Wednesday, September 15, 2004

HARVEST TIME AGAIN FOR RC
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
September 15, 2004

He retired first in his mid-thirties - a successful businessman whose goal was to achieve financial independence early so he could serve his country and family and live the way he wanted to.

The next retirement came when he already had three grandchildren, a quadruple bypass, and the kind of public prominence that could only be bestowed by the singularly belligerent, mordant, street-smart brand of activism he wielded against the Philippine government.

Twice he has retired and both instances he met on his own terms: he desired it, he looked forward to it, he willed it; and one day it was in place. He lived the words of the English novelist John Galsworthy, who said that "if you do not think about the future, you cannot have one."

For friend and foe alike, his surliness was legendary. On the occasion of the State of the Nation presidential address almost a decade ago and marching towards the Batasang Pambansa at the helm of a demonstration numbering a hundred thousand, he was warned by the Secretary of Justice in a live radio news program that though they were free to march, freedom of expression and assembly had limits. The warning he took as an incentive.

He thanked the secretary rather politely on the air and once off the air he proceeded to march with his group through five menacing police barricades each manned by water cannons and fully armored, truncheon-wielding crowd dispersal police units. At the last barricade, bruised and bloodied, he went straight to the line of shields, thrust his head right in front of the helmeted police and pulled the truncheon of a policeman and dared the policeman to hit him on the head as other policemen had done in the barricades they had just passed. The policeman stared at him, completely befuddled by the activist's impudence, and refused to use his truncheon. No other truncheon was used again that day.

Another time, just days after his heart surgery and still weak and recovering in his hospital room, he asked to be transferred to another area after the cooling system in the intensive care ward conked out.

Over an hour later and after many unheeded requests, still in the same room and already sweating and worried he may develop pneumonia - but actually more infuriated that his requests had been ignored - the patient whose chest was cut open just days ago goes up a flight of stairs, walks straight to the admitting section in his hospital gown, lifts and hurls a couple of computers to the floor and tells the shocked personnel politely "Do I have your attention? I need a place where the aircon works otherwise my health may deteriorate." He refuses to leave the room, which he found quite cool. Orderlies swiftly bring in a hospital bed and he tucks himself in and in a minute is snoring in the admitting section.

Of the many vital moments in his life, the battles with the powers that be he enjoyed the most; the higher they were, the more he relished the political skirmishes. He always said this to his only son - always respect your opponents - a stance he combined with trademark savvy, contagious optimism, maddening meticulousness, moral purpose and epic stubbornness.

National Security Adviser Joe Almonte and President Fidel Ramos disrespected him once by underestimating him and they paid dearly for it when they attempted to ban the Asia Pacific Conference on East Timor (APCET) he had led in organizing in 1994 - a watershed assembly, it would later turn out, which amplified the plight and cause of East Timor globally and helped accelerate the independence of the newest country in Asia today.

He was alone mostly in his doggedness - more so when signals from the Philippine government that they disapproved of APCET and did not wish to upset Jakarta and the despotic ASEAN consensus of silence became more ominous and increasingly threatening - signals which finally led to the Ramos administration announcing their intention to ban the East Timor conference. "Well, we will defy the ban," the activist replied publicly.

When sections of the Philippine media came out in support of the Ramos ban and condemned the activist's hard-headedness, the activist became even more determined to hold the conference. And thus earned the respect of some in the media, including a national daily by the name of TODAY, which had just begun to publish that year.

That Filipino journalists "should join the jubilation over the . . . ban on the APCET conference only shows we do not deserve the freedom and rights that groups like APCET helped to give us," wrote TODAY in its May 14, 2004 editorial titled "Constantino correct".

"What RC Constantino and the other APCET organizers put together was the sort of conference that all decent and intelligent men and women, and all honest writers, should support," the editorial continued. "The obligation of every journalist is to stand alongside RC Constantino in exposing and denouncing a brutality that cannot - unless you are an animal - find any justification or mitigation in reasons of state . . . the moral rationale for the conference is unimpeachable."

