Bullying the State University
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Students rally after the Philippine Department of National Defense cancels the long time agreement that officers of the military and police can operate in the university. (Source: Reuters/Nikkei Asia)
Just before the holidays, it opened to a limited schedule, allowing people to jog, do their daily stroll, picnic at sunset – a return to what it used to be. On the weekends, it becomes a crowded park that is uncommon in a metropolis lacking of green landscape.
In mid-January, just out of the blue, the secretary of national defense announced that it was unilaterally breaking an accord with the university disallowing the presence of the military and police, on the grounds that it is a recruitment environment for communists classified as terrorists.
At that instant social media burst into a resistance and an outcry, as if the scenario was a deja vu of the social unrest during the martial law years of the 1970s and the 1980s. It then became part of a script the government of President Rodrigo Duterte has been aiming for – a return to authoritarianism.
Just like that, it painted a picture of the university as a nest for communists as if it were school policy to send students to the mountains to be guerrillas. It is almost laughable and yet so flabbergasting one wonders if the military has lost its sense of history – or its mind; that a backlash might actually create the opposite of its purported intention to save kids from turning red.
The university, a creation of the American colonial regime, has been known to be a hotbed of left-wing student activism and a milieu of academic freedom – a privilege in a country where most private schools are run by Catholics. It is meant to breed the best for nation-building, but it has also, over the decades, bred capitalists, corrupt government officials, and fascists.
An art installation on the front steps of UP's Palma Hall in 2020 commemorates the Diliman Commune on its 50th anniversary this year. (Photo by Gemma Nemenzo)
Gone are the days when the fire of activism saw students lead massive demonstrations that threatened government, as it did in the early 1970s when Ferdinand Marcos eventually declared martial law and reigned with terror until he was ousted from power in 1986. Is the military establishment trying to return to the past? Did it not learn that the insurgency grew because of martial law?
The communist insurgency has slowly diminished in the post-dictatorship years, with the outlawed Communist Party bitterly splitting into factions. One could not discount Party members still trying to recruit students not only from the main campus, but also from other schools; and in the current mood at the University of the Philippines, they are likely competing with other interests, such as religious groups, fraternities, or even Korean students searching for English-speaking tutors.
I have known military officers studying for degrees in higher education. I sometimes run into officers jogging or joining bicycle races around the campus. I meet them for lunches in restaurants also favored by leftists and they greet each other amiably. We have long chats at a café and no one bothers us.
The campus is an icon of freedom and also of tranquility, and it has always remained that way. Where else could one go for peace of mind in a city blasted by noise, literally, and for open discussions of just about anything under the splendid arcs of ancient acacia trees? Where else could one enjoy cheaper classical concerts all-year-round and the colorful lantern parade before Christmas?
All of that came to a halt when the pandemic struck almost a year ago. In my bike rides to look for food around the campus, I’d see school buildings that are used to temporarily house front-liners and as quarantine shelters.
Scientists from the university designed testing kits that the government ignored. The government could not even get its act together when it came to mass testing and contact tracing, putting us in one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in the world. We are second to the highest number of coronavirus cases in Southeast Asia. The government is struggling to figure out how to get access to vaccines. Meanwhile, a scandal flared when the president’s security officials were caught getting their shots secretly and illegally.
And in all the months of quarantine, as we were virtually imprisoned in our own homes, freedoms were being snatched away. Foremost was the shutdown of the giant television network ABS-CBN in May. It was the only station that could reach remote villages around the country. Now, the conflict over the university’s academic freedom is not going to go away soon.
The defense secretary, Delfin Lorenzana, likened the campus to Korea’s demilitarized zone, clearly distorting the image of the university, which is less than ten kilometers from his headquarters, in between a strip mall, other universities, condominiums, and restaurants. His brand of propaganda will likely backfire and expose his aim of making the university a target of the military’s McCarthyite red-tagging campaign.
Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana (Source: GMA News)
On the day of Lorenzana’s announcement, armed soldiers in fatigue uniforms drove into the campus in trucks supposedly for a civil-military operation to helping to plant vegetables for the pandemic. I have seen such kind of operations so many times in areas of conflict in the south, but this one is hilarious. The military has invited ridicule upon itself. And it will invite dire consequences if it continues its attempt to suppress academic freedom as it had done in the days of martial law.
Criselda Yabes
Criselda Yabes is a writer and journalist based in Manila. Her most recent books include Crying Mountain (Penguin SEA) on the 1970s rebellion in Mindanao and Broken Islands (Ateneo de Manila University Press) set in the Visayas in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
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