quietly helped the Indonesian military kill some one million civilians during the anti-communist massacre in 1965.

Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia — Ben Bland, 2020

One may argue that President Joko Widodo, a political elite outsider with a man of the people reputation, is the manifestation of Indonesian democratic ideals. Former journalist Ben Bland argues in his engaging book that there is more than meets the eye with Jokowi — a man, much like the country he leads, who is caught between and is navigating great opposing forces in the quest for progress.

Julia’s Jihad: Tales of the Politically, Sexually, and Religiously Incorrect: Living in the Chaos of the Biggest Muslim Democracy — Julia Suryakusuma, 2013

Julia’s Jihad is a collection of essays by columnist Julia Suryakusuma published over the span of eight years in The Jakarta Post and Tempo’s English edition. The book tackles serious feminist, religious, and human rights issues in a delightfully digestible fashion thanks to the author’s wonderful wit.

Indonesia, Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation — Elizabeth Pisani, 2014

This one is for the Java-centric among us who wish to learn more about the diversity of this vast nation. Journalist Elizabeth Pisani takes us on a 26,000-mile journey across the country on roads less traveled than your run-of-the-mill travel book. In Indonesia, Etc, Pisani masterfully weaves in historical and sociopolitical contexts in search of links that bind a disparate nation.

Indonesian Slang: Colloquial Indonesian at Work — Christopher Torchia, Lely Djuhari, 2011

Language — and certainly, slang — will never stop evolving, but Indonesian Slang from 2011 is still a great launching pad to familiarize oneself with informal Indonesian expressions and why we are so obsessed with random acronyms and portmanteaus. They say language is a window into a country’s identity and culture, after all.

Singapore has had some heinous crimes involving hurting and even killing helpless domestic workers trying to earn a puny amount of money on this island.  

Over 250,000 foreign domestic workers were recruited in Singapore since 2018, according to 2019 statistics. They have to be at least 23 years old to be employed by the roughly one in five Singapore households to do all sorts of chores like cooking, cleaning, and even care-giving, and at times, dealing with violence. Several Singaporean families have been reported to vent their anger at the workers, even driving them to death. Forcing food down throats, burning skin with a hot iron, and breaking fingers, were among the most evil things Singapore employers have been reported of doing. 

Here’s a roundup of some of the worst cases of domestic worker abuse in Singapore’s history.

Piang Ngaih Don

The most recent court case involves 24-year-old Piang Ngaih Don from Myanmar, who died from a brain injury in 2016 after she was inflicted by employers Gaiyathiri Murugayan, her cop husband Kevin Chelvam, and mother Prema Naraynasamy. Kevin was a staff sergeant when the abuse occurred, and was suspended from the police force the year the domestic worker died. The horrifying abuse lasted several months. 

They tied Piang to the window grille at night, stomped on her while she was on the floor, pulled her hair, attacked her with a broom and metal ladle, and even burned her forehead with a hot iron. She was also forced to use the bathroom and shower with the door open. Piang weighed a mere 24kg when she died, after being fed only bread soaked in water, cold food, and little rice. 

The abuse began five months into Piang’s employment, which began in May 2015. Gaiyathiri apparently lost her patience when she found Piang to be slow and unhygienic. She died in July 2016 when Gaiyathiri and Prema punched and hit her head with a detergent bottle for doing laundry too slowly and kicked her after tying her to the window grille. She did not wake up the next morning. 

Gaiyathiri pleaded guilty on Tuesday to 28 charges of culpable homicide, voluntarily causing grievous hurt by starvation, voluntarily causing hurt by a heated substance, and wrongful restraint. The case is pending charges for Kevin and Prema, with the prosecution seeking life imprisonment for Gaiyathiri.

Piang’s body was already brought back by her brother and buried in Myanmar, in the remote village of Dimpi.

Khanifah

Things started off well for 32-year-old Khanifah from Indonesia after she was employed by Zariah Mohd Ali and her family in 2011. Then things turned ugly less than a year later when their relationship soured, leading to what prosecutions had described as the worst case of domestic worker abuse in Singapore’s history at the time. 

Zariah was sentenced to 11 years in jail after she was found guilty of 12 charges in 2017 for hitting the back of Khanifah’s head and mouth with a hammer, stabbing her shoulder with a pair of scissors, slashing her forearm with a chopper, and breaking her pinky by bending it backward, among others. 

Zariah’s husband Mohamad Dahlan also took part in the violence and was sentenced to 15 months’ jail for hitting Khanifah on the head with a frying pan cover. They were both fined about S$57,000 in total as well.

The months of abuse left Khanifah with permanent scars all over her body, a deformed left ear, and an impaired left pinky.

The couple was previously convicted for abuse of another domestic worker named Tutik Rahayu Purwadi in 2001 over similar offenses, including rubbing chili on her eyes. For the previous offenses, Zariah was sentenced to 10 weeks’ jail and fined S$500, while Dahlan was jailed for 12 weeks.

Moe Moe Than and Fitriyah 

Two domestic workers, Moe Moe Than, 33, from Myanmar and Fitriyah, 40, from Indonesia, braved 10 months of abuse in 2012 at the hands of Singaporean couple Chia Yun Ling and Tay Wee Kiat. The couple’s case was so prominent that it set a new court framework to cover psychological harm suffered by domestic workers. 

Moe was thrown against the wall, stepped on, and forced to down rice and sugar using a funnel whenever she complained of hunger. She was also told to eat her own vomit and was threatened with her family’s death if she ever snitched on them. Both Moe and Fitriyah were forced to pray before a Buddhist altar 100 times even though they were not Buddhists, and made to slap each other 10 times.

Tay was sentenced to six years and one month in jail while Chia received four years and one month. They were also fined over S$13,000.

Sulis Setyowati

The abuse suffered by 24-year-old Sulis Setyowati from Indonesia was so harsh that she escaped from the Yishun flat by climbing down 15 stories from the balcony.

Only a month after Sulis’ employment began in December 2017, 31-year-old employer Nuur Audadi Yusoff began torturing her by spitting, slapping, and dragging her by the hair when she forgot to apply ointment on her child’s stomach. The abuse paused for months as Sulis requested for a transfer but continued after Nuur found out she had posted pictures of her children online. Nuur also bruised her forehead with a comb and repeatedly hit her with a broom.

She finally ran away at around 2am through the balcony as the front door was locked. She spent the whole morning climbing down the building, and went to the police. 

Nuur pleaded guilty in September 2020 to six counts of assault and was sentenced to 10 months and two weeks’ jail. She also paid Sulis more than S$7,000 in compensation.

Phyu Phyu Mar

In 2016, Myanmar national Phyu Phyu Mar, whose age was never made public, fell victim to abuse that lasted three months from yet another married couple.

Linda Seah Lei Sie, former manager of Anew Me Beauty Aesthetic salon at Orchard Road, and husband Lim Toon Leng had forced Phyu to pour boiling water on herself twice, drink dirty mop water, and starved her until her weight dropped from 50kg to 38kg. She was also never paid the S$700 monthly salary.

One of Seah’s salon employees alerted the police after Phyu accompanied Seah to the salon. Seah was guilty of five assault charges and one count of causing the domestic worker to drink the dirty water and sentenced to three years’ jail while Lim got six weeks’ jail. They were also fined over S$12,000.

Amandeep Kaur 

Amandeep Kaur, 32, from India was put through abuse since her first day of employment in 2016. Farha Tehseen and her husband Mohammad Tasleem treated Amandeep like a punching bag, kicking her waist and lower back twice, and punching her eye and nose as punishment for trivial things like being too slow to prepare milk for their son. 

She escaped through the living room window of the Sengkang flat from the fourth floor and stood on the ledge until a painter who was working in the estate used a gondola to help her down.

Farha was found guilty of nine counts of assault and one count of criminal intimidation and was sentenced last year to 21 months’ jail, while Tasleem was guilty of two assault charges and sentenced to four months’ jail. Both were fined a total of $5,500 paid in compensation to Amandeep.

Estabillo Soledad Agustin

A 42-year-old Filipino woman named Estabillo Soledad Agustin was assaulted by a 21-year-old after a dispute at home went wrong. 

Ng Jia Sheng pleaded guilty last year for using criminal force, causing grievous hurt by performing a rash act and insulting Estabillo in 2018. Ng argued with Estabillo after he asked her to turn on the air conditioner and she had replied irritatedly. They shouted at each other and he spat in her face before throwing a metal mug at her. Estabillo then retaliated by throwing plastic bottles at Ng but missed. She suffered multiple facial injuries including a nose fracture.

Reports said Ng told Estabillo that “she was only a domestic worker, was poor and had no right to be in Singapore.” Agustin has since returned to the Philippines.

Ng was sentenced to at least six months’ reformative training and will undergo counseling and follow a strict regimen that includes foot drills.

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Domestic workers from Indonesia are “… more submissive [and] appear more obedient… However, because of their innate characteristics, they tend not to speak up so if you prefer someone who is vocal and assertive, Indonesians may not be the best choice.”

“Most Mizoram maids come from the mountain areas, which leads to them having a hardier constitution, and are stronger physically, with more endurance then the other races.”

“Filipinos have a more prideful nature and [are] not as submissive as Indonesians.”

Those racially stereotyped descriptions were, until recently, featured on the website of Best Housekeeper, a domestic worker agency in Singapore. They were quietly removed from the site late last week but can be seen in full on an Internet Archive snapshot of the page taken on Sept. 28.

Hoping for an explanation for the removal, Coconuts called Best Housekeeper’s office but were told they were “not interested” in speaking to the media. So we must surmise they were taken down in response to the outrage over a viral tweet that highlighted them last week.

While the backlash may have led to one domestic worker agency removing racially stereotyped language from their website, we were able to find plenty of similar examples used by other agencies and their affiliates. Migrant worker advocacy groups say such language can have a serious impact on their working conditions and treatment.

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“Hiring domestic workers based on purported nationality-based traits diminishes the need to give them strong labour protections, and takes away from their right to decent work conditions, which ultimately is detrimental to their physical and mental well-being.“

– Humanitarian Organisation of Migration Economics (HOME), a migrant workers advocacy group based in Singapore

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The tweet that surfaced Best Housekeeper’s descriptions was made in response to a much-discussed clip of the late great Anthony Bourdain telling a table of Singaporeans how he really felt about their reliance on domestic workers.

Government-accredited placement agency invites you to select a race of servant! Look out for "prideful" Filipinos. Consider the "innate characteristics" of the "submissive" Indonesians, or the Mizoram who have "more endurance than the other races." ??? pic.twitter.com/ahhgaJJ3au

— Alexander Lee (@post_vermouth) September 25, 2022

More than a few commenters said the language used reminded them of a slave auction.

This sounds like a slave auction. https://t.co/0CgiaM0s8S

— Mpu Anom Prasanta (@NightmareCrone) September 27, 2022

what in the slave auction

— Jin ⸆⸉|Midnights Oct21 (@folkloreforevrr) September 26, 2022

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A widespread issue

This is far from an isolated case involving a single company. With little effort, we were able to find similar examples of racially stereotyped language on the websites of many domestic worker agencies and their affiliates.

This description of domestic workers from Myanmar comes from the Frondosa City Employment Agency website:

Here’s the description of Indonesian domestic workers used on the EazyMaid website:

And here’s EazyMaid’s description of Sri Lankan domestic workers:

Here are some of the benefits of hiring a domestic worker from Myanmar listed in an article on Homee.co:

This is from the Searchmaids.sg FAQ page on Indonesian domestic workers:

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We should strive to treat domestic workers with dignity, and not as commodities where we attribute arbitrary, baseless stereotypes to them based on where they come from.”

Humanitarian Organisation of Migration Economics (HOME)

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In 2014, Al Jazeera caused an uproar with its reporting on foreign domestic workers (FDWs) being put on display and made available for ‘purchase’ in Singapore’s shopping malls. In that article, Jolovan Wham, executive director of the Humanitarian Organisation of Migration Economics (HOME), a migrant workers advocacy group based in Singapore, noted how racial stereotypes were also sometimes used by employment agencies: “Some of the stereotypes include Filipinos as ‘smarter’, Indonesians as ‘less bright’ and Burmese as ‘sweet-natured and compliant’”.

In response to the Al Jazeera report, Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM) sent out an advisory banning employment agencies from “insensitive advertising and inappropriate display” of maids by agencies. MOM said all advertising should “accord foreign domestic workers (FDWs) basic respect and human dignity”. The president of the Association of Employment of Agency (AEA) in Singapore specified that advertising materials should not refer to promotional rates, fees, and racial stereotypes of workers and that employment agencies that violated those guidelines would receive demerits and potentially lose their licenses.

Asked to respond to the continued use of this kind of stereotyped language by some domestic worker agencies and their affiliates, a spokesperson for HOME told Coconuts:

“Agents, who are instrumental in matching employers and domestic workers, should not be perpetuating nationality-based stereotypes. They should endeavor to match employers and domestic workers with considerations such as whether the domestic worker will be given a decent working and living environment in the employer’s house, and whether the job requirements and workload are reasonable for the domestic workers, instead of amplifying sweeping presumptions of their personalities to employers.”

Hiring domestic workers based on purported nationality-based traits diminishes the need to give them strong labour protections, and takes away from their right to decent work conditions, which ultimately is detrimental to their physical and mental well-being.

We should strive to treat domestic workers with dignity, and not as commodities where we attribute arbitrary, baseless stereotypes to them based on where they come from.”

It’s impossible to quantify how much dehumanizing racial stereotypes contribute to the mindset that leads some employers to mistreat domestic workers but there is no doubt that mistreatment remains a major issue. There have been many high-profile cases about FDWs in Singapore experiencing horrific physical abuse at the hands of their employers, but the dehumanizing emotional abuse many suffer has also been well documented, if not as widely discussed. 

A 2017 study by independent consultancy group Research Without Borders found that 60 percent of domestic workers in Singapore said they were exploited by their employers, including receiving low pay, little time off work and verbal and physical abuse.

At least 90 percent of those surveyed reported working excessive hours, with 84 percent saying they worked more than 12 hours a day and 41 percent saying they were forced to work on their sole mandated rest day.

Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower responded by calling the study “misleading” and referring to its own 2015 survey that said an astounding 97% of FDW were satisfied working here and had no issues with their workload.

Related

• We all need to stop using the terms ‘maid’ and ‘helper’ | Opinion
• 7 of the worst domestic worker abuse cases in Singapore

On this day, 50 years ago, former president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. signed Proclamation 1081, effectively declaring martial law in the Philippines. What followed was one of the darkest periods in the country’s history, full of egregious corruption and human rights abuses.

But even though these transgressions were well documented, myths about the Martial Law era are still being perpetuated, tarnishing the memory of those who suffered greatly during it.

Today, another Marcos is president. Social media is rife with distorted truths about Marcos Sr’s regime. But for those who want to know the truth, there are many films you can watch online depicting the experiences and voices of that era’s victims, whose stories have largely been swept under the rug.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of martial law, we’ve put together a list of the best of these films that you can stream right now for free.

The Kingmaker

Lauren Greenfield’s critically acclaimed documentary The Kingmaker centers on infamous first lady Imelda Marcos and her desire to restore the Marcoses to glory after protests against her husband’s decades of corruption and human rights violations forced their family to flee the country. The documentary debuted at the 76th Venice International Film Festival in 2019 and depicts Imelda as an “unreliable narrator”; you see the Marcoses’ ascent to power through her lens and then through the lens of martial law survivors.

Ahead of the May elections, Greenfield announced they had worked out a deal with streaming partners ABS-CBN and iWantTV to offer the movie for free in the Philippines.

You can watch it here.

Respeto

Treb Monteras’ first award-winning film, Respeto (“Respect”), which was also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, sees an aspiring young rapper, Hendrix (Abra), who dreams of making it big in the rap battle scene and breaking away from his abusive family, strike an unlikely friendship with Doc (Dido de la Paz), an old and crabby bookstore owner who turns out to be a former revolutionary poet during the martial law era.

