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Issue Number 31, October 2008
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Kapatiran Issue
No. 31, October 2008
KA BEL IN NEW ZEALAND
- Murray Horton
This was published in Kapatiran 16, December
1999. Ed.
Crispin Beltran (hereafter referred to by his universally
known nickname of Ka Bel) is the chairman of the Kilusang
Mayo Uno (KMU), the Philippines’ best known militant
union confederation. PSNA has had regular dealings with
the KMU, and Ka Bel, going back to the KMU’s
formation in the mid 1980s. We decided to invite him to
New Zealand for a 1999 national speaking tour, with the
focus being on APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation;
NZ was the 1999 APEC host nation, hosting a whole variety
of meetings of APEC leaders, Ministers, officials and
business people). It took more than a year of
organisation (including meeting with him in Manila whilst
Becky and I were over there on a 1998 family Christmas
holiday). Eventually we decided the best time to tour him
was in the build up to the September APEC Leaders’
Summit in Auckland (PSNA Committee member, Aziz Choudry,
was a key organiser of the whole year of counter-APEC
activities throughout NZ, culminating in him spending
nearly two months in Auckland organising the Alternatives
to the APEC Agenda Conference and related activities).
Aziz’s tribute to Ka Bel appears elsewhere in this
Special Issue. Ed.
A Coup To Get A Speaker Of His Stature
We considered it a coup to get an internationally known
leader of the Filipino union and progressive movements,
of Ka Bel’s stature, to spend over a fortnight
touring New Zealand. He has led an extraordinary life -
as an 11 year old, he fought the Japanese in WW11;
underground union organiser under the Marcos martial law
dictatorship; detained without trial, he escaped from
military detention and continued organising workers. He
has been KMU chairman since 1986 (his predecessor, Ka
Lando Olalia, was brutally tortured and murdered, a crime
that still reverberates in the Philippines).
Tours of this scale do not come cheap but the response
from both our own members and sympathetic organisations
was excellent. Trade Aid jumped at the chance to secure
Ka Bel as the keynote speaker at its national conference,
in Christchurch, in September 1999 and, within 24 hours
of our appeal for funds, had become the single biggest
donor. Major support also came from Christian World
Service, (the former) Corso, the Campaign Against Foreign
Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA), the (former) NZ Trade Union
Federation, and the Canterbury WEA. These donations, plus
collections taken at most of his public meetings
throughout the country, meant that PSNA ended up
shouldering less than one fifth of the $5,500 cost.
As with our previous national speaking tour (Leonor
Briones, leader of the Freedom From Debt Coalition, in
1995), the secret was to put together a national network
to organise and host Ka Bel’s visit. We had a
natural ally - the Trade Union Federation (TUF) and one
union in particular, the National Distribution Union
(NDU). Paul Watson, the NDU’s southern region
secretary, has been a PSNA Committee member for several
years (he and I had attended the KMU’s 1991
International Solidarity Affair and May Day activities).
Paul played a key role in coordinating Ka Bel’s
tour, personally accompanying him to Dunedin, and
arranging for NDU officials to organise and/or host him
in several centres (such as Dunedin, Nelson, Palmerston
North and Rotorua). Paul’s tribute to Ka Bel appears
elsewhere in this Special Issue. Ed. The NZ union
movement has been battered and besieged ever since the
(former) Employment Contracts Act became law in 1991 - Ka
Bel’s tour enabled officials in various towns
(particularly Nelson) to build working links with other
sectors of the community. It presented an opportunity to
rebuild, or create for the first time, links between
Filipino and New Zealand unions, between workers of both
countries.
I personally had always wanted to bring Ka Bel, the best
known Filipino unionist, here, because I had known him
since first visiting the Philippines in the 1980s and had
been greatly impressed by the KMU and Filipino
workers’ struggles. I believe that NZ unionists can
only benefit from contact with a genuine, militant,
fighting union movement. This is not an academic
interest. Although now self-employed, and not directly
involved with unions, I held a variety of union positions
during my 14 years with the Railways. Circumstances are
not as different as they once were between the
Philippines and New Zealand - the last 15 years has seen
NZ workers steadily sliding towards Filipino-type wages
and conditions. Workers here need all the international
friends and help that they can get.
