Benigno Aquino assassinated

By the end of August, those of us who live in the still-infernal regions – the whole east coast and the huge blazing centre of the country that Americans call 'the heartland' – we grow to be impatient for word of the beginning of the hurricane season because the hurricanes, whatever boisterous damage they do along the way, do blast away the heat and the drought and bring us rain and blustery winds before we settle into the golden fall.

Well, the first hurricane came howling in last week along the Texas coast on the Gulf of Mexico. It slammed into the port of Galveston, killed 17 people, marooned hundreds and left countless homes awash in its wake and then, having done a few million dollars worth of damage, it ducked out to sea.

I was musing about these things when President Reagan went for a medical check up and was pronounced in great shape for a 72-year-old, except that he had to admit when he emerged, his hearing in one ear is further impaired. He's had trouble in that ear since he was making a wartime movie and a gun went off too close for his health. You have to feel a touch of sympathy for the president, for any president these days, when the exact state of the president's health down from his respiration rate and chest X-ray to his bowel movements are thought to come under the Freedom of Information act.

This new 'right to know' was first asserted when President Eisenhower had what was at first taken to be a heart attack and then was diagnosed as an attack of ileitis. After that, the president's doctor gave regular press conferences throughout the convalescence. And in the next campaign, or the one after that, when Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were fighting it out for the Democratic nomination, Johnson and his men spread the dark rumour that Kennedy was suffering from Addison's disease. He wasn't but he had to let it be known that he did have an adrenal insufficiency of some sort that required him to have shots of hydrocortisone. Well, pretty soon, the political issues stifled this interesting information and Kennedy got the nomination and rewarded Johnson with the booby prize of the vice presidency.

I say you have to feel a twinge of sympathy for the poor inhabitants of the White House and they must feel more than a twinge themselves when they recall that in the happy long-ago, before everybody insisted on knowing everything and calling it a constitutional right, there was a president, Grover Cleveland, who, not quite a hundred years ago, woke up one day with a sore throat that wouldn't go away. It turned out to be a beginning cancer of the throat, so the White House doctor called in a surgeon, an anaesthetist, some interns and nurses and they all sailed off on the presidential yacht on what was given out as a sea-going holiday. President Cleveland was successfully operated on, came back to Washington, went on with his presidency and nobody was any the wiser. In time, he was called to his fathers – a very able and good, if not a great president, and years and years later this little episode came out. It went into the history books as an enlightening footnote.

But, today, Mr Reagan admits his bad ear is a little worse and the editorial writers on papers – especially with a strong Democratic bent – begin to feel deep concern for the future of the republic in the hands of a man hurt by an assassination attempt, a man requiring regular long periods of rest who will, after all, if he runs or tries to run again, will be 78 by the time he patters out of the White House.

This ominous item, a growing deafness in the ear of the President of the United States would have been, I think, sermonised about a good deal more if, while the president was having his check-up, a thunderbolt had not come hurtling out of the Philippines, once an American dependency, then an island chain triumphantly set free by the great General MacArthur, set free for growth and democracy, but, for the past 18 years, a dictatorship under the smooth and ruthless heel of President Ferdinand Marcos.

I'm talking, of course, about the swift and terrible end of Benigno Aquino, within literally a minute or two of his going down the steps of his airplane and setting foot on the tarmac at Manila. I can't think of an assassination or an attempt or a death of a politician that has confronted an American president with so excruciating a dilemma of foreign policy, it being understood that a dilemma offers a choice of two courses of action, either of which is unsatisfactory. 'Unsatisfactory' is a mild word when you come to consider the acutely embarrassing courses open to the Reagan administration.

Now Aquino is not a household name not, anyway, in America and I'm sure not in Europe or Africa. His is a remarkable story and I ought to tell the relevant part of it. He came from a rich Philippine family. He was amiable, droll, well-educated and, given a different emphasis in the elements of his character, he could have been a freewheeling member of the international jet set, but he developed a passion for journalism and politics at an early age and at 17 was a correspondent for American magazines. He became the youngest Filipino ever elected to the Philippine senate and by the early 1970s was becoming a nuisance to the Marcos régime.