You can stream Respeto via MOOV here.

Imelda

Before The Kingmaker, there was Imelda: the award-winning documentary by Ramona S. Diaz that takes a closer look at the life of the infamous former First Lady. The 2003 documentary chronicles her childhood, her marriage to Ferdinand Marcos Sr, and the luxurious life the Marcoses led during the martial law era. Like The Kingmaker, Imelda’s narratives are challenged by opposing views from victims and survivors of that era.

Watch the documentary here.

Liway

Liway, directed by Kip Oebanda, centers on a boy named Dakip, who lives in a prison camp with his mother, a martial law dissident known as Commander Liway (Glaiza de Castro). Distracting him from the difficulties of living in a prison camp, Dakip’s mother tells him stories to protect the child from the realities of a political prisoner’s life.

The film is based on the director’s real-life experience with his mother, Cecilia Flores-Oebanda, aka the “real-life Liway.”

Stream it here.

Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon

Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon (From What is Before), directed by acclaimed filmmaker Lav Diaz, follows the struggles of a remote town in the Philippines and the strange and mysterious events that happen when Ferdinand Marcos Sr announces Proclamation 1081. The film is over five hours long but remains gripping throughout with its insights into the difficulties ordinary people faced during that period.

You can stream the movie on Youtube here.

Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari?

The 1994 “never-ending documentary” Bakit Dilaw ang Gitna ng Bahaghari? (Why is Yellow at the Middle of the Rainbow?), directed by National Artist for Film Kidlat Tahimik, compresses 10 years of filmmaking into a 175-minute long “cinematic essay” that touches on aspects of the Philippines’ culture and history interspersed with snippets from his everyday life — proving that the personal is political. 

Stream the documentary here.

Barber’s Tales

The 2013 film Barber’s Tales by Jun Robles Lana tells the story of a widow named Marilou (Eugene Domingo) who inherits her husband’s barbershop, the only one in a rural town at the height of the Marcos dictatorship. Watch the movie here.

READ: #NeverForget, #NeverAgain trend on Twitter as Filipinos mark 50th anniversary of martial law

St. Etheldreda’s Church is a Roman Catholic church and dates back to 1250 when it was the town chapel of the Bishops of Ely. It was built by John de Kirkeby, the Bishop of Ely, and dedicated to Etheldreda, a Saxon Princess born in 630 and who was the daughter of King Anna of East Anglia. It is the oldest Catholic church in England and one of only two remaining buildings in London from the reign of Edward I. It was once one of the most influential places in London.

Despite wanting to be a nun, Etheldreda agreed to an arranged marriage with King Egfrith only on the condition that she remain a virgin. However, the King changed his mind and Etheldreda fled back to Ely where she founded a religious community. Etheldreda died in 679 of the plague and was buried in a simple grave at Ely Cathedral. About 16 years after her death, Etheldreda's body was removed from that grave to be interred in something more befitting her status. Her body was found to be "incorrupt," with no signs of decay. Believing it to be a sign from God and that she was a saint, Etheldreda's reputation for miracles grew and so did the religious relics. Today an annual blessing is still held in the church on her saints day for those with sore throats and neck infections.

Off the main thoroughfare, the church is down a little cul-de-sac. The walls are ordained with shields of prominent families of the day and to the right of the altar is a small wooden jeweled casket. Inside it is claimed is the undecayed hand of Etheldreda herself still intact more than 1,350 years after her death.

El Gobierno del Presidente Gabriel Boric anunció la conformación de una Mesa Regional de Trata de Personas.

Esta definirá los protocolos intersectoriales sobre la atención a víctimas de trata de personas por medio de mecanismos de coordinación entre los servicios de asistencia y protección a víctimas con prestaciones en los ámbitos de salud, asistencia jurídica, regulación migratoria, asistencia social, educación y un retorno asistido y protegido de las víctimas hacia su país de procedencia.

Esta comisión asesora estará compuesta de 22 instituciones públicas, de las cuales destacan la Subsecretaría del Interior; Delegación Presidencial; Ministerio Público; Justicia; Relaciones Exteriores; Defensa; Mujer y Equidad de Género; PDI y Carabineros.

Tendrá como objetivo lograr desarrollar acciones institucionales e intersectoriales que favorezcan la prevención del delito de trata de personas, la protección de sus víctimas y la persecución de las organizaciones criminales que se encuentren detrás de su realización.

La delegada presidencial RM, Constanza Martínez, indicó que «la conformación de esta mesa nos permite abordar de forma conjunta y sostenida los efectos del crimen organizado y la trata de personas como resultado de este. Delitos de esta magnitud no pueden quedar impunes, por lo que hemos discutido mecanismos para la prevención y persecución de estos, junto a la protección de las víctimas».

Cabe destacar que el Ministerio del Interior se encuentra actualmente elaborando la Política Nacional contra el Crimen Organizado, para establecer una respuesta efectiva contra el mismo.

Es por eso que el seremi de Justicia, Jaime Fuentes, apuntó que «la estrategia de implementación regional de la Mesa Intersectorial sobre Trata de Personas es una medida de reforzamiento en el combate contra el crimen organizado, previniendo, reprimiendo y sancionando esta modalidad por la cual obtienen ganancias ilícitas por medio de la explotación de personas, objetivándoles como bienes económicos y despojándoles de su agencia como sujetos de derechos humanos».

«Nos encontraremos frente a uno de los delitos más graves contra los derechos humanos que atenta contra la dignidad de las personas, por lo que esta mesa tendrá como objetivo también recibir, acompañar y reparar a las víctimas», adicionó.

Según información que maneja el Gobierno, entre 2011 y 2021, se ha logrado identificar 309 víctimas en 52 causas formalizadas. El 45% son víctimas de sexo masculino y el 54% de sexo femenino, todos en su mayoría con fines de explotación sexual. De ese total, se han identificado 25 víctimas niños, niñas y adolescentes.

Accamma Cherian's contributions in India's struggle for independence have been lost to history.

During a raid in Kampung Sungai Udang in Klang on Tuesday, police said they freed six trafficking victims from forced labor. All of the victims were foreigners.

The police also detained four suspects, including a foreign couple as well as another man and woman. The suspects range in age from 38 to 43.

During the operation, twenty passports and RM13,600 (US$3,057) were seized.

According to a police statement, the six victims, who ranged in age from 24 to 44, were tricked by an employment agent into working excessive hours at a cement mill. 

Police said they had been lured from overseas with offers of well-paying jobs at the factory. 

“However, upon arriving, costs for travel and passports were deducted every month from their salaries and they were forced to work long hours to pay off this ‘debt’,” South Klang district police chief Cha Hoong Fong said.

“The agent had also confiscated their passports and, despite being promised work permits, they were forced to work without valid documents.”

Cha said the case is being investigated under Section 44 of the Anti-Trafficking in Persons and Anti-Smuggling of Migrants Act 2007. He urged the public to report any such cases to the police.

Foreign workers constitute more than 30 percent of the Malaysian workforce. They typically migrate voluntarily—often through irregular channels—from Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

According to the 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report, human traffickers exploit domestic and foreign victims in Malaysia and, to a lesser extent, traffickers exploit victims from Malaysia abroad. The overwhelming majority of trafficked victims are among the estimated two million documented and an even greater number of undocumented migrant workers in Malaysia. 

Cada cierto tiempo reflota en redes sociales y en uno que otro foro televisivo la idea de que el nazismo y el fascismo eran de izquierda. Esa es una polémica bastante absurda que dice mucho de quienes la enuncian. Vale la pena aclarar el asunto.

Primero. Hay una derecha neoliberal que ha pretendido cooptar a toda la derecha y consideran que las ideas contrarias al liberalismo de Von Hayek y cia. son de izquierda. Esa posición es vieja, dentro de la sociedad Mont Pelerin, fundada en Suiza por el mismo Frederic Von Hayek para defender sus ideas ultraliberales, consideraban todo lo que no era parte de su acervo ideológico como izquierdista. Después de la Segunda Guerra, años en que en todo Occidente el pensamiento económico estaba hegemonizado por el keynesianismo, los acólitos del liberalismo de Hayek consideraban que el camino a la servidumbre estaba garantizado. Solo a partir de los años 70 esa escuela de pensamiento económico comenzó su hegemonía. Su estandarte era Milton Friedman, un economista de Chicago que tenía una receta liberal para el problema de la inflación que aquejaba a las economías centrales y periféricas. El asunto es que, desde esos años aciagos para el capitalismo industrial, el pensamiento ultraliberal de Hayek y Friedman gana terreno y comienza un acelerado desmantelamiento de algunos fundamentos del capitalismo industrial tal como se le conocía. Para estos ultraliberales todo lo que no estuviera dentro de su cerco ideológico es de izquierda. Eso incluye a los populismos, que es bien discutible que fueran de izquierda, recordemos que Juan Domingo Perón, el general y presidente de Argentina que fundó el justicialismo, señalaba que su política era una tercera alternativa al liberalismo radical y a la revolución socialista, pero era una tercera alternativa nacionalista.

Segundo. Cuando alguien dice que los nazis eran de izquierda porque el nombre del partido era Partido Nacionalsocialista de los Trabajadores Alemanes, y se quedan con el “socialismo” del nombre, olvidan que antes que eso es nacionalista. Ese nacionalismo radical, anti oligárquico, anti elitista y furioso, era una reacción al pavor que generó en las masas obreras nacionalistas la posibilidad de una revolución socialista a escala continental. Pero también, es una reacción a la política burguesa elitaria. Para los fascistas, el verdadero pueblo era la masa de trabajadores que no tenían un espacio en la política elitista de hegemonía burguesa y aristocrática. Se identifican con un “demos” (pueblo idealizado), romantizado, cuya supuesta historia es ancestral y su identidad es racial y pura. Si la izquierda marxista reivindicaba una identidad de clase histórica y transnacional; los fascismos (nazis y fascistas) reivindicaban una identidad racial transhistórica y esencial. Los fascismos emergen como una forma política radical, anti ilustrada y violenta. Los socialismos provienen de la misma ilustración que los liberalismos, por lo tanto, los fascismos son antiliberales y antisocialistas.

Tercero. Todo el que quiera llevar agua a su molino de forma burda dirá que su posición política es mejor porque tiene una historia intachable. Los ultraliberales creen que solo la izquierda ha cometido atrocidades, cierta izquierda hace lo mismo. Lo que todos ellos olvidan es que la política de izquierdas y derechas, que proviene de la Ilustración y la Revolución Francesa, está marcada por una historia de violencias. Por ejemplo, eran regímenes liberales los que llevaron el colonialismo a África y masacraron pueblos por ambiciones económicas y políticas. Todos tienen tejado de vidrio, pero cada uno debe cargar sus muertos y no adjudicárselos de mala fe a los demás. El nazismo y el fascismo eran de derecha, de una derecha distinta a la que dominaba la política del período entre guerras. Esto no quiere decir que toda derecha sea violenta, por el contrario, políticos de derecha liberal o de tradición conservadora eran considerados enemigos por los fascistas.

Para dejar atrás la violencia política de los fascismos se debe entender que sus ideas son ante todo reaccionarias, desdeñan de la Ilustración, desdeñan del liberalismo, aborrecen a los socialismos y detestan la democracia. El peligro que representan debería hacernos olvidar rencillas políticas pequeñas y llegar un mínimo común que signifique un rechazo a toda alternativa política violenta y contraria a los logros civilizatorios mínimos que hemos alcanzado.

El 18 de octubre de 2019 se estaba exhibiendo en las salas de cine de París La cordillera de los sueños, el más reciente documental, en ese momento, de Patricio Guzmán, mientras en Chile comenzaban a desarrollarse las protestas más intensas y masivas de nuestra política reciente y que marcan la historia social hasta el día de hoy. Si bien el documentalista tuvo la oportunidad de filmar desde el comienzo otros momentos históricos y decisivos para el país, como lo hizo con La batalla de Chile, para el estallido social estaba a más de diez mil kilómetros de las personas que se reunían en distintos puntos del país para demostrar su descontento con las desigualdades, el costo de la vida, la elite política y las injusticias que se arrastraban desde el retorno a la democracia. Sin embargo, un año después, Guzmán aterrizó en Chile y se encargó de recuperar la memoria del estallido social que venía ocurriendo en su ausencia.

«Sin previo aviso, de una manera completamente instantánea, explosiva, aparece la toma del Metro en Santiago, que parecía un evento corriente, pero luego, al cabo del segundo día, se vio que la explosión era enorme y nos quedamos mirando las noticias con la boca abierta, porque fue un hecho espectacular. Y ahí mismo, en ese instante, dijimos ‘bueno, pero hay que estar en Santiago y filmar lo que está pasando; lo que está pasando es tan importante que no se puede dejar en segundo término'», relata el cineasta en una entrevista con El Mostrador.

«No pude filmar la primera llama», narra en Mi país imaginario, el documental que se estrenará este 11 de agosto en Chile. No obstante, desde la distancia Patricio Guzmán ya había desplegado un equipo en terreno para grabar lo que es ahora parte de la historia.

«La cuestión ya no era un alzamiento estudiantil, sino que era un alzamiento nacional y con mayor razón dije ‘bueno, esto hay que filmarlo’. Hablé por teléfono con nuestro equipo en Santiago y empezamos a planificar e improvisar cómo filmar lo que estaba pasando», cuenta.

Al igual que otras películas de Guzmán, Mi país imaginario se caracteriza por la construcción de un relato a partir de las propias memorias y reflexiones del cineasta. En este documental habla de la filmación de La batalla de Chile y de los procesos de cambios sociales que han ocurrido en el país. En ese sentido, Guzmán retoma la idea de la memoria histórica del país.

«Hay una especie como de línea recta que viene desde aquellos años, ya casi son 50 años y es insólito. Ahí está esa especie de giro histórico del cual Chile no se quiere desprender hasta solucionarlo, hasta repararlo, hasta darle la vuelta, hasta extender a todo el mundo lo que realmente significó olvidar la naturaleza de un pueblo entero. Ahora se vuelve a recuperar poco a poco», comenta en relación con las consecuencias que ha dejado en la sociedad la dictadura militar.

«La memoria es siempre la memoria, tú puedes trabajar sobre el momento en que Allende tomó el poder o que desfiló en pos de ese vicepresidente nuevo que apareció. O puedes filmar el momento en que Allende cayó en el momento en que gente muere. Y puedes filmar las mujeres chilenas cuando empezaron realmente a protestar sistemáticamente durante 40 años. Y todos esos pasados son uno solo, es la memoria de nuestro país, una memoria maltratada, porque nadie la ha tratado, la ha juzgado. Por lo tanto, es una memoria enormemente rica e interesante que está delante de nosotros y que es un pasado presente magnífico, digamos. Sobre este presente que es la memoria podemos construir muchas películas y nos haría muy bien», afirma.

El cineasta también habla de su relación con el documental y las narrativas por las que se pueden identificar sus obras.

«Yo creo que las obras de arte en general tienen que partir de ese punto de vista personal. Tú partes de tu propia infancia, de tus vivencias, de tus padres, de tus abuelos, de tu familia, de lo que había en el colegio, qué colegio era, dónde estaba, qué pasaba, qué ocurrió. A partir de ese volumen de experiencias es que nace un relato, una narración, un río, que es muy importante en el cine documental que yo defiendo, porque es el cine documental personal, es el documento como testimonio íntimo de la persona que empieza a contarlo. Y me gusta mucho ese tipo de de películas documentales, y en Chile tenemos varios autores estupendos, más que en otros países de América Latina, lo cual es magnífico para nosotros. Y eso significa que el diario del país es un diario nuestro también», comenta.

El estallido a través de voces de mujeres

En Mi país imaginario todos los personajes y fuentes que se ven en el documental son mujeres. En tal sentido, el director relata que no fue una decisión que se tomó desde el principio sino que a partir de las investigaciones que fueron haciendo, hasta que se dieron cuenta de que eran todas mujeres.