But the ban remained. And so did RC Constantino's defiance of the ban. As the East Timor meet neared its end and it was clear they had been outflanked, Ramos administration officials threw in the towel. By June 5, on the front page of the Manila Times - similar to the front pages of other newspapers - a photo above the front page story reporting the successful conclusion of the APCET meet showed a beaming RC carrying his first grandchild, Ia, on his left arm and holding in his right hand the gavel that would end the conference.

RC Constantino turns 60 today - a warrior in retirement (try as he might, he cannot shed his warrior ways) and an accomplished full-time lolo (grandfather), the chairman of the board of a prestigious language school and a generous adviser to the many who continue to seek his counsel - through text messages, phone calls, lunches and dinners and, as before, through visits to Panay Avenue.

"Old age, to the unlearned, is winter," a Yiddish proverb goes, and "to the learned, it is harvest time." RC continues to harvest what life has to offer, at 60 years of age, even as he continues to play Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo each noon on his Mac with his six-year old grandson Rio Renato, merienda frenzies with his other grandchildren, the rambunctious affections of his children, the unfettered love of his mother, the graceful Letizia, and the extraordinary love of Dudi - nurturing mother, woman, wife, nationalist and writer, whose dreams RC passionately shares.

Happy birthday, Pa, from a grateful son. An American, President Theodore Roosevelt, captured best the example you have so generously shared to so many:

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again because there is no effort without error and shortcomings, who knows the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the high achievement of triumph and who, at worst, if he fails while daring greatly, knows his place shall never be with the timid and cold souls who know neither victory or defeat."[i]

NOTES:
[i] Isyu, August 14, 1996.

Monday, September 13, 2004

NARRATIVES OF FOLLY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
September 13, 2004

We continue to live in interesting times where "the young," wrote Decoly, "delude themselves about their future; the old folks about their past."

Last May 6, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution "which, in effect, authorized a 'pre-emptive' attack on Iran. The vote was 376-3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one commentator, 'once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of American power.'"[1]

It is unthinkable for the superpower - and its believers - to leave Iranians to decide their own fate. The ignorant are taken in by tacitly racist reasoning: an oppressed people cannot liberate themselves without the help of the empire's humanitarian weapons of mass destruction. The learned espouse imperial intervention for convictions they secretly harbor. Convictions nakedly expressed by one of the greatest tribunes of Western civilization.

Referring to Palestinians before the Peel Commission of Inquiry in 1937 - at the height of the British colonial offensive which eventually crushed the first Palestinian intifada - Winston Churchill declared: "I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right, I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."[2]

Iran wasn't always ruled by an anti-American, virulently fundamentalist theocracy. Once upon a time, Iran had a parliament - and a real prime minister who was actually chosen and embraced by his people. Physically frail due to his advanced age, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was nonetheless a giant of a man who insisted to Iranians - and the world - that democracy can and should serve, feed, educate and clothe one's people.

He was a charismatic and driven man. At the pinnacle of his popularity, the name Mossadegh stood for moral purpose, independence and Iranian dignity. But dignity, moral purpose and independence are words that imperial powers do not always look upon with favor. Especially when the leader who lives the words leads a country overflowing with oil. And so the dignified man had to go.

"Neither by trusteeship nor by contract will we turn over to foreigners the right to exploit our natural oil resources," Mossadegh once wrote in a speech delivered to the UN Security Council in 1951, the year he was chosen by Time magazine - over Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower - as its Man of the Year. A full year almost to the day before Mossadegh expelled the last citizens of Britain - the erstwhile colonial tormentor of Iran - and less than two years before Mossadegh himself was ousted by a coup d'état sponsored by the US government, which despised Mossadegh's independence and craved Iran's oil, a coup supported by a humiliated British government, the erstwhile colonial tormentor of Iran.

Days after Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated in January 1953, the American ambassador to Tehran, Loy Henderson, "began contacting Iranians he thought might be interested in working to overthrow Mossadegh." The goal: to foment unrest in the streets of Tehran, destabilize the Mossadegh government and establish the pretext for a coup, which came close to exactly what took place in Iran.

