“THE MARCOSES AND THE MISSING FILIPINO MILLIONS”

Speech Delivered Aboard The QE2,

June 1987

By Caroline Kennedy

Leaving the Philippines, in 1984, for what seemed like the final time saddened me. I had spent almost two decades there, on and off, and had assimilated myself so much into its history, its culture and its people that many locals referred to me as their country’s favourite “honorary Filipina”.  The advantages were that I could now, from a distance, take a step back and view those two decades objectively. I had always told myself “one day I would write truthfully about the Marcos era” and now here I was in an unique position to do just that.

I had arrived in Manila almost by accident in 1968 and remained there on and off for the next sixteen years. My first decade there turned out to be, perhaps, the most bizarre in my entire life. During that short period I went through more incarnations than most people do in a lifetime. In those few years I was transformed from budding writer and radio producer, to weekly columnist, to singer, to actress, to TV presenter, to disc jockey, to comic strip heroine, to film star and, finally, ending up annointed as a true “Living Goddess” among a former headhunting tribe in the Philippine’s remote Mountain Province.

The years I spent in the Philippines coincided almost exactly with the years in power of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. So, as a journalist, I was able to observe and write about them at firsthand. It was hard, in fact, to ignore them.  They dominated every aspect of Philippine life, particularly since the imposition of martial law in 1972. There was nowhere you could look in Manila without seeing their larger than life posters on giant hoardings. There was nowhere you could go without overhearing endless conversations about them and ambitious plots being forged against them. And there was nowhere you could hide without feeling that your every move was being closely monitored by them or their cohorts. Theirs was an all-pervasive presence, neither benign nor compassionate. On the contrary, theirs was a destructive, intimidating and, for the Filipino nation as a whole, an ultimately catastrophic presence.

I spent much of my time in the Philippines chronicling the excesses of Imelda Romualdez Marcos. I think there has been nobody in contemporary history that has so aptly illustrated the saying that:

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Imelda always liked to compare herself with Eva Peron. In fact she took it as a compliment if anyone pointed out any similarities between her and the former First Lady of Argentina. But, despite Eva Peron’s excesses – and there were many – at least she did, in part, help her “decamisados” as the Argentine’s poor were referred to. But, in twenty-one years as First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Romualdez Marcos did nothing for the destitute in her country.

At the time of my arrival in the Philippines the Marcoses had been in power for only three years and so I was able to see and document their rise, from fairly humble beginnings, to what has been dubbed their “conjugal dictatorship”, outlasting as they did so, four US presidents and three British prime ministers until their final ignominious defeat in February 1986.

I suppose the image that springs to most peoples’ minds when they hear the name Imelda Marcos is shoes.  This is hardly surprising since it is now known she owned at least 3000 pairs of them. And it is hard to forget the TV news film, in February 1986, showing row upon row of them left behind in the Palace when she fled to exile in Hawaii.

“Three thousand?“ Imelda protested at the time, “That’s nonsense! I only had 1006!” 

Imelda’s shoes have, perhaps, become the very symbol of her excesses. They are currently housed in the Imelda Marcos Museum in Manila, a museum dedicated solely to her greed, her ostentatious lifestyle and her extravagances.

Imelda may have left behind all those pairs of shoes for us to marvel at but many of us probably harbour a secret admiration for what she and her husband, the late President Ferdinand Marcos, did manage to bring with them into the United States under the term “household effects”.  The official customs list drawn up when they arrived into exile in Hawaii reads like pure fantasy.

 

22 Crates of Cash valued at $717 million dollars

 

300 crates of assorted jewellery Value undetermined.

 

$4 million dollars worth of unset precious gems contained in Pampers diaper boxes.

 

$7.7 million dollars worth of jewellery, including a gold crown encrusted with diamonds, three tiaras, 65 Seiko and Cartier watches

 

A box, measuring 12 feet by 4 feet, crammed full of real pearls.

 

A 3 foot solid gold statue covered in diamonds and other precious stones.