«De repente empezamos a ver que las personas más interesantes que teníamos delante de nosotros eran mujeres. Mujeres muy diferentes, jóvenes, muy jóvenes y señoras ya de edad y tenían todas una especie como de furor, una especie como de fuerza, una personalidad abierta, una indignación común. Y eso nos pareció sorprendente y comenzamos a filmar sin preocuparnos y, al cabo de un tiempo, nos dimos cuenta de que la mayoría eran mujeres y la mayoría de las que eran buenas. Entonces comenzamos a dejar a los hombres un poco a un lado y finalmente los eliminamos porque las mujeres eran más espontáneas, más directas, tenían mejor fundamentación, tenían un propósito inmediato, pero con historia. Era un grupo importante de mujeres que tenían conciencia y no era uno o dos o tres. No era un grupito, no era una minoría, eran cientos y esto a mí me dejó sorprendido, porque eso no ocurre en todas partes», relata.

En el documental aparecen figuras conocidas como la escritora y dramaturga Nona Fernández, la periodista Mónica González y también mujeres comunes y corrientes, como una madre que estaba en la primera línea en las protestas, una dirigenta social y una politóloga.

El estreno a semanas del plebiscito del 4 de septiembre

El estreno mundial del documental se hizo en el Festival de Cannes en mayo de este año y, al terminar la función, el público se expresó con entusiasmo respecto de la película y aplaudió el trabajo de Patricio Guzmán, quien estaba presente en la sala. Finalmente, Mi país imaginario llega a las salas de cine chilenas este 11 de agosto, a solamente semanas del plebiscito del 4 de septiembre, donde se definirá si se aprueba o rechaza la propuesta de nueva Constitución. Guzmán expresa que la fecha de estreno comercial la eligió la distribuidora y le parece que fue una buena decisión.

«La fecha la eligió la distribuidora chilena y ella opina que esa fecha es buena porque es justo antes del plebiscito y va a ayudar a que la gente resuelva sus opiniones y estoy muy contento que así sea», expresa.

Si bien el documental retrata el estallido social de 2019, en consecuencia también habla del proceso constituyente, el plebiscito del 25 del octubre y la conformación de la Convención Constitucional. Sin embargo, ese proceso todavía no finaliza. En ese sentido, ¿por qué Patricio Guzmán no grabó el proceso constitucional por completo?

«Hay que parar un poco y hay que reflexionar. Porque en este tipo de procesos, si tú sigues demasiado sumergido adentro del océano de lo que se mueve, acabas ahogándote. Es complicado, tienes que mantener la distancia y mantener la distancia es muy difícil en el cine documental, y además es muy duro porque tú estás enamorado de una situación y tienes que alejarte de lo que quieres para tener claridad. Y por eso es que vamos a hacer un pequeño compás de silencio, porque hay que acumular material, se sigue filmando, seguiremos filmando. Tenemos cuatro cámaras filmando Santiago. Pero filmar es una parte, ¿no? Lo otro es la reflexión, qué es lo que vas a hacer con ese material o qué es lo que Chile necesita tener en estos momentos y en los momentos que vendrán. Y ahí estamos», finaliza.

 

PETALING JAYA, Aug 3 — Efforts to eradicate human trafficking should not only solely fall on the shoulders of the government as it needs the involvement of the people as well.

Home Minister Datuk Seri Hamzah Zainudin said while enforcement activities are carried out via various approaches including air, sea and land, all parties should give serious attention to the issue as national security is a joint responsibility.

“To ensure the success of the country on the matter, it is of utmost importance that all of us take an interest in the country’s security together and attract more foreigners to come as investors, visitors and workers,” he said.

He was speaking to reporters after opening the “Aviation Against Trafficking In Persons Conference (AATIP-C) 2022” held in conjunction with the World Day Against Trafficking In Persons 2022 here today.

Apart from that, Hamzah said the government would continue to tighten border control at all gateways into the country including rat trails apart from stepping up programmes to create the people’s awareness of human trafficking.

Meanwhile, in his speech, Hamzah said according to the Council for Anti-Trafficking in Persons and Anti-Smuggling of Migrants (MAPO) statistics, from 2015 to June this year, a total of 1,972 trafficking cases were reported while 2,902 people were arrested in connection with the cases.

“In an effort to combat human trafficking in Malaysia, the government has enacted a special law, the Anti-Trafficking in Persons and Anti-Smuggling of Migrants Act or Atipsom (2007), which was enforced in 2008 and it was recently reviewed with the third amendment coming into force in early 2022,” he said. — Bernama

Estimado ex Presidente, estimado Ricardo:

Los punteros del reloj siguen su curso y el tiempo corre sin que nada lo modere. Por eso las vidas demandan, al llegar a la última recta, como en nuestro caso, una rúbrica, en particular a quienes hicimos de los asuntos públicos una de las motivaciones principales de nuestra existencia.

Yo intento ser leal a aquello que ha definido mi transcurso político: soy socialista y allendista. Y el de nuestra generación política: luchar por un mundo más justo y humano. Pensé que tú, más allá de nuestras legítimas diferencias, procurarías algo semejante. Pero tus declaraciones recientes desmienten mi expectativa.

Mi opinión no tiene influencia decisiva en el plebiscito próximo. Deberías abrirte a la posibilidad de que la tuya ya no sea muy importante. Ha emergido una nueva generación e intentar extender tu influencia es iluso y artificial. El pasado nos hace morisquetas burlonas. A mí no me perturba demasiado, no pienso haber tenido siempre la razón. La política es un permanente ejercicio de conformación de voluntad mayoritaria en torno a un proyecto de sociedad. Tal vez el éxito es impulsarlo una y mil veces, a pesar de lo abrupto del camino, sin perder nunca el norte y sin necesariamente liderarlo. Nuestro activo es perseverar, nunca desertar.

Me cuesta aceptar que pienses como equivalentes la Constitución de 1980 y sus modificaciones y esta nueva Constitución, y los senderos que abren el Apruebo y el Rechazo. Desde ya la legitimidad democrática es incomparable. Por más que hayas estampado tu firma en reemplazo de la firma de Pinochet, la Constitución de 1980 no dejó de ser la Constitución del Estado subsidiario, binominal, centralizadora, ignorante de nuestra rica diversidad humana, despreocupada de la naturaleza, sin resguardo ni aseguramiento de derechos sociales y con un veto implícito para la derecha. En cambio, la nueva Constitución se hace cargo con decisión de los grandes problemas del país y es integradora y democrática.

Leo ahora tus últimas declaraciones. Mientras más hablas de lo que te ha llevado a adoptar tu postura, más te hundes en un marasmo de argumentos aberrantes. Algunos lo han dicho: tus expresiones dañan la opción transformadora y favorecen a la derecha. Pero quisiera ir más allá: si gana el Apruebo, tu rol será aun menor de lo que ya es. Solo el Rechazo te daría la oportunidad de negociar con la derecha, una vez más, nuevos retoques a la Constitución pinochetista.

Como rúbrica de una trayectoria política es indecorosa.

¡Qué pena, Ricardo!

On Monday, three months of campaigning will come to a close as Filipinos head to the polls to pick the candidates who will lead the nation for the next six years. The problems facing the country’s next set of leaders are enormous: the Philippines is still reeling from the devastation of Covid, as well as ballooning debt and accelerating inflation — all issues magnified by systemic graft, corruption and widespread poverty.

Out of 10 presidential candidates in this year’s race, the two frontrunners are far ahead and facing off in what is sure to be a pivotal point for the future of the Philippines. Surveys show a strong lead for former senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, while Leni Robredo, the current vice president and primary opposition candidate, appears to be a distant second in the polls but has seen a huge upswell in public support and volunteer activity late in the race. 

While the Philippines has long seen a more active electorate and higher voter turnout compared to its neighbors in the region, many analysts say this year’s election season has been unprecedented. 

“For many Filipinos, this is the election of their lifetime. The stakes are high,” says Cleve Arguelles, assistant professorial lecturer at the De La Salle University’s Department of Political Science. “On the one hand, many of our people are still suffering from the losses during the height of the pandemic. We are slowly recovering but there is no assurance it will be less painful.”

Many Filipinos fear that their post-COVID struggles will be magnified if the Marcos’ family returns to power and glory following a Bongbong win. The family was defamed following the toppling of Marcos Sr.’s 21-year authoritarian regime during the 1986 People Power Revolution, which drove the family out of the Malacañang Palace and forced them to flee to Hawaii, but they still managed to get away with an estimated US$10 billion worth of ill-gotten wealth, much of which has not been recovered to this day.

Marcos Jr. topping the polls signifies that the painful lessons of the People Power Revolution appear to have been forgotten a mere 36 years later. 

“A Marcos Jr. presidency would indicate that Filipinos demand a new social contract away from the liberal democratic promises of the 1986 People Power Revolution. This may include experimenting with taking the country on, as in Marcos Sr.’s rule, a decidedly authoritarian path. In the past six years under [President] Rodrigo Duterte, the support that his government enjoyed was an experiment on the part of usually democratically ambivalent Filipinos,” Arguelles explains.

Also on Bongbong’s side is President Duterte’s daughter Sara, who is running for vice president. For Sara, who is the incumbent mayor of Davao City in Mindanao, joining forces with Bongbong is seen as not only the missing piece that will secure Marcos Jr.’s votes in the Visayas and Mindanao islands, but also the main signifier that the duo are the anointed successors to Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.

“Without a doubt, this is a continuity election. President Rodrigo Duterte, despite the blunders in his pandemic responses as well as attacks to democracy and human rights, is set to end his term as among the most popular of Philippine presidents,” Arguelles explains, adding that surveys show that voters have positively assessed his time in office and continue to support him.

“[Duterte’s] popularity is driving demand, as also shown in polls, for a presidential candidate who can continue his programs and politics. Marcos Jr.-Duterte have clearly positioned themselves as the continuity candidates — their campaign promises center on building on the legacies of [the president’s] government.”

The Marcos machinery: blood ties, Dutertismo and a disinformation machinery

According to Arguelles, Marcos Jr.’s electoral advantage can be summed up in two Ds: disinformation and Dutertismo — Duterte’s brand of populist politics. 

Arguelles surmises that the Bongbong Marcos-Sara Duterte tandem benefit from a massive disinformation machinery that has been put into place “as early as six years ago.” 

Over the past few years, pro-Marcos and Duterte disinformation campaigns have dominated social media platforms popular among Filipinos. Fact-checking collective Tsek.ph places Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok as the leading sources of online disinformation. Just this week, the US Filipinos for Good Governance uncovered over 100 trolls engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook, spewing pro-Marcos propaganda and falsehoods about Robredo, her programs, and fabricated ties to the communist movement.

READ: After Bongbong Marcos dares critics to ‘show me 1 troll,’ Filipino-American group exposes hundreds of fake news peddlers

This disinformation machine has been effective in convincing a large swathe of voters to vote for Marcos Jr. and Duterte. They’ve successfully peddled false narratives such as portraying the years the country was under martial law as a prosperous era, that the Marcos government was responsible for the Philippines’ golden age of infrastructure, and that the Marcoses have been unfairly treated by the country’s political elites and oligarchs — despite being members of the elite class themselves.

“Their disinformation machinery has also systematically targeted young voters on social media platforms like TikTok. These TikTok disinformation campaigns are designed to rehabilitate the Marcos family image by portraying them as hip and relatable political celebrities while downplaying the family’s role in some of the country’s worst cases of plunder of government funds and human rights abuses. For instance, old videos of then First Lady Imelda Marcos justifying the use of government resources for her personal excesses as just her philosophy of beauty circulate on TikTok,” Arguelles elaborates.

READ: So what was so bad about martial law?

While the deeply entrenched disinformation web has played a massive role in rehabilitating the Marcoses’ once-tainted image, the Marcos campaign has also benefited from President Duterte’s halo effect, despite the latter saying that he would not endorse any presidential candidate.

“He didn’t have to formally endorse Marcos Jr. because he has been campaigning for the family since he assumed the presidency. Since 2016, he has also mobilized state resources to rehabilitate the image of Marcos Sr and the legacies of the Marcos dictatorship,” Arguelles says, citing Duterte’s repeated praise of Marcos Sr.’s rule and his regime’s lasting achievements, as well as the controversial decision to allow the late dictator’s to be buried at the national Cemetery of Heroes — a milestone in the Marcoses’ long road to symbolic redemption. 

“So for the past six years, Filipino voters have been exposed to pro-Marcos propaganda on two levels— coming from the very top (the president) and in everyday life (social media). This kind of ecosystem, dominated by state machinery and disinformation machinery, effectively shifted the nature of public conversations and considerations, including for the 2022 elections.”

Arguelles explained that the Marcos Jr.-Duterte dynastic tandem represents the political marriage of some of the most formidable, notorious, and entrenched political elites — including former Presidents Gloria Arroyo and Joseph Estrada, who had been embroiled in their own corruption cases, as well as the Romualdez and Villar clans. Marcos Jr.’s mother, Imelda, hails from the politically influential Romualdezes in the Leyte province, while Manny Villar, former senator and real estate magnate, is currently ranked the richest Filipino.

Arguelles explained that these alliances help concentrate significant political resources that are crucial to the Marcos Jr.-Duterte campaign. “Many of these political dynasties have been in control of their respective provinces since the return of elections in the country. The Marcos and Duterte families are the best examples of this— they have been the dominant political families in Ilocos Norte and Davao, respectively, for so long. Among other resources, these local political bosses deploy proven grassroots election machines which have been tested throughout the years in their own electoral races.”

The Robredo magic: Will volunteerism be enough to carry her to the presidency?

While Marcos Jr. controls formidable financial and political resources, the greatest obstacle to his campaign is the groundswell of organic, grassroots support that has driven the campaign of his closest rival, Vice President Leni Robredo.

The Philippines votes for the president and vice-president posts separately and the Marcos Jr. and Robredo rivalry stems from the 2016 election, in which they faced off in the vice-presidential race. Robredo narrowly defeated Marcos Jr. in that election, despite him having held the frontrunner position in the polls. That led Marcos Jr to file multiple electoral protests over the course of four years until the Supreme Court unanimously junked the case in 2021 after he was unable to provide evidence for his claims of vote fraud.

Robredo’s spotless track record, her background as a lawyer for the marginalized, and the excellent pandemic response she engineered, despite the meager budget for the Office of the Vice President and multiple politicking tactics by Duterte’s allies, have earned her a strong and fervent following among those fed up with traditional dynastic politics and endless post-pandemic struggles.

“The movement for Vice President Leni Robredo represents the highest ideals of our democracy — that of empowering the people to determine the affairs of our society. But because it challenges a tried and tested electoral strategy, the fate of a volunteer-driven election campaign is still unclear. However, if there is someone who can succeed in using a volunteer-driven election strategy, it will be Robredo. She did it in 2016 and it may also send her to Malacañang this year,” Arguelles says.

The political scientist said that the strength of Robredo’s campaign definitely lies in the unprecedented number of volunteers that it has been able to mobilize for the election campaign. Robredo’s spokesman, Barry Gutierrez, pegs their number of volunteers at two million — a clear pushback by the people against the overwhelming machinery of the Marcos Jr. campaign.

“The thousands of volunteers leading the house-to-house campaigns and rallies of Robredo repudiates the role of the usual political dynasties and their machineries in our elections,” Arguelles says.

A glimmer of hope is the consistently high turnout at Robredo’s campaign events, dubbed “grand people’s rallies,” that have seen a broad range of Filipinos from across generations, classes, and genders convene towards a common goal. In Pasig City, some 137,000 Filipinos came out in support of Robredo, a number that was topped by a grand rally in Pasay City that saw over 412,000 flock to the site. Social media is rife with moving stories of Robredo supporters sharing food, car rides, and other acts of kindness that make one hopeful for the possibility of change.

“My encounter with the crowds in the rallies is always inspiring,” Arguelles shared. “How the rallies, for instance, attract broad support from diverse groups of Filipinos — young and old, students and professionals, ARMY and BLINK, rich and poor, straight and queer — you begin to imagine that the class, gender, generational and other divides that characterize Philippine society can be bridged even temporarily.”