The mob that "was decisive in the overthrow [of Mossadegh] was a mercenary mob," said Richard Cottam, who was on the Operation Ajax staff in Washington. "It had no ideology, and that mob was paid with American dollars."[3] Dollars that totaled, depending on which expenses are counted, "anywhere between $100,000 to $20 million."

After the coup, an international oil consortium was set up to ransack Iran's main resource. Five American companies took up 40 percent of the consortium, with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which would later change its name to British Petroleum, or BP) - the company with which Britain previously plundered Iran's wealth - comprising another 40 percent. Lesser vultures Royal Dutch/Shell and Compagnie Française de Petroles formed the remainder of the consortium, which "agreed to share its profits with Iran on a fifty-fifty basis but not to open its books to Iranian auditors or to allow Iranians onto its board of directors."

Operation Ajax bought the American government 25 years of stable relations - with the Iranian potentate of Mohammad Reza Shah. On the 25th year of the Shah's brutal reign, outrage spilled over and forced the despised Iranian monarch to flee. Straight into the waiting arms of the United States government.

No one else then thought this conclusion possible - except, of course, the people of Iran.

In 1977, two years before the Shah was overthrown, the celebrated war reporter Robert Fisk and Ed Cody of the Associated Press had driven into a Shia village in war-torn Lebanon "to find the usual tea-drinking Palestinians sitting in a field beside the main road, their officer lecturing them about the need to move their mortar positions every 24 hours." Lebanon was then the prime battleground between the Israeli army and Palestinian fighters.

The journalists noticed a gunman in the group who seemed different from the others. The gunman "wore a coal-black scarf - not a kuffiah - around his neck. And he appeared to speak no Arabic. His English, however, was almost perfect. The gunman asked Fisk and Cody to translate what his officer was saying to him. Cody, Fisk recounted, asked the gunman why he spoke no Arabic. "Because I am not an Arab. I am from Iran," said the gunman, who grinned at Fisk and Cody. "I am from the opposition in Iran. I have come to learn here how to fight. We understand a common cause with our Palestinian brothers. With their help, we can learn to destroy the Shah." Fisk and Cody held back their laughter. An Iranian training in Lebanon to overthrow (what was then) the most formidable dictatorship in the Middle East? Yeah right, thought the journalists. "And, of course," Fisk would later recount in his soul-searing book, Pity the Nation, "we were wrong."[4]

But no one, not even Iranians, would be able to predict the events set in motion by the overthrow of the Shah. Such as the 1979 hostage-taking of Americans at the US embassy by panic-stricken Iranians who feared the Shah would be re-installed by the US government; the takeover by fundamentalist Islamic clerics of the Iranian revolution; Iraq's invasion of Iran; the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan; and "the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

All arguably connected and traceable, according to Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men, the gripping account of the US-engineered overthrow of Mossadegh, to Operation Ajax.

The blood of hundreds of thousands spilled; an immeasurable number of lives lost - and for what? So that a has-been empire and a hyper-empire could slake its thirst for power and oil?


NOTES:
[1] "The warlords of America," John Pilger, The New Statesman, September 8, 2004.
[2] The clash of fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, Tariq Ali, 2002, Verso.
[3] All the Shah's men: An American coup and the roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
[4] Pity the Nation: the abduction of Lebanon, Robert Fisk, 2002, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books.


Sunday, September 05, 2004

NOTHING NEW IN THE WORLD
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, TODAY, abs/cbnNEWS.com
September 6, 2004

"Memory says, 'I did that,'" Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote. "Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields."

Three years ago in America, on September 11, airplanes fell from the sky and thousands died. Countless numbers mourned the mass murder. Countless mourn still. On the same day 31 years ago, the sky fell in Chile when the democratically-elected Allende government was overthrown in a bloody coup staged by the American government. Who mourns the Chilean sky?

Remembering is a political act, wrote Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. "Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny."[1]

In 1953, the United States engineered a coup in Iran which ousted the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh - an Iranian colossus who happened to live in a frail old man's body.