PSNA is the first to admit that the Philippines is not
the “sexy” Asian solidarity movement any more,
and hasn’t been since the overthrow of the Marcos
dictatorship and the early years of Cory Aquino’s
presidency, in the 1980s. East Timor, Indonesia and Burma
have all attracted much greater Western attention in
recent years. And, of course, the East Timor crisis
reached its bloodsoaked climax right during Ka Bel’s
tour. So we never expected audiences to be large nor the
level of public knowledge about the Philippines, let
alone Filipino unions, to be particularly high (indeed,
lamentable ignorance was displayed by some journalists).
But we still consider Ka Bel’s tour, and others like
it, to be invaluable.
Meeting NZ Workers
He spoke to a wide variety of audiences, large and small,
from Dunedin to Whangarei. Audience sizes, at his public
meetings, ranged from 12 in Whangarei to a much healthier
70 in Palmerston North. Christchurch had a disappointing
15 people (our home base, to PSNA’s embarrassment.
More people attended his 2008 memorial meeting in the
same Christchurch venue. Ed). He was a featured speaker
at major conferences in Christchurch and Auckland,
speaking to over 100 delegates from all around the
country at Trade Aid’s national conference (he was
the keynote speaker, as part of Trade Aid’s
opposition to APEC), and to the 160 people who attended
the Alternatives to the APEC Agenda Conference in
Auckland. As well as speaking at the latter, he played a
leading role in its International workshop and marched on
the various demonstrations and pickets protesting APEC
and the East Timor crisis.
Ka Bel met MPs, ranging from Jim Anderton, the then
Leader of the Alliance (in Christchurch), to
Labour’s Pete Hodgson, an Opposition frontbencher
(in Dunedin). Of course, since the election, Anderton
went on to become Deputy Prime Minister and hold other
portfolios and Hodgson a Minister. Ka Bel met
Dunedin’s then Mayor, Sukhi Turner. Obviously he met
unionists, throughout the country. He had working
meetings with officials from TUF, the NDU, the Seafarers
(which is now part of the Maritime Union. Ed.), Service
and Food Workers, Meat Workers, Local Government
Officers, and others. In most (but not all) centres, his
visit was organised and hosted by union officials. Paul
Watson accompanied him to Dunedin, where, ironically, the
tour’s only disruption was caused by industrial
action, namely the long and ugly Ansett pilots’
dispute. They had an extra, unscheduled, night in
Dunedin, at the airline’s expense; Paul had to
rearrange a vital stopwork meeting in Christchurch; and
travel arrangements had to be changed to get Ka Bel to
Nelson (where I accompanied him). His only regret was
that there was no pilots’ picket line for him to
join (Ansett is, of course, now long gone from NZ. Ed.).
Throughout the North Island, his travel companion was his
old comrade, Ken Findlay, a retired Meat Workers Union
official, who had known Ka Bel longer than any of us,
having visited him in prison during the Marcos martial
law dictatorship. Ken played a vital role in the whole
tour.
In Palmerston North, his visit was co-hosted by the NDU
and a Massey University academic. He spoke to a class of
30 international development students at Massey (his only
campus talk on tour). Auckland has the country’s
biggest Filipino population - Ka Bel met with and spoke
to local Filipino groups there, he was interviewed by
Filipino community radio, and he featured prominently in
the newly launched Filipino magazine, Philippine News
Update (which didn’t last, sadly. Ed.). A handful of
expatriate Filipinos attended his meetings in other
centres. He met with a variety of New Zealand progressive
groups, ranging from Christian World Service to Asia
Pacific Workers Solidarity Links Aotearoa and the Workers
Party. Unlike Leonor Briones, he is not a churchgoer, so
there were no meetings with bishops, etc, but Ka Bel did
attend a Palmerston North Mass for the crisis in East
Timor (the local paper, the Evening Standard, gave him
and the Mass front page coverage).