“From the firsthand accounts I have read, this is exactly how many Filipinos felt when they joined the 1986 People Power protest against Ferdinand Marcos. After six years of demobilization under Rodrigo Duterte, Filipinos are mobilizing for democracy and good governance again.” 

READ: Power to the People: Citizens, not officials, raise Robredo’s and Pangilinan’s hands

Arguelles argues that the ability of everyday Filipinos to mobilize such a strong campaign has been striking. “These ordinary Filipinos have been organizing the rallies, showing up in huge numbers, and volunteering to take care of each other’s needs. All because they have embraced a campaign and a candidate; all because they have been convinced that another Philippines is possible. We have not seen this kind of broad and deep democratic solidarity among Filipinos in past elections.”

Although Marcos Jr. has sustained his lead in the surveys, Arguelles believes that strong voter turnout, as well as shifts among “soft” supporters and undecided voters, could still influence the election’s outcome. “In a survey, we have seen that around 30-35 percent of the voters are still ‘soft voters.’ This means that almost three or four out of 10 voters may still change their vote preferences for president between the survey period and election day.”

“Robredo, as shown in the polls, generally has the most number of ‘hard’ supporters or those unlikely to change their voting preference until election day. If she is able to maintain her core supporters, encourage Marcos Jr.’s soft supporters to switch to her camp, and get the support of the undecided voters, she could still pull off a surprising last-minute victory.”

The path to a Robredo presidency has many obstacles to clear, but it is evidently not an impossible feat. The question is: is there enough time?

Day 1

Good Friday, you ask? Not great. Died today. Very painful. Do not recommend. Saw Dad briefly and brought it up first thing. “All-powerful and You couldn’t have made it, I don’t know, smothered by puppies? No, it had to be nailed to a cross.”

“Trust Me,” He said, “the merchandising.”

Then He told me He was sending me back.

“So we’re really doing that?” I asked.

“We’re going to blow their minds.”

But wait: First He said I had to hide out for three days so people would believe I was genuinely dead. I was nailed to a tree and left to agonize in the sun for hours; I think they’ll figure it out.

“So I come back,” I said, “and then I just go on with my life? Because dying really makes you think, you know? And I’ve been seriously neglecting my carpentry.”

“No, you’re only alive again for a few weeks.”

“Oh.”

“But then you come back again in two thousand years or so. Maybe.”

I just don’t get Him.

Anyway, woke up here in this tomb. Pitch black. Luckily, I have this heavenly aura going on now, kind of like Mom had, so I can see a bit. Found a blank scroll and a pot of ink. At least I hope it’s ink. The glow is only so-so and I’m afraid to look too closely.

Not going to lie, good to have some alone time. Disciples, disciples, disciples. Always with the questions. “Is it me, Lord?” “When will these things be?” “Is this really the last supper? Because it’s Simon’s turn to host next and he makes a wicked hummus, though I doubt it’s an original recipe…” Friggin’ Thomas…

Might take advantage of the peace and quiet to work on some new parables. Parable of the Pitless Olive. Parable of the Fasting and the Furious. I wonder if anyone would be interested in these in book format?

Hmmm, now I want hummus…

Signing off for today. Fingers starting to cramp up, what with the hole in my hand and all. Thanks again, DAD!

Day 2

So BOOOOORED!!! If only there were a corpse in this tomb I could raise from the dead. At least we could play Sin or No Sin or something.

This wound in my side is not looking good at all!

And surely Dad could have thought ahead to provide some snacks. Omniscient? My Saint Fanny!

Getting nowhere with the parables. The Parable of the Creepy Tomb. The Parable of What’s Shuffling in the Corner? The Parable of the Overbearing Dad Who Keeps Me in the Dark (Literally and Figuratively). The Parable of the So-Called Friend Who Denies Knowing You Three Times, Peter!

Still thinking about hummus. I tell myself to stop thinking about hummus, but then all I can think about is that I’m not thinking about hummus. Considered performing the Miracle of the Ink into Hummus but still not sure what I’m writing with. It has a kind of smell… Then again, that could be my wound.

Hard to focus. Mind beginning to wander.

The boys know that whole body/blood thing was a metaphor, right? That must have sounded crazy! I should clear that up when I get out of here.

There was a pretty good turnout for my crucifixion, though, I have to admit.

Ugh, how much longer!

Maybe if I sing some songs. Some hymns. That’s a funny word. Hymn. Hymn. Hymn…

“I am just all right with me! I am just all right, oh yeah! I am just all right with me! I am just all right!…”

Day 3

Rolled the rock away this morning. I mean, it’s the third day, right? Technically I’ve only been stuck in here for two full days – Saturday makes one complete day, and today is two days – but if you count Friday as day one, Saturday day two, this is the third day. Three days. I’ve done three days. Or maybe two. I don’t care, I can’t take it anymore.

Stepped outside. Kind of expected a crowd but found only two shiny dudes in white standing there. “You Dad’s guys?” I asked. They nodded. Couldn’t even be bothered to show up Himself. Typical.

“Listen, if anyone comes looking for me, tell them I went to take a bath. Maybe some anointing.”

Then I wandered off. Pretty forgettable morning, really.

Am no longer craving hummus. Suddenly want chocolate.

When I was 10, a teacher told my class to draw a picture about Thai identity. Something that is just unique to Thai culture, tradition, and our land.

I remember it was tough. “Thai costume” seemed obvious. But my 10-year-old self already knew that our neighbouring countries also shared similar costume. At that time, I also did not appreciate Thai foods enough. So, I decided to draw a banana tree, thinking that it was so Thai.

As I was growing up, I did not think much about Thai identity or Thai-ness. But I remember knowing that Buddhism and the monarchy are highly respected. They were perceived as the driving force, the soul of the country, the reason we have survived as a nation. If you criticised them, you would be burnt in damnation, or be socially excluded, sanctioned. Or worst, face a criminal legal charge with an infamous lèse-majesté law. Back then, I had nothing against them because I was a “good” kid. To be precise, I was a relatively obedient kid who listened to adults or those in power, my parents, my aunts, teachers, and of course, the mainstream media.

In my 20s, I learned, not from the mainstream media, that during the Cold War, the fear that the communist spectres would destroy the monarchy and Buddhism led to many inhumane killings. On Oct 6, 1976, student protestors were slaughtered on the campus ground at Thammasart University, for “insulting the monarchy” and “trampling the soul of the nation”. Bodies were burnt on street. Hung on trees and beaten with a chair. In broad daylight. In front of the Emerald Buddha Temple and the Grand Palace.

Yes, I am not over that chapter of history. And how can anyone move on when Cold War’s legacies are still there, scattered all over South-East Asia?

Did I go back too far? [But does time mean anything if no one is held accountable?]

How about the Red Shirt crackdown in April-May, 2010? Streets of Bangkok soaked with blood and bodies of “bad people” who “burnt the nation” and “wanted to overthrow the monarchy”. Later, everything is swept under the rug sugar-coated with the Thai smiles. That rug was guarded with guns and law.

Some say that we should forgive and forget like good Thai-Buddhists would do. But before we even think about forget and forgive, I wonder, why good Thai-Buddhists chose and accepted barbaric killings at the first place? Since when did massacres and oppression become a path to the “righteousness”, as if there is no other way? Why do good Thai-Buddhists have such a low tolerance for different ideologies? I thought tolerance and compassion are adjacent to the heart of Thai-Buddhism. Am I wrong?

At some points, it seems like being Thai means I have to overlook the barbaric killings and the state impunity as if it is a way of life. Of course, like many Thais, I cannot forgive and forget. Let alone moving on. I cannot unlearn those traumatic facts. I cannot unsee those photographs. Every time someone said that Thai people are nice, I saw the beaten body hung from the tamarind tree. How can I forgive and forget, as I roam Bangkok streets, knowing that people were slaughtered here? When no one was held accountable for any of these cruel acts.

That official narrative of Thai-ness: I can no longer identify myself with it. But I have to admit that its toxic fruits are real and there. Since I grew up there, that toxin is a part of me too. Haunting me, deeply rooted in me, shaping the way I think, feel and behave, somehow. Even if I cannot embrace it. Even if I cannot shed it the way snakes shed their skin.

Because national identity is not something one can erase, no matter how disappointed or betrayed one feels.

So, I have to convince myself that the official narrative is not all Thai-ness is about. Deep down, underneath my rage and disappointment, I know that Thai identity means something to me. I know it means something to me when I experience racism outside Thailand. I know it means something to me because I miss Thailand, not just my family and friends. And I miss Thai foods so bad. Sometimes when I have not had Thai foods in a while, my body feels off, as if it doesn’t know how to function properly.

******

For me, Thai identity is not just a geographical body of land and borders (nor cuisine). As I was struggling to redefine it, I found pieces of my homeland I can still love and embrace in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films. From a tale created by seemingly-ordinary people across the country in Mysterious Object at Noon to an afternoon escape by a factory worker and her illegal Burmese lover who has flaking skin in Blissfully Yours. A love story between a male soldier and a country boy featuring magical-tiger folklore in Tropical Malady. Male soldiers with the mysterious sleeping sickness supposedly caused by dead kings in Cemetery of Splendour. Lastly, a terminally-ill man, who has killed “too many communists”, visited by his deceased wife and his son who has left home and turned into a red-eyed monkey ghost in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Uncle Boonmee also recalls his dream in which future authorities erase the people from the past.

These films are not only connected by illnesses and the tropical landscape. They also portray Thai lives in honest ways, signifying the people, their labour and local languages as well as everyday surroundings without romanticising their hardship nor employing a condescending tone. Unconventionally, they dig up unresolved/buried traumatic pasts, gently yet firmly expressing defiance of the official narratives.

Perhaps with the design of light, colours, framing, and ambient sounds, these films somehow were able to recreate memories, reminding me of this set of experiences and feelings of being born and raised there. These memories, mine and perhaps others’ as well, scatter all over the place. From the rain forest to the arid land. In trees/bushes/grasses. Mountains and hills. In animals roaming freely. The sounds of insects at dusk. On lonely country roads. Busy city streets. In food vendors, static and roving. Night markets.

In the ways music is played and languages are uttered. What [and how] people actually believe and hold on to. In the haunting red-eyed spectres of the past. In the interrupted/broken memories and the pains we carried, willingly or not. All these seemingly small things that weave Thai lives together.

Watching his films felt as if I was having an honest conversation with someone, sitting among the ruins, preparing for a coming storm. No more lies this time.

Somehow, this is warm and comforting, a moment of peace and consolation I can grab when the wave of traumas and ugly truth have crashed. And among all of these, the true meaning lies in the people who have struggled and fought to be alive and freed in that constrained geographical body. The fight has gained momentum in the last few years with the call I had not dared to dream of, they demand the monarchy to be reformed.

Today, if I were to draw something about Thai-ness. It wouldn’t be just one item. I would need a big canvas. On it I would paint a picture of a red-eyed spectre with a monitor ankle eating Pad-kra-pao in a night market somewhere, with rain forest and banana trees in the background. While the people are staring at a gigantic monument of a king, hoping their gaze will turn it into dust.

The post Redefining my Thai identity appeared first on New Mandala.

Submitted on Fri, 25 Mar 2022 - 05:09 PM

Okay, Hollywood, it’s way past time for the next batch of raunchy teen movie adaptations. And since we’ve already covered Shakespeare’s entire canon, next on the hit list are Greek Tragedies. Because nothing is hornier or more relevant to teens than plays written over two thousand years ago by a bunch of dead white guys.

Oedipus Rex

Oedipus “Eddie” Rex is the hot and horny new kid at school who wants to get laid before graduation. He wins over his classmates by being the star football player, absolutely dominating the rival school in THE BIG GAME. At prom, he bangs his hot teacher after bonding over their dark and sexy pasts (she had a teen pregnancy; he was involved in a learner’s permit hit and run). But wait, hold the phone: his hot teacher is also his… hot MOM. Sick! And at one point, he puts his “Oedipenis” (that’s what his comic-relief best friend Tiresias [probably just “Ty”] calls his shlong) in a dessert. Please note: all the actors in the movie must be hot.

The Bacchae

You know the drill, it’s one last rager to celebrate THE BIG GAME. Huge, hot ensemble cast, including a teen heartthrob musician—really a thirty-year-old playing a teen—as “Dion.” And it has one of those killer subplots where a guy dresses up as a girl to flirt with his crush in disguise. Never misses! Lots of teens doing drugs, and drinking alcohol, and pranking the adults who are trying to stop the party. Also, the adults are very hot, you know, for adults at least.

Antigone

Since our Oedipus adaptation will be such a banger, can you say sequel? “Andi” is the nerdy, unpopular freshman who is into weird stuff like politics. Her brothers went to rival schools and died after brutal football injuries during THE BIG GAME, so she wants to shut down the whole football program in protest. It’s like a social justice thing about concussions—super zeitgeisty right now. BUT the jocks stop her by having the captain take a bet to transform her into prom queen—even though she wears glasses. Yada yada, she’s expelled before prom, and he ends up naked at graduation. He’s hung up on Andi… and well-hung. That’s straight out of Tiresias’s mouth. (You bet Ty’s back for a cameo and better than ever, baby!) And don’t worry, when she takes off the glasses, she’s smokin’ hot.

The Odyssey

Okay, technically not a tragedy, but an epic poem… emphasis on epic. Odysseus “O.D.” is a stoner who forgot how to get home. The movie is a series of shenanigans and hookups as he tries to get back to his house in time for prom after THE BIG GAME. The title is Dude, Where’s Ithaca? and it has everything: more cross-dressing for a crush (never misses!), an orgy with the Sirens (the school’s a capella group), and a drug dealer named Circe whose molly gets everyone porking (that’s what Ty calls sex). Oh, yeah, you thought we couldn’t squeeze in another Ty cameo? Well, you thought wrong, amigo. This one is a little alternative in that O.D. is unconventional hot, like how some people have messed up noses but they can still pull it off.

Medea

Hear me out: HORNY TEEN DANCE MOVIE. Medea isn’t much of a dancer, but her hot football captain boyfriend, Jason, cheated on her with the most popular girl at dance school, so she must get revenge by killing… it in the BIG DANCE COMPETITION. She’ll stop at nothing to win, going as far as destroying the popular girl’s costume, giving the principal food poisoning, and burning down the dance floor and Jason’s actual house while their kids are inside. Their kids are their shared ninth-grade peer mentees, and they perish. For real. The chorus is a bunch of TikTok stars, obviously. Not only is the cast hot, but so is the choreography—even hotter than the flames that consume those poor teens!

And hey, if these movies aren’t all hits, at the very least, substitute teachers can show them when their lesson plans bomb. Now that’s longevity, baby!

“By an Indian breakfast by no means must be understood that simple bread, tea, and butter, which compose an English one.” Edward Fane, the nephew of the British General Sir Henry Fane, devotes a lot of time to describing breakfasts in his memoir of their travels through India, then a British colony, in 1858. Describing the morning meals of local English families, he notes that they include meat and fish and eggs, as well as “the eternal curry and rice.”

This is what the British Raj commonly ate for breakfast: breakfast curry.

You might, like many people, think of curry as a bastardization of Indian food, even a hurtful slur. India's regional cuisines are hugely varied, multiple, nuanced, delicious; rejecting curry is a way of rejecting their oversimplification or appropriation. Curry is colonial, it gestures at India with only the waviest of hands, it’s been co-opted since British people came to India in 1608 and misheard “kari.” These sentiments have been echoed over the past decades, both by academics and even the great actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey, who wrote, “To me the word ‘curry’ is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ‘chop suey’ was to China’s.”

Given the rich history of chop suey, this may be a more apt comparison than Jaffrey intends. Although curry is often described as an invention of British colonizers, Indians ate what non-Indians call curries long before the British arrived, and Indians across India still eat all kinds of curry today. Curry is not a colonial relic.

