PERHAPS it was because of something like the so-called fog of war or an instance of the adage that history is written by the victors. But there were facts â now indisputable â that we didnât know, or were hidden from public knowledge, during the February 1986 People Power Revolt and even three decades later.
Perhaps because of the disillusionment with the presidency of the son of the so-called heroine of EDSA I, the facts have been ferreted out or have simply become clearer.
“Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men..â Horace Mann, American educator, 1848
RATHER than âIskolar ng Bayanâ (Scholars of the People) with its connotation that theyâre from the masses, students of the University of the Philippines are mostly âIskolar na Mayayamanâ (rich scholars).
Based on official UP data, its typical student is from the upper class, whose tuition taxpayers heavily subsidize: 72 percent are among the A and B brackets, or those whose families have income of at least P500,000. Only 6.2 percent are from the lowest E bracket, who are not charged tuition.
This conclusion is extracted from the UPâs report on beneficiaries of its Socialized Tuition and Financial Assistance Program. The number of those in the AB could be a bit inflated, based on the argument that the UPâs requirements to prove oneâs eligibility to the STFAP program is so rigorous that many of those not from the upper classes do not bother to go through the process. I donât believe this though: Really poor parents would do all they can to save a few thousands in tuition they deserve.
The class structure for a university the state subsidizes is scandalous. The UPâs full tuition for a year is P54,000, while its actual cost has been estimated to be nearly triple that, at P150,000. Why would the governmentâus taxpayersâsubsidize a rich college kidâs tuition by nearly P100,000?
The data shows something deeply wrong in the UP, as a heavily subsidized national university. UP Manila student Kristel Tejada took her life when she fell into deep depression that she had to stay out of school as her application to be moved to the E2 bracket (full tuition subsidy and a stipend) was not acted upon.
And how many UP Manila students were in the E2 bracket? One hundred ninety-eight: 3.3 percent of the UP Manilaâs 5,938. If Kristel was taken in into the E2 bracket, that poorest strata would account for just 3.4 percent of its student population. Was that such a difficult decision from UP Manilaâs administrators?
The UP systemâs budget is about P10 billion. How many poor students are there in UP who do not have to pay tuition fee? Just 2,544 or 6 percent of its 41,356 students.
In the US, college tuition accounts for an average of 17 percent of a familyâs income. In the UP tuition is just 5.4 percent of those in the A bracket, or those with at an annual income of P1 million. The P54,000 the 72 percent of rich UP students pay for tuition is dwarfed by their familiesâ annual budget for such leisure as for eating out, or a summer vacation.
Even in such things as the state-funded national university, the elite manages to use it to perpetrate itself. (more…)
The Manila Times, April 15, 2013 For the sake of world peace, President Aquino should ask Communist Partyâs senior leader Jose Ma. Sison, (Joma) and ask him to talk…
Tuition Fees Per Year in Pesos (36 units, or for a year): Education for all, certainly, but charge the rich
The Manila Times, March 27, 2013
WHAT makes the suicide of University of the Philippines student Kristel Tejada so tragic is this:
While she got so despondent that her family couldnât afford her tuition fees, the university has actually been subsidizing children of the Philippine elite.
The UPâs âfull tuitionâ fee (imposed for students whose families ostensibly make P1 million or more a year) is P54,000 for 36 units, for a yearâs maximum academic load. That’s a preposterous 5 percent of their income that they’re allocating for their son or daughter’s college education, really the best in the country.Thatâs peanuts for the rich, not even close to what they spend in the year eating out.
The populists and Leftists at UP would protest that thisâor any tuition level actuallyâis too high for a state university. But this is a subsidized rate: There have been studies that the actual cost for UPâs quality college education would be three times that, about P150, 000.
Hostage Rodwell: Why are US troops, not Filipino soldiers, securing him? Photo from Western Mindanao Command.
The Manila Times, March 25, 2013
Unless President Aquino and even most Filipinos have become so dense to realize it, the recent release by the Abu Sayyaf bandits of Australian Warren Rodwell is a huge red neon sign for the world to read:
âVisit the Philippines, Asiaâs Ransom Republic, if you want to be kidnapped by bandits and then pay millions of pesos to be released. Â Hassle-free arrangements will be made for payment of the ransom by our police and local governments.â
While we rejoice that a human life has been saved, âgovernmentâs handlingâ of, or rather, total inutility over the kidnapping diminishes our integrity as a nation, unless Mr. Aquino himself goes on a televised press conference to deny that P7 million in ransom paid was paid for the Australian âs release.
But it was Basilan Vice Gov. Al Rasheed Sakalahul who told one newspaper that he witnessed the payment of P4 million to Abu Sayyaf leader Pujuri Indama. The Abu Sayyaf got only P4 million of the ransom, the paper said, as âlocal officials and middlemenâ took their cut. (more…)
Bocalan, who claimed Marcos asked him to finance and help run Operation Merdeka. Photo and caption from the book, âBossism in the Philippinesâ by John Sidel
The Manila Times, March 22, 2013
Last of Three Parts
The allegations that Muslim youths were massacred in 1968 in Corregidor in a plan gone awry to take Sabah from Malaysia, as I explained last Wednesday, effectively buried our countyâs claim to that territory.
Then Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. in his speech on the controversy March 28, 1968 claimed the Malaysians had a hand in creating conditions for what was hyped in media as âthe Jabidah Massacre. â
But behind the controversy was, as Filipinos term it, âpulitikaâ, politics in its most pejorative sense. âJabidahâ was a propaganda weapon in the political war between two warlords for the control of Cavite in the 1971 elections as well as for the Philippine presidency.
