By: Lira Dalangin-Fernandez
InterAksyton.com
The online news portal of TV5
17 October 17 2012
MANILA, Philippines — Exiled communist leaders on Wednesday blasted the memoirs of Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile as a “pack of lies” intended to clear his name as one of the chief architects of Martial Law, which plunged the country into 14 years of dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos.
“Enrile’s attempt to clear his name and whitewash the brutal record of the Marcos dictatorship insults the hundreds of thousands of victims of the dictator Marcos, their families and their survivors,” Luis Jalandoni, chairman of the National Democratic Front peace negotiation panel, said in a statement Thursday.
“The countless victims of torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, illegal arrest and detention, and forced displacement, will surely cry foul,” he added.
Jalandoni said Enrile “was lying through his teeth” for taking back his earlier confession, made during the 1986 People Power uprising that toppled the dictator, that a supposed ambush on him on September 17, 1972, which was among the reasons used to justify Martial Law, was in fact faked.
In his memoirs, Enrile claims the ambush was real.
“Now, he claims in his memoir that the ambush was real. He is engaged in flagrant lying,” Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Ma. Sison said in a separate statement.
“In the memoir, he admits that he was the drafter of the martial law proclamation and general orders and played a major role as martial law administrator. But like the cheapest shyster, he engages in systematic lying in whitewashing the martial law regime and absolving it of the gross and systematic human rights violations that it committed against the Filipino people,” Sison said.
Sison said there was no need for Enrile to challenge human rights victims to a debate to prove their case as there has already been a court judgment in the US in favor of the victims.
Despite this, he said, the victims have yet to receive justice and indemnification.