 

$200,000 dollars in gold bullion and nearly $1 million dollars in Philippine pesos

 

Discovered among their luggage too were deposit slips worth $124 million dollars for banks in the US, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

 

A week ahead of their departure 2000 tons of gold, worth $22 billion dollars, had been dispatched to Australia but, on a tip off, was intercepted by the vigilant Australian Customs. Weekly shuttle flights, transporting crates containing money, period furniture, antiques and Old Master paintings were reported to have flown to Hong Kong during the six months prior to their downfall in February 1986.

A further $250 million dollars worth of jewellery was also confiscated from a friend of Imelda’s who was caught smuggling them out of the country for her.

And this was probably just the beginning. Over two decades later the Philippines government is still trying to locate all the Marcos assets. Imelda has not helped them. She has claimed the Fifth Ammendment. She has obfuscated. She has bribed. And she has lied. She told the Philippines commission charged with retrieving the stolen funds:

“If you know how rich you are, you aren’t rich. I have no idea how rich I am!”

Following a request from the Philippines government, the Swiss government, for the first time ever in its history of secret banking, froze all assets they suspected of belonging to any member of the Marcos family. In the past five years the Swiss government revealed the existence of yet another Marcos account, holding almost $20 billion! And so it seems quite possible that one day we might actually find out just how rich the Marcoses were.

After my arrival in the Philippines, just three years into her husband’s first presidential term, I became fascinated by Imelda Marcos and proceeded to write about her often, mainly in very unflattering terms. My best friend Betsy Romualdez, a writer and poet, happened to be Imelda’s niece and so I was fortunate to have access to many inside stories about the First Lady, more so than most Filipino journalists at the time.

I was still living in Manila in 1974 when Imelda was hosting the 23^rd Miss Universe contest. On the night of the main event the beauties and the foreign Press were lined up for hours in the lobby of Imelda’s brand new Cultural Centre building waiting for the First Lady to show up. Eventually her limousine swept up the driveway and Imelda regally stepped out. As she passed down the line of girls, a bit like royalty, she stopped occasionally to shake hands with them and share a few words.

When she reached Miss South Africa she asked, “What does your father do?”  The nervous young woman replied, “Daddy? Oh, he’s in the mining business!”

“That’s a coincidence ! “ Imelda immediately retorted, sweeping her arms around the magnificent lobby of her new Cultural Centre, “I’m in the mining business too! That’s mine, that’s mine and that’s mine. In fact everything you see here is mine!”

This may have been Imelda’s cynical attempt at a joke, and a handful of journalists among our group giggled politely, but it had a portentous ring. For less than 15 years later, Imelda, her husband and their cronies, would own an estimated 85% of the nation’s wealth, commerce, land, produce, dollar and gold reserves. By their departure in 1986, the country would be left reeling, bankrupt and riddled by foreign debt from which it is still recovering today.

Although Marcos had taught Imelda how to play dirty politics, her drive and ambition were entirely her own. As she succeeded in winning votes for him so he rewarded her with jewellery. She, in turn, would tell journalists and friends that these jewels were Romualdez family heirlooms she had inherited along with a palatial home, priceless antiques, paintings and a silver collection.

In the early days, during the 1965 presidential campaign, Marcos was able not only to switch from being the leader of the Liberal Party to being the leader of the Nacionalista Party but also to clinch the election. But political pundits and colleagues agreed it was Imelda who influenced the result. Marcos was a brilliant tactician, they said, but it was Imelda’s charm, persuasion and sweet singing voice that ultimately won him the presidency.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say,” a political aide told me, “that Imelda used plane, motorboat, banca and literally crawled on her hands and knees to reach each delegate who had a vote. She then swayed them with her voice, her tears and her beauty.”