How exactly did the allegations of a âJabidah massacreâ break out? (more…)
The âJabidah massacreâ commemoration at Corregidor March 18. Why did the MILF and the MNLF ignore it? This article answers that question.
The âJabidahâ question
Second of Three Parts
Malaysiaâs leadership have been probably laughing their heads off reading about President Aquino delivering a speech in the event commemorating the alleged 1968 âJabidah massacreâ of Muslim youths initially recruited to form a commando unit codenamed to infiltrate Sabah.
It was the âJabidahâ allegations that hugged headlines for several days in 1968 that buried our claim to that territory in Borneo. Â
This was due to three of its consequences:
The publicity over the alleged massacre enraged thousands of Muslim youth to swell the ranks of the fledgling Moro National Liberation Front.  Malaysia after âJabidahâ not only gave it substantial finances, but also even militarily trained its first officers and provided sanctuary to its leaders. President Marcosâ Operation Merdeka (âFreedomâ) was intended to create a Tausug rebellion in Sabah. Instead, because of allegations of a massacre of Muslims by Marcosâ army, it was a Muslim rebellion that broke out in Mindanao, aided by Malaysia.
The Malaysian involvement proved to be crucial to the MNLFâs strength that by 1976 Marcos declared that the only way to end the insurgency is to give up the Sabah claim so that Malaysia would stop its crucial support of the secessionists.
In the public consciousness, the allegation of such an atrocity as a âJabidah massacreâ was tightly linked to the Philippine claim to Sabah. Indeed writers who have been passionate in claiming a massacre occurred expectedly denigrated the claim as merely due to âMarcos expansionist tendencies.â It therefore became an unpopular agenda to champion.  Since 1968, no politician would touch with a ten-foot pole our Sabah claim. That attitude ended only as a result of the bold but bloody expedition to Sabah recently by the Sulu of Sultanâs fighters. (more…)
Aquino delivering a privileged speech at the Senate
The Manila Times, March 19, 2013
The “Jabidah Question”: First of Three Parts
Contrary to many accounts, senator Benigno Aquino Jr. did not expose the so-called “Jabidah massacre” 45 years ago today, which the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) exploited to the hilt to rally Muslims to its secessionist cause.
What he revealed to the world, and asked for a stop to, was the clandestine plan of his archenemy president Ferdinand Marcos to train and send Muslim commandos to Sabah to organize a revolt against Malaysia, the first step for the Philippines to take over the territory.
This conclusion is incontrovertible based on the late senatorâs privileged speech on March 28, 1968 titled: “Jabidah! Special Forces of Evil?”
The speech is posted at the archives section of the official government website and at my personal website as an annex to this column.
That there was a Jabidah massacre has been mostly uncritically believed, as indicated in the following Wikipedia entry:
âThe Jabidah massacre . . . refers to an incident in which members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines massacred a number of Moro Muslim recruits who were escaping their covert training to reclaim Sabah . . . It is widely regarded as having been the catalyst behind the modern Moro insurgencies in the Southern Philippines.â
The entry continued: âSources differ regarding the details, with the number of victims ranging from 14 to 68, and some sources assert that the massacre is a myth.â The âsome sourcesâ it referred to consist solely of University of the Philippines anthropologist Arnold Molina Azurin who investigated the episode intensively in his book, Beyond the Cult of Dissidence. (more…)
Note: This is the speech  in 1968 of then Senator Ninoy Aquino, in which many, including his on Benigno Aquino III, claim he “exposed” the Jabidah massacre.  Ninoy refers to the episode only as the “Corregidor Affair’. When he mentions “Corregidor Massacre,” he  uses the qualifying adjective ‘so-called’.  You judge  for yourself what he thought of the episode.
Jabidah! Special Forces of Evil?
By  Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr.
[Delivered at the Legislative Building, Manila, on March 28, 1968]
JABIDAH! Who is Jabidah? What is Jabidah?
Jabidah, Mr. President, is the name of a ravishing, stunning and beautiful woman in Muslim lore and legend.
As Muslim legend has it, Jabidah turned a countless number of Muslim men.
As it turns out now, however, her name might well have been Helen â Helen whose matchless beauty launched a thousand ships and laid the great Greek states to siege and waste.
For as things are, as I found them in my flying spot investigation of the muddled Corregidor Affair at its root, in the Sulu isles, Jabidah is the codename for a sinister design of President Ferdinand E. Marcos. (more…)
With the death toll of Filipino Muslims killed in Sabah by Malaysian authorities rising to 62 and with reports of human rights abuses against our countrymen, where the heck is ASEAN?
Forgotten it seems is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, one of whose main purposes is to âpromote regional peace and stability through abiding respect for justice and the rule of law in the relationship among countries of the regionâ.
Ban Ki Moon, the secretary-general of the United Nationswhich consists of 193 member states last week issued a statement calling for âdialogue among all parties to end the (Sabah) conflict peacefully. He also urged âall parties to facilitate delivery of humanitarian assistance and act in full respect of international human rights norms and standards.â
Why hasnât there been a similar statement â even just an innocuous one like âASEAN is concerned over the fightingâ —Â from ASEAN consisting of just ten member countries, whose two founders, the Philippines and Malaysia, are involved in this flashpoint in Southeast Asia?
Did our department of foreign affairs even ask ASEAN to persuade Malaysia not to throw its full, brutal force against the Sultan of Suluâs men who had dug in in Lahad Datu and to give the government more time to talk to them? Or did it just forget to ask ASEAN? (more…)