The Iranian giant's commitment to social reform was unrivaled in his country's history while his towering presence in the international arena as a voice of poor countries presaged the era of giants such as Kwame Nkrumah, Sukarno and Patrice Lumumba.

During Mossadegh's time, Iranian peasants were freed from forced labor in their landlords' estates, factory owners were ordered to pay benefits to sick and injured workers, and unemployment compensation was established. The giant caused twenty percent of the money landlords received in rent to be placed in a fund to pay for development projects like pest control, rural housing, and public baths.

The giant supported women's rights and defended religious freedom and allowed courts and universities to function freely. In addition, the colossus was known even by his enemies, as "scrupulously honest and impervious to the corruption that pervaded Iranian politics."

But above all, the giant was independent. Too independent. Mossadegh had thrown out the British, nationalized the Iranian oil industry in order that Iranians may benefit first from their own resources, and was intent on implementing further sweeping social reforms. And so one day in 1953 - when America still enjoyed the affections of the Iranian people - the US government decided that Mossadegh should not rule for long. And it schemed and schemed and schemed.

Code-named Operation Ajax and designed, hatched and led by Kermit Roosevelt, a key CIA operative and a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, the American-orchestrated coup toppled Mossadegh and forever "reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East and the world. [The coup] restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne," allowing the monarch to impose a murderous 25-year tyranny which claimed the lives of thousands of Iranians.

The US agents who had assembled in the American embassy compound in Tehran as soon as the success of the coup was ensured were "full of jubilation, celebration, and occasional whacks on the back as one or the other of us was suddenly overcome with enthusiasm," recalled Kermit Roosevelt in his book Countercoup: The struggle for the control of Iran - a book which came out ironically in 1979, the year of the American hostage crisis in Iran.

Jubilation and celebration. Maybe it's all about perspective. Maybe not.

Where the US government "saw a glorious day," exiled Iranian intellectual Sasan Fayazmanesh would write 50 years later, "we saw a day of infamy." Where American officials "wished the day had never ended, we wished it had never begun." Where the United States "saw a dazzling picture of his majesty's restoration to power, we saw grotesque pictures of a brutal dictatorship, informants, dungeons, torture, executions."[2]

"My only crime," Mossadegh would recall after his ouster, "is that I nationalized the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth" - referring to Iran's former tormentor, Britain. But Mossadegh had also committed another 'crime' - one with far more grave consequences: he took no notice of the fact that America had already overtaken Britain in the global imperial race - an America ruled by a government that despised his independence even as it coveted his country's oil.[3]

But what goes around comes around. There is always a day of reckoning.

"It is a reasonable argument," argued an American foreign policy journal, "that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup's legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the U.S. embassy." Hostages were taken by panic-stricken Iranians who feared the Shah would be re-installed by the US.

"In the back of everybody's mind hung the suspicion that, with the admission of the Shah to the United States, the countdown for another coup d'etat had begun," one of the hostage-takers would recall years after the incident. "Such was to be our fate again, we were convinced, and it would be irreversible. We now had to reverse the irreversible."

The hostage crisis, asserts New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer in his book All the Shah's Men - a brilliant reconstruction of the American coup - precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran and helped consolidate the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein "while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran . . . Can anybody say the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was inevitable? Or did it only become so once the aspirations of the Iranian people were temporarily expunged in 1953?"

"It is not far-fetched," states Kinzer, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's oppressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

Outrageous? Not entirely, so long as pride yields to memory.

"There is nothing new in the world," said Harry Truman, "except the history you do not know."


NOTES:

[1] "The Bush Crusade," James Carroll, tomdispatch.com, September 3, 2004.
[2] "The coup, 50 years after: what Kermit didn't say: in memory of August 19, 1953," Sasan Fayazmanesh, Counterpunch, August 15, 2003.
[3] All the Shah's men: An American coup and the roots of Middle East Terror, Stephen Kinzer, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003.
[4] The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity, Tariq Ali, Verso, 2002.