Statement to the Media 23 February 2000
This coming Friday, the 14th anniversary of the EDSA People's Uprising, there will be two commemorations at EDSA. Though they celebrate the same event, they will be sending two distinct and divergent messages.
The official rites, to be spearheaded by the Malacaņang-formed EDSA Commission, will culminate in a program at the EDSA Shrine, where staunch Marcos loyalist now President Joseph Ejercito Estrada will be the main guest of honor. The bulk of participants to this grand affair will be government functionaries and a "hakot" crowd of local government employees, ROTC cadets, public school teachers and students, all of whom have been required to attend the gathering.
A few hundred meters away, in front of the gate at Camp Crame, another commemoration will be held, this time spearheaded by a broad range of cause-oriented groups and individuals under the September 21 Committee. This counterpoint commemoration will have as its main guests stalwarts of the anti-Marcos dictatorship struggle, civil libertarians, members of the opposition, and an array of leaders from the basic sectors, cause-oriented groups and NGOs. Many of its participants will be common folk who know that keeping the true spirit of EDSA means applying its hard-earned lessons to their present conditions.
The EDSA Commission, including Malacaņang, have repeatedly cautioned against "politicizing" this year's EDSA anniversary. This proposition is itself a betrayal of EDSA's true spirit apart from being ridiculous and untenable. The toppling of a hated dictator through a people's uprising is a political act of the highest form.
The motive of the Commission in watering down the EDSA celebration is obvious: it wants to obfuscate the real lessons of EDSA. To save President Estrada and his bungling but brutal administration from being the object of a new wave of protest or another people's uprising.
But we cannot allow such a distortion and such a sell-out. In exchange for a few millions from the Estrada administration, the EDSA Commission (which sadly includes Mrs. Corazon Aquino and Cardinal Sin) would allow EDSA to be "institutionalized" into irrelevance.
This time, more than ever, we have to ask the critical questions we raised at EDSA: Does the ruling regime serve the interests of the people or not? If not, what should we as a people do about it?
EDSA taught us that the people have the basic right and the power to rise up and defend themselves against tyranny and intolerable oppression. Those very same evils are back under the Estrada regime because their roots were never really dug up and extirpated after the ouster of the Marcos dictatorship.
It is fitting, on the 14th anniversary of EDSA, to ask these hard-hitting questions again even if it means an incumbent President is on target.
We call on Filipinos from all walks of life to join us in our protest march and rally on Friday, February 25. Let us all gather once again to keep alive the true spirit of EDSA.