In colonial India itself, curry wasn’t solely the site of exploitation and domination; curry was a two-way street. Colonial food was not just one homogeneous mulligatawny but a dynamic cuisine based on shifting power relations between the imperial government and their local contacts, relations, and staff. Curries are the dishes that best encapsulate historian Cecilia Leong-Salobir’s argument that Anglo-Indian food was a site of active negotiation between colonial officials and their Indian staff, especially their cook. Colonial food was a give-and-take marked by "mutual accommodation." British colonizers' fondness for spicy and savory breakfast curries—so different from the sausages and eggs they grew up on—isn't just a historical curiosity; it’s a testament to Indian food’s resistance to cultural domination.

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Partially, this is because the nature of British colonial presence in India shifted significantly over the centuries, and along with it, colonial food culture. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, British people working in India for the British East India company were mostly single men. They ate mostly Indian food; to be more specific, they were heavily dependent on their Indian servants and so ate regional foods of the Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) Presidencies.

“Until the end of the eighteenth century, there was little sense of racial superiority among the British, whose main motivation was profit,” Colleen Taylor Sen writes in Curry: A Global History. “Company men lived much like the native population: they spoke Indian languages; took Indian mistresses and wives; wore Indian clothes; and consumed Indian meals prepared by local cooks.” These meals centered the foods cooked and eaten by meat-eating Indian Muslim communities at the time, namely creamy, Persianate qormas and qalias: curries.

As British rule formalized and stabilized, British colonial officials living for decades in India started to call themselves Anglo-Indians (the term now refers to their mixed-race descendants). Culinary fusions developed too, such as kedgeree, which contains so much flaked fish it’s pretty much nothing like the dal and rice khichdi that it’s based off of. But when it came to curry, 19th-century cookbook recipes seem surprisingly authentic. All these recipes call for whole spices or ground whole spices; they feature cooking methods still common in India today. Although some colonial cookbook authors did tamp down the heat and spice of curries, this wasn’t uniformly the case. The Economical Cookery Book’s korma calls for eight whole red chiles. A recipe for one masala from the army surgeon at the court of the Nizams of Hyderabad calls for a whopping 12 green chilis.

“In the end, we simply loved their curry and rice. It was delicious.”

These cookbooks demonstrate that for British imperial officers, there wasn’t just one generic, bastardized “curry” but a range: vindaloos, Malay curries with lemongrass, so-called Hoosainee curries that typically require first the mincing and grilling of seekh kebabs. Some of these breakfast curries read as distinctly Victorian (beef curry made with the trimmings of last night's roast), while others seem to be quite accurate representations of local South Indian breakfasts ("Pepper Water, or Rasam"), even if rasam is strictly speaking neither curry nor breakfast. In the separate chapter devoted to breakfast curries in the Economical Cookery Book, there’s fish curry, prawn curry, onion-based do pyaza curries, various moilees of fish, egg, or potato. In a rare surviving cookbook written by a servant, Daniel Santiagoe enumerates still other regional curry variations, such as, “Delhi Curry, Agra Curry, Curry à la Punjab… I myself… will be glad to recommend Madras Curries as best.”

As these trading communities of Europeans in India shifted into direct rule by the British Army and colonial officers—with the establishment of the British Raj in 1858 and Queen Victoria installed as Empress of India in 1877—these food cultures shifted again. Officers’ wives and children joined them to establish permanent residencies in India, and Anglo-Indian cookery became much more Anglo, especially as British wives took over “oversight” of the kitchen staff. British officers entertained each other over roasts and potatoes for dinner: “strictly English, no peculiarities” according to memoirist Colesworthy Grant. But breakfasts stayed Indian. Anglo-Indians still ate curry—just not when other British people were around.

Keeping up colonial appearances demanded offering guests tinned asparagus, imported butter, and dinner tables overflowing with British foods, and so breakfast curry became, for Anglo-Indians, a kind of guilty pleasure. According to historian Mary Procida, one snobby British Army wife was discovered by another army wife, “squatt[ing] on the sofa demolishing a plate of curry-and-rice! The curry was obviously fiery with chillies … Then realising that she had been properly caught enjoying the very stuff for which she and her set evinced such contempt; stuff that ‘the servants eat and which never appeared on her table’ – the wretched woman uttered a shriek of dismay and fled from the room!”

Which brings us back to breakfast curry. The 1894 Mem Sahib’s Book of Cookery states, "curry is eaten in almost every household at least once daily, generally at breakfast." Colonial official and household manual author Albert Kenney-Hebert elaborates: “The molten curries and florid oriental compositions of the olden time—so fearfully and wonderfully made—have been gradually banished from our dinner tables; although a well-considered curry or mulligatawny… are still very frequently given at breakfast.”

It's unclear whether a phrase like “fearfully and wonderfully made” is meant as a genuine compliment or sarcastic barb. And indeed some of these 19th-century colonial accounts of curry were demeaning—writers call them “greasy” or “sweet” or “so entirely of an Asiatic character and taste that no European will ever be persuaded to partake of them.” One of the most famous authors of these cookbooks wrote anonymously under the moniker “the thirty-five years resident,” stressing his Indian bona fides. But apparently even 35 years in India didn’t warm him up to Indian foods: He describes qorma curries as “quite unsuited to European taste” and offers an alternative recipe without the dish’s characteristic aromatic spices such as clove and black cardamom.

But these dismissive writers were the exception. You get the sense from reading colonial cookbooks that, for the most part, the men and women who authored these texts did so because they liked curry: they wanted to learn more about it, and document how to make it. An anonymous colonial official’s wife reports: “In the end, we simply loved their curry and rice. It was delicious.”

Strikingly, the writers of these cooking manuals clearly knew the difference between a Madras-style fish curry (tamarind, fenugreek seeds, mustard seeds, tomato, curry leaves) and a New Zealand Curry (“much appreciated”) of beef, potatoes, carrots, and two heaping tablespoons of Madras Curry Powder. These writers knew, the juxtaposition of these two recipes suggests, the difference between authentic and inauthentic versions of Indian food and they liked them both for different reasons. Even though the 35-Year Resident insults the original qorma in The Indian Cookery Book, he nonetheless offers his readers a printed version of a more typical qorma recipe alongside his own blander “gentleman’s” one.

If anything, breakfast curry shows that by the late 1800s Anglo-Indians prided themselves on their abilities to perform both sides of that hyphen. Paradoxically, as the British colonial government became increasingly institutionalized, underscored by increasingly bigoted programs of racial difference, curries became a more intimate part of Anglo-Indians’ diet. Breakfast curry was a break from conspicuous consumption, from demonstrating knowledge of the latest European dining trends, from the seemingly ceaseless work of entertaining that formed the cultural backbone of British colonial life. Many British officials, it seems, were nostalgic for the days of social integration. They were nostalgic for curry.

Of course, these cookbook authors and household manual writers and memoirists weren’t doing the actual cooking. These recipes belong to the household manager, the khansama, or the cook (bawarchi) who prepared breakfast curries alone, before the British woman head of household officially took over the kitchen and household management duties. The written record of colonial food tells the story from the British side, but we can read between the lines a different story: of Indian cooks whose skills, and whose culinary traditions, overcome Anglo-Indians' pretensions to conquer their dining tables throughout, eventually, the whole British Empire.

Most of today’s conversation about curry and colonialism focuses on curry powder—how English businessmen cheapened India’s diverse masalas by marketing instead a single spice blend of mainly turmeric, how curry powder’s imperial spread to Britain and its colonies served to incorporate the “exotic” subcontinent into the English body politic.

The spread of curry and curry powder is often presented as something done to hapless Indians by their colonizers. But curry also represents the durability and flexibility of Indian culinary traditions, the talent and influence of the cooks who made and make them. British people tried to emulate the taste of Indian regional foods for centuries, even if all they could muster was a pale imitation. Looking closer at the eating patterns of the British Raj, the clandestine breakfast curries of 19th-century India, allows us to better understand the history of colonialism without celebrating it. Breakfast curry shows us curry’s unceasing appeal, even in a colonial empire loath to admit the superiority of anything created outside England.

Un relato sobre la violación de una mujer por parte del poeta Pablo Neruda en Ceylán (hoy Sri Lanka), en 1929, es parte del filme Alborada, del cineasta cingalés Asoka Handagama (1962), exhibida en el 34° Festival Internacional de Cine en Tokio, en octubre pasado.

El hecho, relatado en el libro autobiográfico Confieso que he vivido (1974), publicado un año después de la muerte del Premio Nobel de Literatura (1904-1973), ha causado la indignación del movimiento feminista y fue uno de los ejes del debate público cuando, en 2018, se propuso poner el nombre del vate al aeropuerto de Santiago.

Handagama posee una dilatada trayectoria como cineasta, con cintas como Me mage sandai (2000), Thani Thatuwen Piyambanna (2002) y Him, Here, After (2012).

Está previsto que Alborada se exhiba en otros festivales, pero esto se ha visto afectado por el COVID. Asimismo, su director está en busca de su distribución en las plataformas digitales.

«Me encantaría mostrarla a la audiencia chilena», comenta el realizador.

Poeta conocido

El cineasta cuenta que Neruda y su poesía son bastante conocidos en Sri Lanka, donde residió como diplomático entre 1929 y 1930, aunque no tanto entre el público común como entre los amantes de la literatura, especialmente poetas y escritores.

«Tiene un grupo de seguidores que lee sus poemas, aunque sus vivencias en nuestro país son menos conocidas. Tras leer sus memorias, quise explorarlas», cuenta. Eso fue a fines de los años 90.

Handagama conoció la obra del poeta chileno en su época de universitario, «porque yo también escribí poemas en aquella época. Así supe de su contribución a la poesía, su obra».

En sus memorias, Neruda describe en siete líneas cómo un día fuerza sexualmente a una chica tamil, quien provenía de la más baja casta de los sakkili, que eran considerados “intocables”:

“Una mañana, decidido a todo, la tomé fuertemente de la muñeca y la miré cara a cara. No había idioma alguno en que pudiera hablarle. Se dejó conducir por mí sin una sonrisa y pronto estuvo desnuda sobre mi cama. Su delgadísima cintura, sus plenas caderas, las desbordantes copas de sus senos, la hacían igual a las milenarias esculturas del sur de la India. El encuentro fue el de un hombre con una estatua. Permaneció todo el tiempo con sus ojos abiertos, impasible. Hacía bien en despreciarme. No se repitió la experiencia”.

Una suerte de vacío

A esa altura, Handagama ya sabía que había varias películas sobre la vida del poeta, como Ardiente paciencia (1983), de Antonio Skármeta, o Neruda (2016), de Pablo Larraín.

Sin embargo, «nadie había hecho nada sobre el periodo de su vida en Sri Lanka. Es una suerte de vacío. Así que comencé a pensar en un guion», detalla.

Entre que comenzó la escritura y el estreno de la cinta, el realizador hizo otras tres películas. Y atribuye la demora a que quería hacer una cinta bien hecha, con dedicación «full time».

«No quería hacerla a las apuradas. Recién en 2019, cuando empezó el COVID, pude terminarla», relata.

La cinta cuenta la historia del arribo a Neruda al país, supuestamente en fuga de la tormentosa relación con su amante birmana Josie Bliss. En Ceilán, conoce a Patsy, una chica francesa, con la cual tiene sexo libre sin compromisos. Sin embargo, Josie aparece en su puerta, pero Neruda se niega a recibirla, por lo cual la mujer abandona el país. Neruda queda abatido y dirige ahora su atención hacia la chica sakkili, que le vaciaba y limpiaba los baldes de excremento del retrete cada madrugada, y con la cual fantaseaba por su parecido a una escultura de la diosa Parvathi.

Desafíos

La filmación, en medio del inicio de la pandemia, supuso grandes dificultades, como es posible imaginarse.

«El principal desafío fue hallar las locaciones para representar la época de fines de los años 20. Colombo (la capital de Sri Lanka) ha cambiado mucho. El suburbio rural en que vivía hoy es parte de la ciudad. Tratamos de encontrar una locación similar en el sur del país. Ahí recreamos el ambiente», cuenta.

En cuanto a los actores, la cinta cuenta con un reparto internacional, encabezado por el español Luis J. Romero como Neruda, la franco-vietnamita Anne-Solenne Hatte como Josie y el cingalés Malcolm Machado como el fiel sirviente Rhatnaigh. La actriz cingalesa Rithika Kodithuwakku, en tanto, interpreta a la mujer tamil.

Para el personaje de Neruda, previamente Handagama probó a un actor chileno, Andrew Bargsted, pero por la pandemia al intérprete le fue imposible viajar y no pudo contar con él. Fue entonces que halló a Romero, «un amante de Neruda. Fue un acierto, también por su conocimiento» del poeta.

Complejidad

Lo interesante de esta cinta es que muestra la complejidad del episodio, de Neruda y la propia sociedad cingalesa de la época, muy lejos de las simplificaciones de Hollywood.

«Cuando comencé a escribir el guion, las severas críticas (del movimiento feminista) aún no estaban, las desconocía. En la escritura traté de explorar las relaciones románticas que (Neruda) tuvo durante este periodo. Pero en 2018, cuando supe de las protestas contra el nombramiento del aeropuerto de Santiago con su nombre, seguí muy interesado este tema. Vi que había una especie de enojo con él. Empecé a reescribir el guion, reequilibrando las cosas, mostrando también la parte crítica de la historia. De hecho, quise bajarlo del pedestal, humanizar la situación», cuenta.

«Ahora podemos releerlo, apreciarlo desde un punto de vista diferente. Para mí es un tipo de persona que sufrió durante el resto de la vida por este incidente, hasta su muerte, en su propia conciencia. No tuvo el valor ni la personalidad de hablar de esto hasta escribir sus memorias. No lo mencionó en ninguna otra parte. Quedó dentro de él, pero tenía un especie de conflicto de conciencia. Lo escribió, no dijo directamente que fue una especie de violación, pero la forma en que lo escribe en sus memorias lo insinúa».

La otra clave, para el director, es lo que este episodio dice sobre su propio país.

«Esto ocurrió durante la época colonial», específicamente bajo dominio británico, que duró desde 1802 hasta 1948. «En esa época había una comunidad en el país, una casta muy baja, los ‘intocables’, traídos de la India para limpiar los baños en el área urbana. A nadie le importaba esta casta. Neruda no era alguien que discriminara, pero había un tema de ego con él. Él llegó al país desde el extranjero y pudo haber pensado que podía hacer lo que quisiera», señala Handagama.

«Ahora la situación es diferente. Ya no hay intocables, se han mezclado con el resto de la gente, no pueden encontrar diferencias. No existen este tipo de clases o diferencia racial en la sociedad. Cambió totalmente. Pero este incidente aún tiene una especie de poder o relevancia para leer la sociedad. Podemos crear una diálogo a partir de eso, y por eso quise hacer una película sobre esto», concluye.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, blind, dared to say anything that happens to an artist that does not destroy them is a gift. I don’t know whether the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita would agree that his, for instance, extreme suffering at the hands of one of the world’s ugliest regimes, led by the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet, was a gift. I don’t think it was a gift that drove Zurita to try to blind himself in the midst of it, when he was no longer interested in seeing what was unfolding. For seeing, in a certain sense, can cease to become anything so noble as witness or resistance, can maybe feel—I am guessing—like further torment or, worse, an act of complicity. This feeling may be one reason Zurita’s breathtaking oeuvre, some of which was gathered in English a few years ago in Sky Below: Selected Works, often gives us a voice—as rendered brilliantly by Anna Deeny Morales—impatient with description. Not at all opposed to it, master of it in quick bursts, but not keen to dwell in that mode, driven instead by the urgency experienced in dreams, never far from the rawness of existential panic, drawn on by a nervy and radically desperate beauty. Here’s an untitled sampling from INRI, a book that takes its name from the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. Zurita’s description of a landscape blossoms impossibly like an heroic simile, a baroque flowering that shifts suddenly back into Kurosawa-like dream-narrative:

[…] In the foreground the white
breaker rises and falls. The small cities are white
on the paths at night. They look like luminous
flakes that appear for a moment and then nothing.
Someone heard them, and now they’re thousands
of white faces, with teeth slightly reddened and the
hollows of their eyes empty. My love letters. Then
nothing.

