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Issue Number 25/26, December
2005
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 25/26, December 2005
LONG TIME NO SEE
But, To Make Up For It, Here’s A Double Issue
- Murray Horton
This has been the longest
time, more than a year in fact, between issues of
Kapatiran. As Editor, I humbly apologise. But rest
assured that PSNA has not been idle. Since that last
issue, in August 2004, we ran the two week long national
speaking tour by Marie Hilao-Enriquez, one of the
Philippines’ leading human rights activists. You
will find both her speech and my report on the tour
elsewhere in this issue (I wrote a much longer and more
detailed report for those directly involved in the tour
and major donors). In my case, that involved me
accompanying Marie throughout and introducing her at all
her meetings in seven cities. This was the first time
I’d done that since accompanying Leonor Briones
around the country in 1995. Marie’s tour achieved
the highest national profile that PSNA had had in several
years. This was the fourth national speaking tour that
PSNA has organised in less than a decade and they all
take a long time to organise (planning usually starts the
year before). Traditionally, we have a quiet year
afterwards. And that was our plan for 2005.
Archiving
We decided to concentrate on some long overdue
housekeeping. Back in 1996, we inherited the extensive
contents of the Philippines Resource Centre in Auckland
(dating from the days when Keith Locke, now a Green MP,
was the Network’s national coordinator and a
bookshop manager with available space for the Centre). We
set this up in the Christchurch building of the former
Corso, but that organisation spectacularly fell apart in
2000 (PSNA got dragged into the row; see Kapatiran 19
& 20, in 2001 and 02 respectively) and everything had
to be removed in a very big hurry. Since then it had all
sat at our place, either taking up shelf space in my
office or in a shapeless pile in our garage.
So, this was the year to finally do something about it.
The committee held several weekend work bees and
painstakingly identified and categorised the several
hundred historic Philippine political books. Hours of
work went into this dusty and tedious task. We contacted
several university libraries in both islands, offering to
donate them (asking only to be reimbursed for postage).
The upshot was that the Macmillan Brown Library of the
University of Canterbury took all the historic
publications and papers, two carloads. As that Library
already holds the papers of the late Father John Curnow,
the Christchurch priest who founded Philippines
Solidarity in New Zealand, it was building on its
collection. But it wouldn’t take the books, so we
had to look further afield. On behalf of its Asian
Studies Department, the Auckland University Library took
the majority of the books (we donated them two big boxes,
weighing about 40 kgs, to give you some idea of the
numbers involved). And we gifted Wellington’s
Victoria University Library another box of several dozen
books. We still have several dozen books left in our
garage, and we continue to hunt for a more suitable home
for them, but we’re pretty pleased with what
we’ve achieved thus far. We’ve even managed to
find good homes for most of the historic merchandise
– T shirts, pendants, postcards, etc, etc –
that came from the Resource Centre in Auckland.
International Solidarity Mission
But the ripples from Marie’s tour meant that we
wouldn’t get away with archiving historic material
as our only project this year. She had given us a couple
of video cassette discs about the human rights situation
(my reviews of them are in this issue), so we organised a
gathering at our place for Christchurch members to watch
them. Some found them so graphic and gruelling that they
closed their eyes.
And then Marie contacted us about sending New Zealanders
on the International Solidarity Mission (ISM) in August
2005. Normally this sort of thing would need a long lead
in time, but the response to our initial publicity was so
positive that we got straight on with it. It was a
pleasant contrast to our futile attempts to give away
money to a NZ trade unionist to attend the KMU’s
annual May Day activities (despite offering $1,000,
we’ve had no takers for several years). We had so
many responses to our offer (same amount) to help one New
Zealand delegate that we actually had to choose from
among several equally worthy applicants. We picked one,
but a couple of others were still so keen that we did a
very fast bit of fundraising (big thanks to Christian
World Service for their wonderful donation of $2,500) and
were able to donate extra, respectable, sums of money to
three people (the fourth was self-funding). To put this
into perspective, there were only five Australians on the
ISM, so we did very well. All four delegates plunged into
it with gusto (in the case of Tim Howard, he organised
for himself an exposure tour, which took him throughout
the Philippines for more than a month, before joining the
ISM.
It was not actually a PSNA delegation, the delegates had
to deal directly with the ISM organisers in the
Philippines, our role was to set it all up and come up
with several thousand dollars. Those four people came
back fired with enthusiasm to put the Philippines human
rights situation back onto the agenda in this country,
and they have gone to considerable efforts to do so. Once
again, they were expected to do their own legwork upon
return, but PSNA did one press release and played a role
in getting Tim Howard onto Radio New Zealand’s top
rating Nine To Noon With Linda Clark. And we organised
for two of the delegates to come to Christchurch to speak
at a public meeting and report back in person, both to
PSNA and to Christian World Service.
All in all, not too bad for a quiet year. So, plenty of
things have been going on, it’s just that we
haven’t had time to get out Kapatiran to tell you
about them. But, to make up for it, here is our first
ever double issue, the biggest ever, a bumper issue, with
lots of good reading in it. Mabuhay!
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