His main emphasis was to meet New Zealand workers - he
visited a variety of workplaces and met Kiwis on the job.
In Otago, he was particularly touched to meet the Milton
mill workers who had been locked out for years (they were
amongst the very first victims of the former Employment
Contracts Act). In Nelson he attended a stopwork meeting
in the back yard of the King Salmon processing factory.
Ka Bel spoke to the workers, but he was fascinated to
watch (and photograph) the dynamics of an NZ stopwork
meeting. The boss came out, alone, and engaged the
workers in some fairly free and frank dialogue. Ka Bel
had never seen a boss do that, not in his travels to
several Western countries, and certainly never in the
Philippines (where bosses would never meet workers
without an entourage of guards around). In Christchurch,
NDU delegates toured him through the (former) Feltex
carpet factory, then met with him for a solid hour of
discussions.
He got good mainstream media coverage, being featured in
the Otago Daily Times, Nelson Mail, Dominion, Evening
Standard, Daily Post and Northern Advocate newspapers,
plus a number of radio interviews, and a live appearance
on a regional TV channel in Christchurch. He was also
interviewed for a number of community and movement
publications and radio shows. Media disappointments
included: the non-publication of interviews by the Press
and City Voice newspapers; and no mainstream media
coverage in Auckland. This media exposure was invaluable
in raising the profile of Filipino issues, specifically
the situation of Filipino unions and workers, to a New
Zealand audience unfamiliar with the Philippines but
sensitised to the whole APEC fiasco.
A Pleasure To Host
It wasn’t all work. There were rest days,
sightseeing (which he enjoyed immensely), social events -
for instance, we took him to a Latin American video
night. He even shook off jetlag on the night of his
arrival to watch his first ever rugby match (to his
disappointment, the All Blacks got hammered). He arrived
here in winter, straight from the steamy tropical heat of
Manila. We went to great lengths to ensure that he stayed
warm and healthy - he regularly joked that I was
“protecting my investment”. He had no health
problems worth mentioning on the trip. His good health
and energy was even more remarkable considering that he
mentioned in passing that he, along with other KMU
leaders and staff, had been in a jeepney crash just a
week before coming here, and that he was still feeling
the effects of whiplash. Pretty good for a 66 year old!
His main concern was that a Kiwi diet would make him too
fat. Once he discovered the scales in his room at our
place, he was forever bloody weighing himself!
Ka Bel was a great pleasure to host and accompany. During
his week in the South Island, he was based at the
Christchurch home of Becky and myself, and he was a lot
of fun, with a great sense of humour. He caused great
amusement by asking who was the oldest in each audience
he addressed, and how many kids they had (he has 11, plus
27 grandkids. His CV says 19 of the latter - he told us
his wife upbraided him for “forgetting” eight
more). Cultural differences can be hilarious - he was
greatly entertained to be told that it is not polite in
NZ to illustrate the number two by forcefully thrusting
two fingers upwards at the audience. He has the down to
earth nature of workers anywhere in the world. He was
equally happy discussing the finer details of Filipino
politics or the materials used in the construction of our
new kitchen. To Becky’s horror, he insisted on
seeing the gallstones I was presented with when they were
surgically removed a couple of years ago. He was game for
anything, including offering to tinker with Becky’s
car when it wouldn’t start (drawing on his many
years as a Manila taxi driver, possibly an even more
hazardous occupation than being a militant trade union
leader). He was touched by the friendliness and
hospitality of New Zealanders, people such as the former
union leader who, as a gesture of solidarity, declined
payment for a greenstone pendant bought in his gift shop.
In short, Ka Bel’s NZ tour was a great success, at
all levels. It was PSNA’s biggest project in years
and one which we consider cemented extremely valuable
contacts both in the Philippines and throughout New
Zealand.
Since 1999 PSNA has hosted Emila Dapulang, Marie
Hilao-Enriquez and Amirah Ali Lidasan on speaking tours.
Ka Bel’s tour remains unique in that he was the most
high profile person we’ve hosted, the oldest, and
the only man. Ed.
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