Opinion | Wanna Ver: Why I must confront the Philippines’ painful past — including my father’s role

I’m the daughter of Gen. Fabian Ver. For 20-plus years, my father was Marcos’s right-hand man, the chief of employees of the armed forces and the overseer of the nation’s intelligence and nationwide safety equipment. He was the second-most highly effective man within the nation, fiercely loyal to the Marcos household.

I grew up being taught that the Marcos period was the nation’s Golden Age. I believed that Marcos’s nice achievements made our nation and folks flourish. In my 20s, Imelda Marcos, who was visiting our household after my father’s dying in exile, informed me that a number of public relations companies have been smearing the Marcos title. I believed this was the explanation many individuals described their rule as a “brutal dictatorship.”

I’ve lived in exile in the US and Europe for many of my life. It was solely lately, after I started doing my very own analysis in regards to the martial legislation period below Marcos, that I got here to phrases with the tales about my father and the Marcoses.

At present, Marcos’s son, Ferdinand Jr., is the front-runner in subsequent week’s presidential elections, poised to reclaim the presidency that some imagine had been wrongfully seized from his household. I used to imagine that, too. It took me years of analysis to lastly perceive that the 1986 revolution was the truth is peaceable, and that it was an necessary step towards constructing democracy within the Philippines.

Since then, I’ve labored with the survivors of the Marcos regime. In Sweden, the place I at present reside, I helped kind a bunch that’s gathering the tales of those that had suffered through the dictatorship. Our purpose is to provide survivors an opportunity to speak about torture, arrest, extrajudicial executions and compelled disappearances.

I interview survivors each as a journalist and the daughter of one of many males identified for giving orders that resulted of their struggling.

To them, I’m the face of a brutal dictatorship but additionally a witness to their ache. I inform them I’m sorry these atrocities occurred to them. A torture survivor informed me our assembly was cathartic — I used to be the primary, if not the one, individual from the Marcos regime to hearken to the horrors he had lived by, and the one one who has acknowledged to him and to others that what they suffered was incorrect.

One lady thanked me for preserving the story of her slain brother and invited me to go to. One other wept. She is a author who was arrested in 1976 and compelled by her captors to level a gun to her head and play Russian roulette. She, too, thanked me. They gave the impression to be saying that if Gen. Ver’s daughter is right here — listening and apologizing — possibly there may be hope for reconciliation.

Marcos Jr. has not apologized for his father’s sins. Quite the opposite, he champions what he says are his father’s nice contributions to the Philippines. Loyalists typically ask for survivors to forgive and neglect, however our deeply Catholic nation is aware of forgiveness solely happens after confession, penance and restitution. Filipinos can’t transfer on as a result of they’ve did not pay attention to one another, to acknowledge and account for the sins of the previous.

Many in my household really feel in another way than I do. They are saying “it’s time to forgive and bury the hatchet for the sake of our nation and the individuals.”

It’s troublesome to confront the previous. My husband tries to consolation me, suggesting that, as a result of I used to be so younger after we fled the nation, I solely knew Fabian Ver, the aged exile who might simply be a dad. Not the Gen. Ver, whose military dedicated human rights violations and crushed dissent, not the loyal officer who stood trial for the assassination of Marcos’s rival, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.

It could be simpler to maintain quiet, however silence is what has allowed the revision of historical past and denial of individuals’s testimonies. I’ve heard sufficient tales from those that suffered and can’t be quiet any longer.

No matter who wins, at this essential second in our historical past, I hope for a president who can have the braveness to place the Philippines first, to hearken to our countrymen and ladies, to decide on reconciliation over revision, and carve a brand new path towards therapeutic our nation.