I cross small towns at night. I cross furs mottled
with blood. Both are slight […]

Zurita, who studied engineering and mathematics, and at one point survived by selling computers door-to-door, writes poetry that sometimes consists of pictographs, sometimes formulas like math problems of the spirit—“Areas N = The Hunger of My Heart”—or subpointed sequences, like “The Beaches of Chile” series. Not a direct description of the beaches, but an account of the suffering in and around that stark beauty, the psychic account of the experience of a particular place in a particular time, which yet has a feeling of myth to it: “i. Soaked in tears he threw his vestments to the water / ii. Naked you’d have seen him huddled coiled upon himself shaking with his hands covered over the swarm at his wounds.” Zurita once years ago (there are pictures in Sky Below) had some of his poetry written by airplane in the firmament over New York City, a gesture that signals his ambition, his anti-provincialism, and maybe his ironical and worldly understanding of where certain kinds of power gather—he didn’t write these lines over Valparaiso or Santiago, where he was born. It was a ritual signaling his willingness to suspend the orthodoxies of even the page itself.

Which is to say, his relationship to limits—limits of all kind—suggests his genius, for he seems to sense that limits (such as the edges of language, the edges of a life) are and are not real and final, even limits imposed arbitrarily and terribly, like dictatorship or dying. Coexistence with such a reality—our reality—is a tricky business, and Zurita’s poetry offers one way, or the record of one man’s way, of mapping it without losing your mind or your will or your way. A way to face even the realities that can’t be seen. This is a poet who writes a little fable not so much of as in the shadow of the political nightmare of a collapsing social order. Not so hard for Americans to imagine anymore. A poet whose lines are sliced unnaturally, often breaking jaggedly in Spanish at the logistical helper-word “que,” and at “the” in the English version. In one of his poems about the human face—and so many of Zurita’s poems seem to gesture at, or openly make a subject of that irreducible stamp of our subjectivity—the lines are replete with a characteristic mythic compression, that vividness impatient with emplotment and extensive description, vividness which nonetheless claims a time and place:

With my face blood-soaked I called at his door:
Could you help me—I said—I’ve got some
friends out here
“Go away—he replied—before I kick the
shit out of you”
Come on—I reminded him—sir you know they
also turned Jesus back.
“You’re not Jesus—he answered—get or I’ll
break your face. I’m not your father”
Please—I insisted—they’re your sons …
“Fine”—he said calming down—“take them to
the promised land”
Okay, but where is that place?—I asked—
Then, as if it were a star that spoke, he
answered:
“Far off, in those lost cordilleras of Chile”

JESSE NATHAN: Many of your poems seem to move like dreams and yet also to move through history. The poems in Zurita, for example, imagine September 10, 1973, and the gesture reminds me of Czesław Miłosz taking us in a poem to the night of August 31, 1939. And then there’s the way you weave things together: the insignificant imagined alongside the momentous. What can a poet say to history? How does a poem intervene in time, or in history? And what is the responsibility of a poet toward the human body?

RAÚL ZURITA: Often when I write I am overwhelmed by a strange sensation. It is as if I were taking an exam for which the examiners have disappeared. I’m ignorant of the questions, but I must answer them somehow, knowing ahead of time that, whatever your answer, it will always be wrong and that the punishment for the error is inevitable. You are in the center of the plaza, the pyre is lit and awaits you. Writing is like the ashes that remain from a burned body. In order to write it is necessary to burn yourself entirely, consume yourself to the point that not even a sliver of muscle or bone or flesh remains. It is an absolute sacrifice and at the same time it is the suspension of death. When writing, you suspend life, and so also suspend death. The instant in which you are being burned by the mistake of your words is the same instant in which that infinite cloud of wrong answers also burns, wrong answers which we, as if in a dream, have called El Quijote, Hamlet, Inferno, The Brothers Karamazov, and Residence on Earth. I draw back, then, and awaken, I see the mound of ashes of my poem scattered on the ground and I get up. I write because it is my private exercise of resurrection.

I have believed that there is no before and no after in poetry, that all poems are being written simultaneously, and that they are answers to questions that even now have not been formulated. The central theme of poetry is time, and that one of those times, just one of them, is what we call history. Poetry is the most vast and desperate effort to say with words from this world things that no longer make up this world. We die there, in that radical defeat and failure, because the work never was to write poems or paint pictures; the work was to make of the world something decent, and the pulverized remains of that work cover the world as if they were the debris of a battle atrociously lost.

More and more I see my poems as ruins, they refer often to things that are happening but as if they had happened thousands of years ago. I have written from a body that is bent over, that has become stiff under the effects of Parkinson’s, that trembles, that goes forward and falls, and I have found my infirmity to be beautiful, I have felt that my tremors are lovely, that the challenge of holding up these pieces of paper that I now read is lovely. I have written about that body, about the pains that I myself have caused others and that I have inflicted on myself, I have recorded my poems on its skin. I have come to believe that only the sick, the weak, the wounded are capable of giving beauty to those ruins, that debris. Such beauty is intolerable and at the same time is the light of the world. When all of humanity bows down weeping before La Pietá, the world will have come to its end. Meanwhile, all we have are our ruins, our tiny misfortunes, our great loves, our horror, our deaths.

Translated with Daagya Dick.

King Charles II was on his deathbed. The year was 1685, and the monarch had suffered a stroke. Doctors tried everything to save him, but the king was convinced that one particular remedy would work. Years before, Charles II had paid Oliver Cromwell’s own doctor and chemist, Jonathan Goddard, a handsome sum for the secret formula for Goddard’s Drops. The chemist claimed that his invention, which later came to be known as King’s Drops, was a kind of miracle cure for all manner of ailments. The recipe for this liquid concoction was complex, involving numerous components and multiple distillations, but its efficacy supposedly hinged on one crucial ingredient: a powder consisting of five pounds of crushed human skulls.

Not just any skulls would do. According to medical wisdom of the time, the bones of an elderly person might contain some of the very illness the King’s Drops were meant to cure. “Ideally, [the skull] would be from someone who died a violent death at a young, healthy age,” says Lydia Kang, co-author of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. “You wanted somebody who died in the prime of their life, so execution and war were ideal ways to get these products.”

By the end of his life, doctors were pouring 40 drops of this gruesome elixir down the king’s throat daily. Needless to say, the potion didn’t have its desired effect. King’s Drops and other bogus medical treatments may have sped up his demise on February 6, 1685. Yet the fact that the drops failed to save Charles II didn’t deter many other English people from making and drinking the concoction. In 1686, an Englishwoman named Anne Dormer wrote to her sister about the positive impact a little bit of skull juice had on her mental health. “I take the king’s drops and drink chocolate,” she wrote, “and when my soul is sad to death I run and play with the children.”

The idea of ingesting human skulls from the freshly killed seems repulsive today, but it was shockingly common among British and other European aristocrats from the 16th century all the way up into the so-called Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. Medical science was still very much an evolving field, one which left plenty of room for treatments ranging from the bizarre to the downright disturbing.

King’s Drops were especially popular, but medical books across Europe published all sorts of other recipes for various skull-related cures. Oswald Croll, a German alchemist, published a recipe for an epileptic cure in 1643 that called for three skulls from men killed by violent means. In 1651’s The Art of Distillation, English physician John French wrote up the following recipe for “Essence of Man’s Brains,” which he touted as a cure for epilepsy:

“Take the brains of a young man that has died a violent death, together with the membranes, arteries, and veins, nerves … and bruise these in a stone mortar until they become a kind of pap. Then put as much of the spirit of wine as will cover it … [then] digest it half a year in horse dung.”

Much of this macabre fixation on corpse medicine had a single source. Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, was a 16th-century Swiss alchemist, physician, philosopher, and all-around polymath. Prior to his work, the amalgamation of ancient Greek and Roman beliefs known as Galenism dominated European medical circles. According to Galenism, the body consists of different humors—blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile—and the key to health was keeping them all in balance.

While Galenism led to some utterly ineffective medical treatments, it was nothing compared to the horror that came out of Paracelsus’s work. Essentially, his philosophy was that “like cures like,” or similar elements from outside the body could restore health within it. His book Der grossen Wundartzney (Great Surgery Book) was one of the most influential medical books of its time.

According to Paracelsus, if someone's illness centered on their head, the best remedy was to, in turn, consume part of the head of a healthy individual. Paracelsus advocated drinking the blood, powdered skulls, and other parts of corpses, particularly those of men in their prime who died a sudden, violent death, since their “vital spirit” was so strong.

People eating human body parts to cure themselves became such a widely accepted concept that it crossed the Atlantic to New England, where the 17th-century Puritan town physician Edward Taylor enthusiastically touted all sorts of cannibalistic remedies in his handwritten Dispensary. Taylor had an extensive list of useful human body parts, including “Man’s Skull” (“good for head diseases and the falling sickness,” or epilepsy) and “Moss in the skull of dead man exposed to the aire,” to stop bleeding.

While most of these cures did more harm than good, patients swore by them. Skulls and other body parts were mixed with chocolate, wine, hard spirits, or other substances that, when combined with a pinch of willful denial, may have made the afflicted feel better. “As with a lot of old-fashioned remedies, they were often mixed with other intoxicants like opiates or alcohol," says Kang. "There was a lot of magical belief and placebo going into these."

An ugly side effect of the Western obsession with corpse medicine was the demand it created for human remains. “In England, there was a huge trade in skulls and cannibalistic treatments,” Kang says. Executioner’s blocks were a popular place to procure the requisite body parts. A thriving, well-documented trade in Egyptian mummies went on in Europe for years.

Whenever there’s a market for a particular commodity, no matter how unsavory, history dictates that some unscrupulous entrepreneur will find a way to fill it. “Often, they would go to Ireland because there were so many people who had died on the battlefield and there were so many skulls lying around,” Kang says. The English philosopher Francis Bacon once remarked that skull moss, which was thought to be good for nosebleeds, could be harvested from the “heaps of slain bodies lying unburied over in Ireland.” Moss-covered skulls looted from the battlefields became a common sight in London druggist shops.

The marketing of their skulls for consumption was one more brutality in a long list of oppressions against the Irish at this time. The fact that there was money to be made, particularly from the export of skulls, seemed to be enough to keep anyone, English or otherwise, from questioning the ethics of this business for an uncomfortably long time. “Germany had a particularly big hunger for corpse medications,” Kang says. “So there was a brisk trade in pillaging Irish skulls and selling them to Germany.”

While there are documented records of skull sales as late as 1778, medical cannibalism in England trailed off in the 19th century. “You really start to see the physician’s understanding of anatomy [and] physiology come into more modern clarity," Kang says, "when lot of these more magical theories start to disintegrate. They just don’t hold up against science.”

In the pre-dawn hours of September 24, 1974, the people of Palimbang, a town in Sultan Kudarat, Mindanao, were awakened by the sound of bombs. That was only the beginning of a long ordeal for the thousands of people who lived in the villages of Palimbang.

In the next weeks, in what would become one of the worst state-sponsored atrocities that would be committed during the Martial Law era, a large contingent of military troops would execute nearly all the men of Palimbang—more than a thousand of them, perhaps as many as three thousand. The military men raped women, terrorized and tortured villagers, and leave children to starve to death.

This all happened a few days into Ramadan in 1974, two years into Martial Law, when Mindanao was placed under military rule. The area had seen intense ground fighting between the military and the Moro National Liberation Front, which were backed by air and naval attacks. Driven by intelligence reports that the MNLF were gathering forces near the village of Malisbong—and summoned by Governor Gonzalo Siongco, who was a brigadier general in the army—military forces descended into Palimbang.

When people in the Palimbang’s seaside barangays felt the shelling and bombing, thousands of them fled into the mountains. A few days later, negotiators from the military found the evacuees and led them back down into Malisbong.

According to survivors who are still alive, after a few days of being held in the village, the men were forced into the Tacbil mosque, while thousands of women and children were loaded into a naval boat anchored near shore. Other women stayed in the village but were locked in a warehouse, purportedly for their safety—the army captain wanted to keep them safe from his own men.

Kept on the boat for several days, the captives were exposed to the harsh sun; there were children who died of heatstroke. Their bodies were thrown overboard. Eyewitnesses say that they had overheard military officers saying that the orders were to make sure no one was left alive.

READ: So what was so bad about martial law?

Living memory

There is plenty of documentation of this dark event in living history—including interviews with survivors, recorded for posterity in documentaries like Forbidden Memory by Maguindanaon filmmaker Gutierrez Mangansakan, which was named Best Documentary in the 12th Cinema One Originals film festival.

The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) has also produced a documentary, for which many survivors talked about the horrifying events that led to the deaths of their family members, and about the atrocities they themselves had to endure.

And the stories are horrifying indeed. Hadji Muhammad Faust Piana was already an imam in 1974, and was one of the men rounded up into the mosque. Though he was tortured, he was one of the rare few who were spared, and he witnessed how the others were tied and led out of the mosque—five or ten in a day—to be executed.

Bernie Bandala, who was a young boy at the time, saw soldiers attempting to rape a woman. She committed suicide by plunging a pair of scissors into her neck, he says, and he was among a group of children who used the commotion to escape into the woods.

Amina Gunao describes how her husband was killed before her very eyes after she tried to bring him food while he was held at the mosque. Another woman, Bayol Maguiales, describes how a soldier raped her after she asked for food for her neighbors.

#NeverForget

Though truly horrific, the Palimbang Massacre is not well-known or remembered by many people. In fact, people like Rigoberto Tiglao and Juan Ponce Enrile have publicly denied that any massacre had taken place at all. This, despite the numerous witnesses who lived through the atrocities.

On the 40th anniversary of the massacre, in 2014, then CHR chairperson Etta Rosales went to Malisbong to mark the somber occasion. A Marine officer was also at the event. “Awkward ‘yung presence ko dito eh,” he said. “Kasi uniporme na suot ko ngayon ay suot din na uniporme ng mga gumawa ng massacre noong 1974…Humihingi po ako ng patawad sa mga ginawa ng katulad ko.” (“My presence here is awkward. The uniform I’m wearing now is the same uniform worn by those who committed the massacre here in 1974…I ask forgiveness for the things that were done by those like me.”)

That same year, the Philippine government recognized the thousands killed in Malisbong as victims of martial law human rights abuses. With help from the CHR, families of the victims and other survivors were awarded claims to the P10 billion set aside for the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013.

Read: Never Forget: Robredo urges Pinoys to reject ‘lies’ on 48th anniversary of martial law

This article, Today is the anniversary of the Palimbang Massacre, another event we must #NeverForget, originally appeared on Coconuts, Asia's leading alternative media company.

Las personas que embadurnaron con pintura roja el monumento de Salvador Allende en San Joaquín escribieron: “Asesino ladrón”.

¿Fue Salvador Allende un gobernante asesino? Los tres presidentes que lo antecedieron, tras haberlo derrotado en elecciones en las que él fue candidato, dejaron un rastro de múltiples muertos bajo las balas de carabineros y militares. Salvador Allende estuvo en la oposición a esos gobiernos y siempre solidarizó con las víctimas, incluso concurriendo al lugar de los hechos.

Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1952-1958): tres trabajadores ultimados por carabineros en la Salitrera Pedro de Valdivia en 1956; al año siguiente, un manifestante muerto en Valparaíso. Viene luego la siniestra Batalla de Santiago del 2 de abril de 1957, en que carabineros y soldados dieron muerte a más de 20 trabajadores y estudiantes. Total de personas ultimadas por la fuerza pública durante el Gobierno de Ibáñez: cerca de treinta, además de cientos de heridos.

Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez (1958-1964): dos trabajadores baleados durante una manifestación de la CUT en noviembre de 1960 y, dos años más tarde, la Masacre de la Población José María Caro, con seis pobladores muertos y veinte heridos bajo las balas de la Fuerza Aérea. Total de personas ultimadas por la fuerza pública durante el Gobierno de Alessandri: ocho, además de decenas de heridos.

Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970): En 1965, un campesino muere baleado por la policía en el fundo Los Cristales. Al año siguiente, en un ataque al local sindical del mineral de El Salvador, lo soldados matan a dos mujeres y seis trabajadores, y dejan sesenta heridos. En noviembre de 1967, la represión a balazos de un paro de la CUT deja en Santiago siete trabajadores sin vida y numerosos heridos. En 1968, un poblador es ultimado por carabineros en Arica y uno en Rancagua. En marzo de 1969, el desalojo por Carabineros de la toma de terrenos de Pampa Irigoin en Puerto Montt, por orden del Gobierno, deja once muertos y un alto número de heridos. El mismo año habrá un manifestante muerto en San Miguel y varios heridos, un estudiante muerto en Copiapó y, al año siguiente, dos estudiantes muertos en Puente Alto, todos por carabineros. Frei se despide en julio de 1970 con un trabajador muerto en Quinta Normal durante un paro de la CUT. Total de personas ultimadas por la fuerza pública durante el Gobierno de Frei: treinta y tres.

Salvador Allende (1970-1973): Antes de que Allende asuma, un comando de ultraderecha da muerte a tiros al comandante en Jefe del Ejército, general René Schneider, con armas llegadas en la valija diplomática de la embajada de Estados Unidos, y los asesinos se ocultan en la parroquia de El Bosque bajo la protección del pedófilo Fernando Karadima. Tres años más tarde, un mes y medio antes del golpe de Pinochet, un comando vinculado a la Marina asesina al comandante Arturo Araya, edecán naval del Presidente Allende.

El 5 de agosto de 1972, Salvador Allende vivirá una situación extrema. Agentes de Investigaciones, la PDI de ahora, allanan de noche los campamentos de emergencia Asalto al Cuartel Moncada, Lulo Pinochet y Vietnam Heroico en el sector Lo Hermida de Peñalolén, convertidos en centros insurreccionales de extrema izquierda. Buscan a los miembros de un denominado Comando 16 de Julio de Liberación Nacional, que han levantado barricadas, ocupado un supermercado y una gasolinera y retenido al dirigente del MIR Andrés Pascal Allende, hijo de Laura, hermana del Presidente, y a quienes han intentado parlamentar con ellos.

El grupo es liderado por un personaje violento, Osvaldo Romo Mena, autodenominado “comandante Raúl”, quien –según se sabrá más tarde– actúa por cuenta de los servicios de inteligencia militar y será durante la dictadura el sádico torturador y asesino de la DINA conocido como el Guatón Romo. En el allanamiento de Lo Hermida estalla una batalla campal y los agentes de la PDI matan a tiros al poblador René Saravia Arévalo, de 22 años, hieren a otros pobladores y detienen a un centenar. Los detectives aseguran haber utilizado las armas en defensa propia bajo una lluvia de disparos.

La noticia de la muerte de un hombre del pueblo a manos de agentes de su Gobierno afecta terriblemente al Presidente, quien a la mañana siguiente, en un acto de coraje, se dirige a Lo Hermida. Dejando afuera a los policías y escoltas, Salvador Allende penetra desarmado y a pie hasta el sector donde han tenido lugar los incidentes y hace frente a los gritos de los pobladores que lo rodean azuzados por Romo: “¡Asesino!… ¡Asesino!… ¡Asesino!… El Presidente los escucha y se hace oír a duras penas en un diálogo que se prolonga cerca de dos horas: “Yo soy el que tengo la mayor responsabilidad y aquí estoy, camaradas, mirándolos a los ojos. Sin bajar los ojos, sin implorar que me escuchen, sino hablándoles con el derecho que me dan mis años de lucha y de lealtad al pueblo”. Promete que los tribunales aclararán los hechos, visita la capilla ardiente y guarda un minuto de silencio ante los restos de Saravia.

Cuando regresa a La Moneda, su hermana Laura lo está esperando enfurecida por la muerte del poblador. “¡Eres un González Videla!”, le grita. Sumada a las emociones que acaba de vivir, la comparación con el mandatario traidor es un mazazo para él. Cuando su hermana se retira, el Presidente llama a Eduardo “Coco” Paredes, director de Investigaciones, y al subdirector Carlos Toro, y les pide la renuncia. El poblador René Saravia fue la única persona a la que la fuerza pública dio muerte durante el gobierno de Salvador Allende. Aunque el allanamiento de la PDI no fue ordenado por él, para el Presidente fue un hecho muy amargo del que asumió la total responsabilidad.

¿Salvador Allende “ladrón”, como escribieron en su monumento con pintura roja?

A pesar de varios allanamientos a la residencia presidencial de calle Tomás Moro y de las infinitas indagaciones que realizaron después del golpe, los militares no lograrán jamás descubrir el más mínimo acto de corrupción o enriquecimiento ilícito de Salvador Allende. Por algo el propio Presidente sostenía: “A mí me han dicho de todo, pero lo único que no pueden decirme es ladrón y maricón”. Aunque hoy esas palabras nos parezcan inadecuadas y ofensivas para la comunidad LGTBQ+, así hablaba en los años 60 del siglo XX el Mandatario más mujeriego que Chile haya conocido.

Después del golpe, los militares, la prensa y los canales propagaban la fake news de que en la residencia presidencial se había descubierto una colección de películas pornográficas y una bodega de licores finos que alimentaban las “orgías y borracheras” del Presidente. La verdad es que él acostumbraba relajarse viendo películas de cowboys en una salita y que las “borracheras” de Allende, a quien nadie vio jamás siquiera achispado por efecto del alcohol, consistían en dos dedos de Chivas Regal como aperitivo y una copa de vino tinto con la comida, tinto con el que incluso acompañaba las ostras, bebidas que él mismo se prescribía como médico para dilatar sus tercas coronarias.

Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990): Víctimas comprobadas según el Informe Rettig y la Comisión Valech: 28.459 torturados, 2.125 ejecutados, 1.102 desaparecidos, alrededor de 200 mil exiliados. En cuanto a sus finanzas, Pinochet se apoderó de bienes y recursos fiscales por un valor superior a los 35 millones de dólares.

¿Quién es el verdadero asesino y ladrón?

1. Lily passed peacefully, immediately after her therapist finally laughed at one of her jokes.

2. After a valiant battle with imposter syndrome, Olivia finally found a job she thinks she’s qualified for: a crazed ghost.

3. Melanie died as she lived: with one hand down her pants and another opening an incognito tab on Google Chrome.

4. Later in life, Deja was a titan of philanthropy. The Deja Wilson foundation continues to raise money for women in their twenties who are recovering from being funny in high school.

5. June is survived by her mom, her dad, and all the women from college that neither of them knows about.

6. When asked whether she was ready to go to heaven, Yebin replied, “I just feel like I need to know what other people will be wearing?”

7. In lieu of flowers, please send Mona’s ex-boyfriend’s mother a text “just to say hey,” as Mona has done every week since they broke up four years ago.

8. Xena will be missed but not forgotten—because Facebook keeps asking you to tag her in photos.

9. Evelyn’s family would like to thank those who have expressed their condolences, especially Eric from Hinge, who, after hearing about her passing, asked, “Without me? haha XD.”

10. Shelby was an inspiration. In her final moments, she shared an invaluable bit of wisdom that no one heard, because she forgot to unmute herself.

11. Helen will be remembered as a leader. Her accomplishments include starting “Happy Birthday” in a reasonable key that was pretty comfortable for everyone singing.

12. Amanda passed away while sleeping in her home, surrounded by sixteen weeks’ worth of dishes and cups.

13. Isabela was known for the great impact she made on women waiting in line for the bathroom.

14. Those close to Charmaine described her as super chill and breezy. Her last words to the paramedic pulling her out of a burning car were: “No worries! Only if you have time!”

Amid record-high COVID cases, Malaysia’s newest Prime Minister from UMNO, Ismail Sabri Yaakob, was sworn in this past week. More than three years after its National Front government was voted out of power, UMNO, the largest party in the current government, regained the powerful prime minister position without an election. The change evokes a strong sense of political déjà vu, but how much is this a return to the politics of old? Here, I briefly assess the extent to which it represents a return to the pre-2018 reign of the National Front, a continuation of the most recent National Alliance government, or a new and unstable political reality. I also consider what the implications of the latest shift in the ruling elite has for the prospects of reform.

Malaysia’s political institutions: battered and circumvented

The appointment of the new prime minister comes during a bruising period for Malaysia’s political institutions. The 2018 elections brought an end to the decades-long rule of the UMNO-led National Front, but the victorious Alliance of Hope (PH) coalition government collapsed in less than two years. In its place, a fragile new government headed by Muhyiddin Yassin of the UMNO-breakaway party Bersatu brought UMNO back into the ruling coalition. For 17 months, he staved off a political reckoning by circumventing basic democratic institutions. By early 2021, with a declaration of Emergency assented to by the King, Muhyiddin halted elections and suspended parliament and state legislatures, ruling instead through his cabinet. The latter swelled to record size as he sought to shore up tenuous political support. Critical voices were punished, and all public assemblies banned—perhaps most vividly shown when riot police were deployed after opposition MPs gathered outside the suspended parliament.  Yet even with these tactics, Muhyiddin was unable to stem increasing public discontent with his government’s leadership, a highly public reprimand from the King for avoiding parliamentary debate on the Emergency, and eventually a loss of support from UMNO.

Ismail Sabri’s unlikely ascension to prime minister has not deviated from the new COVID-era political normal. It marks the second time in a row that a prime minister has been selected, and governing coalition formed, without an electoral mandate or vote of confidence in parliament. Instead, Malaysia’s MPs privately indicated their preferred candidate to the King, who then declared who was most likely to command the support of a majority in parliament. In both cases, the “winning” prime ministerial candidate was backed by a slim or ambiguous majority, comprised largely of parties that had been rejected by a majority of voters in the 2018 elections.

While the Emergency ended on August 1, constraints on public gatherings remain, and its institutions are still unprepared to resume full functioning. The government has still not developed a plan for a full in-person or remote sitting of parliament, instead opting to cut down length and frequency of meetings and the number of MPs who can attend. The Elections Commission has not announced a plan on how to safely hold a national election during the pandemic, despite a number of countries successfully doing so.

An UMNO-led coalition government, but different

In this context, UMNO’s return to power without election simply seems to cap a period of democratic regression in Malaysia. But since UMNO last held national power, Malaysia’s political landscape has changed in significant ways. First, the new prime minister came to power on the thinnest of margins, with a support coalition that is almost exactly the same as his predecessor. At the time of writing, Ismail Sabri commands the support of 114 MPs—just three more than a simple majority in parliament. It is a far cry from the commanding support that UMNO’s National Front held for decades in power, or even from the solid majority that the Alliance of Hope (PH) government had until 2020.

Second, the well-ordered parties and coalitions that defined Malaysian politics for decades have fragmented. In contrast to the tight backing coalition that the party enjoyed for decades in power, UMNO’s new prime minister is backed by a mix of parties, regional coalitions, and individual MPs, with less allegiance to UMNO and even mutual antagonism. While UMNO’s internal divisions may be smoothed over by a return to power, several members of its top leadership, including current and former party presidents Zahid Hamidi and Najib Razak, have corruption cases still working their way through the courts.

The current permutation of government is still delicate and is contingent on rewarding backers with ministerships, patronage positions, and policy demands. It is too early to tell how (or whether) the new prime minister will successfully expand and stabilise his support. The government under UMNO is likely better positioned than its predecessor to hold together a coalition with a fresh prime minister. But in the near term, much political energy and focus will be spent on keeping together and expanding a fragile governing coalition. With a scheduled vote of confidence and budget deliberations looming, the new prime minister has two immediate tests to survive in the coming months.

Yet just as the current government is momentarily weak, so too is its opposition. Mostly comprised of parties from the former PH government, the opposition was sidelined throughout the Muhyiddin administration and lacked the venue of parliament to exercise oversight. Even though PH still controls a significant bloc of seats in parliament, its perennial prime ministerial candidate Anwar Ibrahim was unable to shift support to his side. For now, the public statements of the opposition suggest a conciliatory tone to the new PM, setting their sights on how to make gains in the next election, which must be held before July 2023.

Whither the reform agenda?

The need for political and institutional reform has come into even clearer relief over the past two years. Although it failed to implement many of its promises while in government, the Alliance of Hope (PH) coalition that briefly ruled after 2018, and Malaysia’s civil society organizations, have laid out comprehensive proposals for political and institutional reform.

An optimistic reading of events would see the instability and fluidity of Malaysia’s current politics as offering space to implement some of those ideas. The very tenuousness of the current government opens some avenues for reform-minded politicians to offer support in exchange for implementation of reform. At the end of his term, former prime minister Muhyiddin (allegedly in negotiation with opposition politicians) offered a number of reform proposals in exchange for the opposition’s support. Although the offer quickly fell apart, some of the proposals—including parliamentary reforms and equal allocations given to opposition MPs—suggest such reforms could become future bargaining chips for political support. Along those lines, the NGO Bersih has proposed that the opposition enter into a confidence and supply agreement with the government, ensuring a modicum of political stability while extracting reforms.

Although still hampered by COVID-justified restrictions, public discontent with the political situation and handling of COVID is increasingly visible. A white flag campaign saw Malaysians hanging flags to appeal for urgent food or financial aid; a newer movement called on Malaysians to hang black flags to display their discontent with the government and handling of the pandemic. In July, the #Lawan movement organised a protest in defiance of the bans on public gatherings. The appetite for political change appears stronger, especially compared to the muted response to the collapse of the PH government in 2020.

On the other hand, there is little to suggest that the governing parties or prime minister are interested in pursuing broad political reforms even during a period of relative weakness. UMNO has strong incentives to keep the opposition PH coalition at arm’s length while maintaining the habits of semi-democratic rule that were revived under Muhyiddin and his government. Similarly, new PM Ismail Sabri’s limited public track record does not indicate a reformist agenda. Prior to his rapid rise in the previous government, Ismail was a prominent figure in organising 2018 protests against ICERD, the UN convention on the elimination of racial discrimination, and made incendiary comments about the threat to Malay rights and supremacy by racial minorities and the majority ethnic Chinese party DAP. He is certainly not the only UMNO leader to have employed such rhetoric, but notably, he had not tried to depart from the mould.

An uncertain future

UMNO’s return to power is itself not surprising. From a comparative perspective, former dominant authoritarian parties like the PRI in Mexico and the KMT in Taiwan did not disappear after national political defeat, but instead remain enduring and important political players. In the case of Malaysia, however, the return of UMNO and many of the parties voted out in 2018 was done without elections and was accompanied by a return to authoritarian tactics to quell dissent and ensure political support.

Judging by the outpouring on social media and on the streets, ordinary Malaysians are angry at the continuous politicking and elite political machinations that have occurred since 2020. This anger has been increasingly visible as the country grapples with economic downturn and escalating cases and deaths from COVID. The instability at the top, however, is not just a question of elite positioning. Instead, it has had real social, economic, and political consequences during a national and global public health crisis. The appointment of a new prime minister does not settle the simmering intra-elite conflict. Yet Malaysia already has the appropriate institutional framework—namely elections and the parliament—to not only negotiate these conflicts and ensure effective oversight of decision making, but also to provide an opportunity for ordinary Malaysians to provide an electoral mandate to a governing coalition.

The country’s political elites have revealed a worryingly loose allegiance to these norms and institutions over the last several months. A commitment by the new government to using democratic avenues to govern and prove mass support would increase the chance of effectively dealing with the significant challenges facing the country. But a commitment to playing by the democratic rules is unlikely to be realized any time soon. The promise of the “New Malaysia” that would emerge after the historic 2018 election has been delayed again indefinitely.