For his part, Marcos wined and dined his supporters at the opulent Manila Hotel, filled their pockets with 100 peso bills and took them to expensive nightclubs. Following their inauguration, Imelda sent US presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, some personal advice on how to win an election:

 “You’ve got to control the site of the convention,” she wrote, “you’ve got to have your people everywhere. We had the bellhops. We had the waiters. We had the elevator boys. We had the desk clerks. We had everybody talking about Marcos. But the most important thing was that we had all the telephone operators so the other side never received their telephone calls!”

The presidential election of 1963 had been the costliest, dirtiest and most vicious campaign in the country’s history, “a year long propaganda orgy” as the American Embassy in Manila discreetly described it. But the foreign press were already referring to the Philippines as the “new Camelot” and to the beautiful, young First Lady as the “Asian Jackie Kennedy.” And a few months after the election the Marcoses paid the customary state visit to America. Imelda took the States by storm. “A photographer’s delight” the newspapers called her as she sang a Filipino love song to a bemused President Johnson at a gala dinner. Washington was mesmerized. Politicians and press alike were seduced by her beauty and her charm. For the first time Imelda witnessed the power of her own personal magnetism.

The newspapers quoted her on her return to Manila saying:

 “The Metropolitan Opera House – it was fabulous – those chandeliers, those paintings…My God, the Rockefellers, the Duponts, the Fords, the Magnins, the Lindsays, the painter Marc Chagall – you know he wanted to paint me. And the jewels the women were wearing… strands and strands of diamonds around their necks!….Wow, in America when they’re rich, they’re really rich!”

Back home Imelda set to work to create her own opulent environment worthy of entertaining her new super-rich friends. She began a massive building programme that, in time, came to be known as her “edifice complex”  – not to house the poor and the dispossessed – but to forward her aims of making Manila into the cultural and financial capital of Asia. Neither she nor Marcos cared for the underprivileged. If the squatters’ huts presented an eyesore to her or her foreign guests, she had them obliterated with a bulldozer. She had once been poor herself and she never wanted to be reminded of the fact.

And the sad truth is that Marcos, too, cared little for the majority of his people. During his rule as president graft and corruption flourished, rural poverty became more crushing, the gap between rich and poor widened and these conditions were exploited by the emerging Communist Party. This was painful to the U.S. because the Philippines was the country America had tried to model after its own democratic image. It was where, in 1899, the Americans had fought their first counter-insurgency war in the name of protecting freedom and defeating what they saw as the growing threat of communism.

On his election to the presidency Marcos had promised a redistribution of the country’s wealth – on that he certainly delivered. But he redistributed the wealth from the poor to his business colleagues, his Army generals, his friends and his own family. Overall, by the mid-1970’s seven out of ten Filipinos were worse off economically. Real wages for workers had fallen about 30% while consumer prices had tripled. Two out of every three Filipinos were surviving below the poverty line and a staggering 40%, 21 million Filipinos, were homeless.

The per capita calorie intake, too, was less in 1976 than it had been in 1960. This, despite the fact the U.S. had provided the Philippines with more than $300 million under the Food for Peace Programme. In the 1950s Filipinos had probably been the best fed people in Asia. Now people in India, Indonesia and, perhaps, even Bangladesh were eating better than they were. 40% of all the nation’s deaths were caused by malnutrition. An American journalist visiting the Visayas Islands (near Imelda’s birthplace) in 1979 reported:

“The young patients I saw in the hospitals there seem to have been transplanted from the famines in Bangladesh and the sub-Sahara earlier in the decade. Big eyes staring from skeletal heads, matchstick limbs and bloated bellies. But they were the fortunate ones. They were receiving treatment.”

Impervious to any such domestic problems, Imelda started her infamous shopping sprees in Rome, Paris, New York and London – at Bulgari, Harry Winston, Tiffany’s and Cartier. On October 13 1977 she parted with $384,000 for diamonds. Two weeks later on November 2 she spent over $1 million for more diamonds. In July 1978, after her third visit to the Soviet Union, nine days of spartan communism had, apparently, proved too restricting for  her and she flew directly to New York for a retail therapy binge. On her first full morning there she paid out $194,000 for antiques and the following week in a one-day spree she spent over $2 million on more diamonds and emeralds. And all this on her husband’s official presidential salary of just $6500 a year!

