The trials of Jose Maria Sison
http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2007/sept/08/yehey/opinion/20070908opi2.html
THE OTHER VIEW
Manila Times Saturday, September 08, 2007
The arrest of Jose Maria “Joma” Sison in Netherlands recalls his capture in Pangasinan in 1976. We were in Montreal at the time, and we heard the dictator say that the “insurgency” was finished with Sison’s capture. Reports reached us that Sison was severely tortured and chained to his cot in solitary sell. A picture of his haggard and unshaven face reached the anti-martial law group and soon there were silk-screen posters made with that picture and the slogan, “You can imprison a revolutionary but not the revolution.”
Sison endured the unspeakable tortures and bartolina for 18 months (he was released along with others after EDSA by President Aquino). Out of his travails poured forth lines of poetry smuggled out of prison—recalling an earlier revolutionary Amado Henandez who also wrote in his bartolina lines of poetry secretly brought out in slips of paper by his intrepid wife Atang de la Rama. In the case of Joma his beloved wife Julie de Lima was also imprisoned in another cell. From their rare moments of conjugal meetings was conceived and born a son, now a full-grown adult, as resolute as his parents in radical politics.
“Fragments of a Nightmare” is one of the prison poems that Joma wrote. His capture is rendered in the lines:
“The demons burst through the flimsy door,
Raise the din of bloodlust
And sicken the sudden light.
I am surrounded by armed demons
Prancing and manacling me.
I am wrenched from my beloved
And carried on frenzied wheels
Through the strange cold night.”
Dragged to the Palace for a meeting with the dictator, Sison remembered:
“I am brought to the center of hell
To the Devil and his high demons
For a ritual of flashbulbs.
The Devil waves away his minions
And we engage in a duel of words.
For a start, he talks of buying souls.
Repulsed, he shifts to setting a trap for fools and the
innocent
Repulsed again, he ends with a threat
That he will never see me again.”
After rebuffing the dictator who wanted to make a Faust of Sison, the prisoner was blindfolded and brought to “a sprawling fort, a certain compound” to a “cell of utter silence” to which he was “roughly plunged.” Sison wrote, “The demons want me to feel / Blind, lost, suffocating, helpless.” The weeks and months that followed were all types of torture worthy of the Inquisition. “The torture does not cease / But becomes worse a thousand times.” But through the pain and agony,” I keep on thinking of sea gulls / Frail and magical above the blue ocean / and doves in pairs so gentle / One partner so close to the other.”
With “only bedbugs, mosquitoes, ants / cockroaches, lizards, and spiders “as companions in his cell, he wrote: “I miss and yearn for my beloved / And think of her own fate / I long for my growing children; / I long for the honest company / of workers, peasants, and comrades./ I long for the people rising / And the wide open spaces of my country.”
Those who tend to demonize or caricature the revolutionary might try a fraction of what Sison went through and see if they could stay whole as Sison did in ten years of Marcos’ jail.
After 20 years of living in exile, devoted principally to writing books and lecturing about the people’s struggle for genuine social change, Sison is once again immobilized (but only physically) with his arrest. Once again he is in solitary in a Dutch version of Guantánamo, deprived of his basic rights as a prisoner in what we thought was a civilized and humane society. The US government that has long wanted him eliminated as “communist terrorist” has offered to assist the Dutch government prosecute Sison. No less than the ambassador has made US intervention patent. Need she be reminded that her country’s Founding Fathers were seen as terrorists by the British.
On the other, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark has offered to help defend Sison.
Clark said to fellow Americans: “Sison is a great spirit that the world needs to know, a great voice that the world needs to hear. The demonization [of him] will destroy us if we permit it to continue.” He has kept faith with the libertarian ideals of the Founding Fathers. He called the Human Security Act of this country a copy of the US Patriot Act—seen universally as an instrument of state terror. ###