The post Malaysia: The New Political Normal, for Now appeared first on New Mandala.

On 18 May 2021, the National Unity Government (NUG) of Myanmar announced they are now in the process of drafting a new federal union constitution, which as promised by the NUG, will “guarantee democracy, national equality and self-determination based on freedom, equality and justice.”

Later in June, the shadow government, formed by lawmakers and politicians ousted in the February coup, issued a ground-breaking statement suggesting that the Rohingya people would be “entitled to citizenship by laws that will accord with fundamental human rights norms and democratic federal principles,” and once the new constitution has been drafted, Myanmar’s citizenship laws, which have been blamed for reducing the Rohingya to statelessness, could be repealed.

This promise was made over seventy years ago, when Myanmar (formerly Burma) achieved independence from Britain, and the government of the Union of Burma enacted its first constitution in 1947.

Providing a general description in terms of the classification and definition of a Myanmar citizen, the 1947 constitution effectively allowed Rohingyas to qualify for citizenship, as Myanmar citizens were defined as persons who belong to an indigenous race, have at least one grandparent from an indigenous race, are children of citizens, or lived in British Burma prior to 1942.

Unfortunately, after the coup led by Ne Win in 1962, the 1947 constitution was suspended. Ne Win’s military government enacted a new constitution in 1974 which withdrew many provisions of the 1947 constitution, and a large number of Rohingya residents in Arakan were thereafter disqualified for citizenship.

Not much has changed since then. The current constitution, enacted in 2008, requires Rohingyas to qualify for citizenship by providing proof that their parents are citizens or that they are already citizens. This is difficult, since most Rohingya people do not hold valid documents to substantiate their claim for citizenship. Thus, the 2008 Constitution continues to refuse them the possibility of becoming legitimate citizens in Myanmar.

Supplementing constitutional changes, immigration and citizenship laws have played a key role in gradually depriving Rohingyas of their citizenship in Myanmar. Some examples of such laws include the Burma Immigration (Emergency Provisions) Act of 1947, the Union Citizenship Act of 1948, and the Burma Citizenship Law of 1982.

The Burma Immigration (Emergency Provisions) Act of 1947 was originally intended to be an emergency measure regulating the entry of foreigners into Myanmar prior to its independence. Any person suspected of contravening the Act can be arrested without warrant. Myanmar’s immigration authority has the sole power to judge if a person deemed to be “foreigner” had contravened the Act, whether such a “foreigner” should be deported, and how long the “foreigner” should be detained pending deportation. A “foreigner” can also be punished with imprisonment for several years. Given its broad coverage and sweeping powers, a large number of Rohingya people have been persecuted under the Act.

The Union Citizenship Act of 1948 (UCA) was enacted to clarify the issue of citizenship in the 1947 Constitution. Narrowing the scope, article 3(1) of the Act stipulates that “indigenous races of Burma,” for the purpose of the Constitution, refers to the seven racial groups of Arakanese, Burmese (Burman), Chin, Kachin, Karen, Kayah, Mon, Shan, or racial groups that have settled in Myanmar as their permanent home before 1823. Although the Act could be subject to more expansive interpretation, the Rohingya, as a separate ethnic group, were generally not recognised as an “indigenous race.”

In 1982, Myanmar’s government repealed the UCA and enacted the Burma Citizenship Law, which formally refuted the legality of citizenship of almost all Rohingyas. Access to “naturalized citizenship” applies only to those who have entered and resided in Myanmar before 1948 and their offspring born within Myanmar, provided that “conclusive evidence” is furnished. As many Rohingyas settled in Arakan generations ago, and few of them can provide proof of residence because of low literacy and lack of record keeping, they were effectively stripped of their citizenship after enactment of this Law.

Myanmar’s constitution and states laws may be the cause of the plight of Rohingya people. However, such legal developments are tied to two larger phenomena, which both contribute to the persistent exclusion and persecution suffered by the Rohingya.

The first is nativism rooted in Myanmar’s nationalism. This Buddhism-based nationalist ideology, developed during the colonial era by the ethnic majority Burmans to oppose British rule, became the primary means for Myanmar’s political and religious leaders to pursue national stability in post-independence Myanmar. As Myanmar national identity is closely connected with Buddhism, nationalistic sentiments drive many Myanmar people to fear the invasion of “foreign” cultures that threaten Myanmar’s Buddhist culture. Muslim Rohingyas, consequently, are seen by many as “illegal immigrants” posing significant threat to the Myanmar national identity.

With notable support from the population, the Myanmar government has, throughout the years, especially the military junta, has capitalised on the widespread, long-standing public resentment of the Rohingya to consolidate support. Together with local authorities, Buddhist nationalists in Rakhine have persecuted the Rohingyas by ousting them from their jobs, shutting down mosques, confiscating property, and imprisoning or exiling community leaders.

Importantly, they have also exerted great influence in the formulation of laws restricting interfaith marriage, religious conversion, and polygamy. While constitutional reforms and the immigration and citizenship laws laid the foundation for persecution, religiously discriminatory laws, known as the “race and religion protection laws,” systematised and further intensified the pervasive discrimination against the Rohingya people.

The second phenomena is the law and order obsession. From British colonial era to the present, different governments of Myanmar have continued to pursue a governance model prioritising regime stability and efficiency. Rule of law in Myanmar essentially exists in the thin, narrow, and procedural conception, deprived of values such as equality, fairness, and protection of individual rights as in substantive justice.

There might have been some elements of substantive rule of law in the earlier post-independence years, but most of them were swept away following decades of military rule. The maintenance of law and order, through suppressing dissent and delimiting fundamental rights, was in line with the juntas’ goal of containing ethnic conflict and promoting national unity. Even today, this obsession with law and order remains strong in Myanmar’s politics.

To achieve justice for the Rohingya, drafting a new constitution and repealing discriminatory state laws is a good start. The NUG needs to develop clear vision for a more equal and inclusive Myanmar. Reforms should be proposed to improve the Rohingya’s legal status and abolish practices that violate fundamental rights. Considering the strong sentiments of Myanmar’s nationalism, instead of recognising the Rohingya as indigenous race, it may be more feasible to recognize them as naturalised citizens, thus granting them the rights to freedom of movement, communal representation, and dignified living conditions.

However, to truly put an end to the persecution of Rohingyas and promote trust between ethnic groups, it is also necessary for the people of Myanmar to rethink their understanding of nationalism. It is only with a more inclusive form of nationalism adhering to the values of equality, tolerance, and diversity, that the discriminatory attitudes toward Rohingyas can change, and effective long-term measures can be implemented to secure justice and dignity for the Rohingya people.

The post Citizens or foreigners? A socio-legal perspective on persecution of Rohingyas appeared first on New Mandala.

Fueron cinco minutos de video de una intervención ante la Convención Constitucional que se viralizaron. Visiblemente emocionado, el dirigente José Vásquez Chogue, secretario ejecutivo de la Corporación Selk’nam Chile, relató la historia de su abuelo, Carmelo Chogue, sobreviviente del genocidio que afectó a su pueblo, y donde reclamó para el mismo el reconocimiento del Estado.

Su participación fue parte de una intervención de media hora, donde además estuvieron la antropóloga Constanza Tocornal y Hemani Molina, presidenta de la corporación.

«Ellas prepararon la parte técnica, con una presentación. Son tiempos acotados, yo tenía solo cinco minutos. Al final, yo me dije: voy a hablar lo que mis ancestros quieren que yo diga, lo que ellos pusieron en mi corazón mientras yo iba hacia allá. Yo estaba en el Metro y sentí que era algo que ellos estaban poniendo en mí, que era difícil decir quién yo soy, porque el Estado no me reconoce», recuerda. «Pude decir lo que sentía, tanto a nivel familiar como por los que no podían estar ahí de nuestro pueblo».

Vásquez, de profesión ingeniero, es uno de los más de 65 descendientes directos de Carmelo Chogue que están repartidos en Chile y Estados Unidos.

«Por eso es tan doloroso escuchar que estamos muertos. Duele, porque no estamos sujetos a los mismos derechos que el resto. Los selk’nam estamos repartidos por todo el mundo. Estamos vivos y presentes, no solamente en Chile. Hemos tenido que migrar por motivos de subsistencia en este país», cuenta.

Creció escuchando que los selk’nam ya no existían y que lo que quedaba de ellos eran los utensilios que exponía el Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de la Quinta Normal de Santiago, que él mismo visitaba de niño. Una vez contó allí que él mismo era selk’nam. No le creyeron.

La historia de Iones Koscpay

Vásquez (Santiago, 1974) ha podido reconocer la historia de su abuelo a través de los años, entre otros, gracias al trabajo de su propio hermano, Héctor. Compartió con él en una casa familiar en Santiago Centro, en Brasil con Andes, y vivió hasta los 10 años con su abuelo, cuando falleció. Como su propio padre era transportista y estaba poco en casa, pasó mucho tiempo con Carmelo. «Era nuestro segundo padre, por eso el apego tan fuerte con él».

«Crecí con él, pude compartir con él. Le gustaba verme jugar a la pelota, salíamos a cortarnos el pelo o lo acompañaba a cobrar su jubilación», cuenta. «Mi abuelo siempre fue reservado. Nos protegió para que no se supiera que nosotros éramos selk’nam, por el miedo de lo que él pasó, del genocidio, de que nos pudieran dañar, de que nos pudieran matar». Además, por su origen, «su español no era claro ni perfecto».

«Lo que siempre mantuvo, cuando era de noche, era ir a la puerta de su casa, miraba el cielo, hacia nuestro territorio. El cielo, las estrellas y la luna son parte importante de nuestra cosmovisión. Él nos enseñó el significado de esos elementos de la naturaleza. La mujer luna y las estrellas representan a nuestros ancestros. Además tenía boleadoras, una honda». También tejía, trabajaba el cuero e incluso hacía ropa y zapatos para sus nietos.

El ingeniero supo de niño que era selk’nam. Cuando le preguntaban en la escuela por el origen de su apellido, respondía que era un ona.

«De niño siempre iba al Museo (de Historia Natural) y miraba los accesorios de nuestro pueblo… de lo que quedaba de mi pueblo… En una oportunidad, una persona del museo se acercó a mí y yo le dije que mi abuelo era un selk’nam, que estaba vivo y que vivíamos a muy pocas cuadras de allí. Pero no me creyeron. A lo mejor ese museo podría haber rescatado mucho más de nuestro pueblo, de nuestra cultura, si me hubieran acompañado, pero no lo hicieron. Me duele cuando hemos recibido invitaciones y podemos solo mirar las cosas que tienen guardadas, pero no las podemos ni tocar… la energía de nuestros ancestros, sus arcos, sus flechas, sus pieles, sus collares. Eso me duele mucho también».

 

Gracias, entre otros, al trabajo del historiador español José Luis Alonso Marchante, que documentó el genocidio en sus libros Menéndez. Rey de la Patagonia y Selk’nam. Genocidio y resistencia, la familia de Carmelo se enteró, documentos mediante, que el nombre original de Carmelo fue Iones Koscpay.

«La foto de mi abuelo está impresa en libros de historiadores. Incluso está en un museo en Punta Arenas. Es parte de la muestra. En uno de los libros sale su nombre», cuenta.

El ingeniero presume que Koscpay y su familia, alrededor del año 1899, fueron víctimas de una tropa armada. Su padre «debe haber sido muerto, porque en este tipo de capturas en el territorio,los hombres eran asesinados, y también las mujeres mayores. Solo se trataba de conservar a las mujeres jóvenes y los niños».

«Fue capturado con su madre y sus tres hermanos en los campos de Tierra del Fuego, junto a otros hermanos de nuestro pueblo. Fueron deportados a la isla Dawson, a una misión salesiana. Allí fueron registrados. Los registros están en el Museo Salesiano Maggiorino Borgatello de Punta Arenas». Según el Registro Civil, Chogue nació en Porvenir, en 1904, «en Islugui, un lugar que no aparece en los mapas».

Así, Carmelo, junto a sus hermanos –Julio, Camilo y Juana-–y a su madre, Carmen, llegaron a una misión salesiana, siendo él un recién nacido. Allí se crió y fue «uno de los 25 sobrevivientes de la misión», ya que allí las enfermedades «y el trato inhumano que sufrieron» diezmaron a unos mil indígenas, selk’nam y kawésqar.

En 1911, al cierre de la misión, la familia es trasladada a Punta Arenas y Carmelo entregado en adopción a una familia de colonos, aparentemente de origen francés, que le legaron su apellido, Chogue García, tras ser bautizado como Carmelo. Su madre y sus hermanos, en tanto, son llevados al lado argentino.

 

Servicio militar

Según los registros de su familia, Chogue cumple su servicio militar en Iquique, en el regimiento de Infantería Nº5, «Carampangue», tras lo cual se une al naciente Cuerpo de Carabineros, con el grado de cabo. Esta entidad daría origen a Carabineros de Chile en 1927. Cumplió servicio en la localidad de María Elena, en la actual Región de Antofagasta, pero tras unos años pidió su baja por sufrir asma y se trasladó a Santiago.

En la capital se integró a la Empresa de Transportes Colectivos del Estado (ETC), donde trabajó como cobrador y conductor de trolebuses. En una fuente de soda conoció a su mujer, Margarita Salazar, y tuvo a su única hija, Orfa Chogue, hoy de 85 años. Orfa tendría a su vez siete hijos, el menor de los cuales es José Vásquez.

Aunque durante algún tiempo Chogue mantuvo contacto con sus hermanos y su madre, finalmente lo perdió.

«Tratamos de ubicarlos, años después, mediante la Radio Portales, cuando uno escribía cartas para el reencuentro familiar». Pero ha sido en vano.

Reconocimiento

Hoy el ingeniero Vásquez lucha por el reconocimiento de su pueblo. Ha asumido un nombre selk’nam, Xawqe Chokèn («arpón de fuego») y está orgulloso de ser uno de los que más se parece a su abuelo.

La corporación nació a partir de una reunión de descendientes selk’nam, gestionada por las redes sociales, de la comunidad Covadonga Ona, en 2018, donde hubo más de 200 personas y un «reencuentro» entre lágrimas.

Esa comunidad ayudó a la familia Vásquez Chogue a profundizar la búsqueda de sus orígenes.

«Queremos ser incorporados a la Ley Indígena, ser el undécimo pueblo indígena reconocido por el Estado. Es difícil, porque algunos políticos cuestionan nuestra existencia, nuestro linaje. Dicen que andamos buscando enriquecernos. Yo pido que me nombren un indígena rico o millonario, cuando son ellos los que se han enriquecido, miembros del Senado de Chile tienen partes de nuestro territorio, políticos de derecha y de izquierda que hoy gozan de la riqueza del territorio de nuestro pueblo, y que tienen en sus casas artefactos y reliquias de nuestro pueblo. No sé si lo guardan de trofeo o de adorno, pero así es la realidad hoy día. Y son ellos los que están truncando nuestro proceso de reconocimiento», acusa.

Vásquez señala que el Estado se niega a financiar un estudio que él mismo podría pagar con su 10% de la AFP. «Por eso digo que es irrisoria la cifra, se gasta en un almuerzo en La Moneda en una actividad política». Una negativa que además impidió que hoy tengan un representante en la Convención. «Ha sido intencional», critica.

Celebra, sin embargo, que a partir del estallido social ha habido una revalorización de los pueblos originarios, incluido el suyo. De hecho, hubo una figura de madera selk’nam, por algunos días, en la Plaza Baquedano (también conocida como Italia o de la Dignidad).

Por lo pronto, en sus hijas se transmite la herencia selk’nam. Así, «vemos que la herencia de nuestro abuelo va a continuar. Desde pequeñas les fui diciendo quién era mi abuelo, mostrando sus fotografías. Hemos podido decir a nuestros hijos quiénes somos». Su hermano Héctor le trajo de un viaje a Tierra del Fuego, además, un frasco con tierra. Así, «nuestra tierra siempre está con nosotros».