Nothing and no one would get in her way. When the world press criticized her for being profligate, she would answer that she was only carrying out the wishes of her people.

“They want me to shine like a star in their midst. Who am I not to carry out their wishes?” she asked.

When hauled before a U.S. Congressional Committee of outraged congressmen, her charm no longer seduced them. They demanded to know where her money came from and threatened to cut off aid to her country if she continued to spend so lavishly. Back home she referred to them as “barbarians.” She compared them to the Spanish Inquisition:

 

 “I have been to Peking. I have been to Moscow. I have been to Libya,” she fumed,  “and nobody ever treated me so rudely!”

Her husband pacified her with a gift of the world’s largest blue diamond, the notorious “Idol’s Eye”, said then to be worth $5 million.

The following year while her Ferdinand Marcos was negotiating the renewal of the U.S. bases agreement and promising a massive austerity campaign at home because of the spiraling inflation and a huge foreign overseas debt, Imelda again went on a shopping spree in the US. She bought a multi-million dollar estate in Long Island, named Lindenmere. She shelled out $328,000 on more diamonds, $717,000 on a house in Hawaii, $5.3 million on a hotel in San Francisco, $1 million on another house in Hawaii and, on August 25, 1981, she bought a heart-shaped diamond for over $1million and two necklaces for $400,000.

Two days later she spent another $616,000 on antiques and, in September of that same year, she bought the Fan Fox Samuels estate on Long Island for almost $6 million. In that period too she acquired a townhouse on 66^th Street and Madison in Manhattan and she negotiated the purchase of one of New York’s most famous landmarks, the Crown Building, on 57^th Street and Fifth Avenue. In her personal collection too, I was told by my friend, Jun Gonzalez her private art restorer, she owned Old Master paintings and sculptures worth in excess of $20 million. Jun told me Imelda had invited him to the Palace to see a 12 foot X 12 foot painting by Holbein. He asked if I would like accompany him.

“How could she have bought a Holbein?” I was incredulous. “Surely, the whole world would know when a Holbein had been purchased on the international art market ? Where had it come from ? Who had sold it to her  – or had she been duped – yet again?”

That was not all she owned, Jun told me. In her collection I would see Canalettos, Chagalls, El Grecos, Rubens, Rembrandts and Titians, to name just a few.

At the time of these infamous shopping sprees it was estimated that 30% of the population were struggling on barely $200 a year, not enough to afford the barest necessities of life, such as food, shelter, clothing and medicine – the very things that Imelda, in her new capacity as Minister for Human Settlements, was expected to provide.

In their 21 years in power, it has now been established, the Marcoses salted away between $18 and $30 billion, most of it intended for aid programmes but much of it from personal “donations” Imelda had successfully extracted from intimidated local businessmen. There is no doubt the Marcoses certainly robbed in style, particularly Imelda.

Many of my wealthier friends were constantly receiving visits from the Manila Metrocom, Imelda’s own private police force, with a personal note saying,

“Congratulations! You will be delighted to hear you have been selected to appear at the Palace with a cheque for $10,000, (or shares in your company or deeds to your properties) to donate to my favourite charity.” and it was signed, Imelda Romualdez Marcos.

It was a novel kind of reverse lottery.If they refused to cooperate they would automatically receive a visit from the Bureau of Internal Revenue. If this tactic still failed to convince them then their businesses were taken over by one of Imelda’s friends or family.

But, with an armed police escort, threats of imprisonment and promises of in-depth investigations into their business affairs by the tax authorities, few dared to refuse such a subtle and seductive invitation. In fact one of my friends said he received so many of these “congratulation notes” that he wallpapered his entire downstairs bathroom with them.

