‘11,103’: The Memory Counter-Offensive Begins
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(Source: 11103fil.ph)
It was the first documentary about the Marcos regime that I’ve watched since the Marcoses’ return to power, since the rise to the presidency of the dictator’s son.
I grew up watching documentaries about the regime. This was before the web, before technology made it possible to watch anything on YouTube or on online platforms.
The documentaries we watched were typically on Betamax tapes We watched in classrooms or in living rooms. Sometimes we watched in secret, because you weren’t supposed to watch films or read books or consume any content critical of Marcos, his family, his government, and even his fake war medals.
The most memorable one that you can watch on YouTube is the BBC’s To Sing Our Own Song narrated by and featuring the late Senator Pepe Diokno.
Watching documentaries got easier after the dictatorship fell in 1986. Suddenly, after the Marcoses were forced to flee the country, there were new films about the regime, with new revelations, footage and images showing how the Marcoses raped and looted the country for 21 years.
11,103, directed by Jeanette Ifurong and Mike Alcazaren, and produced by Kara Magsanoc-Alikpala, revisits the pain and the atrocities of those years through the stories of survivors.
Jeanette Ifurung
Mike Alcazaren
Kara Magsanoc-Alikpala
The film features some of the people who were among the 11,103 Filipinos officially recognized by the Philippine government as victims of the Marcos dictatorship and eligible for compensation from the $2 billion Marcos stashed in Swiss banks. (The amount was returned on condition that it would be used to compensate victims and survivors of the regime.)
It’s a tough film to watch.
Former student leader Chris Palabay recalls the murders of his brothers, and his own gruesome torture. “They took off all my clothes and electrocuted me. They made me sit on a block of ice and held my head down in the toilet.”
Another activist, a healer, Hilda Narciso, remembers how she was raped. “I gave up my body. I told them to just kill me. They laughed. If you bleach a rag with Clorox it turns white again. How do you make a body clean again?”
11,103 highlights a major weakness in the Martial Law victims reparations program -- it did not focus enough on those who died and suffered in Mindanao.
“Less than 0.007% not even 1% of those who were given reparations came from Muslim Mindanao when we know that thousands of them actually suffered during that period,” Chuck Crisanto, director of the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission, explains in the film.
Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission Director Chuck Crisanto at the archives of the Commission. (Source: 11103film.ph)
The film does include survivors and victims of the 1974 Palimbang Massacre where thousands of Muslims were beaten, raped, and murdered. “When I came back, I wasn’t at peace,” one of the survivors, Mariam, says. “I wanted revenge. It hurts when I think about what they did to our defenseless parents.”
Mariam Kanda recounts the Palimbang Massacre in 1974 (Source: 11103film.ph)
11,103 powerfully juxtaposes the stories of cruelty and violence with Bongbong’s victorious path to the presidency, a campaign based on social media lies and the brazen denial of a painful past.
In a powerful sequence, the film ends a segment featuring survivors of the Sag-od Massacre in Samar (an atrocity that was also featured in “To Sing Our Own Song”) with a video clip of the infamous conversation between Bongbong and Juan Ponce Enrile, the Marcos ally who turned against the dictator in 1986 but remained faithful to the shameless lies of his regime.
“During Martial Law there were no massacres,” Enrile says. “Name me one person who was arrested because of political or religious beliefs during that period.”
“They were all for criminal acts,” Bongbong says.
These lies are exposed yet again in another scene. Crisanto shows some of the claimants the thousands of files the Martial Law victims claims board had collected.
The files are being digitized and copies will be distributed to some local schools and to institutions overseas.
“Hindi tayo makakalimutan, hindi ito mabubura,” Crisanto says. “These stories will never be forgotten. They will never be erased. Even if censorship is imposed in the Philippines and we lose everything.”
11,103 underscores an important point: the killings, rapes and abuses were not isolated cases; the reparations law made clear. “This is recognized as state sponsored. This is not done by a sadistic colonel or by someone who’s a bad egg in that establishment,” Crisanto says. “There was an order from the top and that kind of order created this kind of impunity.”
Crisanto also explains another provision of the law: the construction of a memorial commemorating the abuses of the Marcos dictatorship.
Remembering the victims of Martial Law at Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Source: 11103film.ph)
That plan underlines a key tension in the documentary. The government-funded project is expected to be completed in two years -- and it is expected to be inaugurated by the current Philippine president.
Will the dictator’s son follow the law -- or will he try to undermine it by affirming yet again the lies that propelled him to the presidency?
Bongbong won the first round in the battle for memory and history by using billions in stolen wealth to twist the truth and distort the past.
But victims and survivors of the regime are fighting back. 11,103 signals the start of the memory counter-offensive.
“I feel blessed and privileged to live and survive to tell others ‘Wake up! Do you want history to repeat itself!’” Hilda Narciso says.
Mariam, who survived the Palimbang Massacre, says, “I want to be heard by the people everywhere. I want people to know that these things really happened to us.”
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