He wrote and he talked against the government's imposition of martial law, made a point of championing dissidents and offered a programme for free elections and himself as the presidential candidate of the liberal party. He made no bones in his speeches and writings about the régime's reliance on forced confessions and its inclination to trump up charges against political opponents which ended either in their disappearance or their death.

In 1972, he was imprisoned and later sentenced to death on charges of murder, subverting the government and possessing firearms. The only charge that stuck was that of illegal possession of firearms, but he was kept in prison, still under sentence of death – one time he went on a 40-day hunger strike, another time he tried to commit suicide. He came out of that depression and he wrote a letter to his sister which somehow got published and is likely to haunt the Marcos régime for some time to come.

In it, he wrote, 'There were times when my desperation was so deep but I believe no life is worth a lie. Things are either right or wrong and life is worth living only if one acts with some consistency. To submit, to yield and to surrender to the forces of oppression is to give ourselves over to despair, but to act, to resist no matter how puny the resistance, still preserves for us the hope that we will stand erect.'

After eight years in prison, it was discovered that he had a heart condition. Mr Marcos has made a big point of the undoubted fact that he released Aquino and allowed him to go to the United States for special treatment. The supporters of Aquino maintained that he was released because, in prison, he was more formidable as an enemy of the régime, than out of it. In any case, he became a research student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he worked for three years documenting the recent history of his country and trying to organise various scattered dissident and exiled Philippine groups in the United States.

He became disheartened by the fragmentation of these possible allies and, a month or more ago, he decided to return home. Only two weeks ago, he gave an interview to Newsweek magazine. He'd never intended, he said, to seek political asylum in America. The Filipino economy, with factories closing down, the best technicians and doctors and engineers leaving, a massive flight of capital, the economy was crumbling so badly that he felt the time was ripe for him to go home and get the grass roots of his liberal party growing again.

He feared what he called the 'ticking time bomb' of Filipino unrest and he wanted neither Marcos nor the Communists to make the most of it; either way lay more suffering and equal repression. He knew he was still under sentence of death but he hoped it might be possible for him to sit down and talk to Marcos, in spite of warnings from the government and the Marcos family that there were plots to kill him.

So he took a China Airlines jet from Boston which no lone assassin was likely to know about and he landed and, according to the Marcos version, he was shot by such a loner as he stepped off the plane and the government security men, who escorted him, gunned down the assassin at once. A Japanese journalist aboard the same plane says, on the contrary, that Aquino was shot in the back of the head by the escorting Marcos guards and that outside a man was pushed by guards out of a waiting military van and provided the target for the Marcos government guards.

Now, after much pressure from Washington, Marcos has set up a commission of enquiry, all its members unfortunately friendly to President Marcos. The Japanese journalist has not boosted his reputation for impartiality either by saying that he hopes to have his account proved with the help of that famously disinterested party, Colonel Gaddafi.

Well, apart from the mystery of the killing itself, Aquino has left behind a reminder of the real, and for the United States the tormenting, issue. His frequent calls to the State Department went unanswered because, he guessed, he was an embarrassment in view of the vital need for the multi-million dollar military bases the United States feels it must maintain in the Philippines at Clark Field and Subic Bay. These are Mr Marcos's two aces. He even wants to up the rent on them.

The administration would doubtless like to rid itself of President Marcos and all his grisly works if those essential Asian bases were not in his islands, but there they are and President Reagan, as well aware as anybody of the tyranny and opulence of the Marcos way of life in a pitifully poor country, has planned to go there in November, swallow his distaste and hobnob with the baleful dictator.

As for the Russians, it's interesting that the Soviet press has reported the assassination dispassionately, accepting the official Marcos version and taking a dim, unsympathetic view of Aquino. They seem to look on him as a sort of Asian Lech Walesa, and they may be right. It would explain why a martyred Aquino is such an embarrassment both to the American democracy and the Philippine dictatorship.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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