Parrying questions by American journalists about her extravagances, she explained:

“I must confess that once upon a time Marcos’s family and mine were oligarchs. But we are reformed oligarchs. The Romualdez family has been in office for many years and thank God there is a family who is willing to serve our country. Thank God they know how to make money. Otherwise if Marcos did not know how to make money before, what experience would he have to make his country prosper? The United States is ashamed that it is rich. Why should we be ashamed? We have some gifted members in our family. Good. They want to serve our people. Wonderful!”

She left the reporters as perplexed with this explanation as she did a group of scientists from the august National Academy of Sciences whom she invited to Malacanan Palace to discuss energy conservation. When they arrived she said energy conservation bored her and she really wanted to talk to them about love, truth, justice and beauty. She then entertained them with folk songs, beautiful women, local celebrities, a banquet dinner and dancing.

After the sumptuous meal she took them upstairs and spoke to them for three hours. She told them about her project of giving each prisoner a rabbit, a dog or a plant to love. She then drew a circle on a blackboard representing the universe. She made a hole in the circle and drew some lines. She explained that this represented where cosmic forces entered the Philippines:

“And my scientists tell me,” she said, “that these forces are so powerful that we can use them to protect you – our American friends – against Soviet missiles!”

Imelda’s forays onto the world political stage were equally successful in grabbing the international headlines and she was dubbed, “The Iron Butterfly”. A typical trip abroad might include a visit to Tripoli to dissuade Colonel Gaddafi from financing the Moslem rebellion in the Southern Philippines (for which she later campaigned to receive the Nobel Peace Prize), a short stay in Moscow with the intention of sending shivers down the spines of the domino-theorists in the State Department, an exhaustive tour of Cuba accompanied by Fidel Castro, who fell for her charms. And then, homeward-bound, with a final stopover for an audience with the Pope, to remind him that even an impoverished, developing nation like the Philippines can be the fifth largest contributor to the Vatican coffers.

To prevent boredom at home she pursued her “edifice complex” with a vengeance. Perhaps, like the Pharaohs, she intended to leave the world monuments to remember her by. She built the Cultural Centre in 90 days as a venue for the Miss Universe contest, then came the International Convention Centre to give a forum for overseas investors and businessmen, a Folk Arts Centre, ready in time to accommodate the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manila” world heavyweight fight, a fortress-like Metropolitan Museum to house her personal collection of paintings, a University of Life, a Heart Centre for Asia, a Lung Centre, fourteen luxury hotels and a coconut palace to accommodate her jet-setting guests and to permanently display – although not to the general public – her priceless collection of jewels and Russian icons.

But the building that tops them all is the Parthenon-like structure dominating the center of Manila Bay and housing her Film Centre, built for an international film festival, conceived by her to rival Cannes.

I watched mesmerized as the mammoth building was constructed in 90 days by literally thousands of underpaid workers struggling day and night to make sure it was completed on time.

A week or two before the grand opening a catastrophe happened. A huge section of the native bamboo scaffolding collapsed resulting in hundreds of workers plummeting headlong into the quick-drying cement. And as their fellow workers scrambled desperately to free the victims, the order came from Imelda that there was no time to dig them out, work must continue otherwise the opening deadline would have to be postponed and her foreign guests would be “disappointed”.

Offending legs and arms that were not completely buried by the cement were ordered to be chopped off and destroyed while the widows and families started assembling at the scene for an impromptu candlelight vigil which was to last for several months.

The opening was a surreal event. Cocteau himself could not have dreamt up a more grotesque one. Despite violent police attempts to remove the grieving families, the vigil outside defiantly continued. As hundreds of demonstrators were forcibly removed, hundreds more arrived to take their place – a never-ending stream of wailing mourners.

Meanwhile I watched as minor celebrities from the United States and ex-royalty from Europe began arriving at the Centre in their stretch limos, ignorant of the disaster and unaware of the grim reception committee that awaited them.

Despite last-minute threats and financial inducements by Imelda to the hostile workers to finish the building on time, the roof was incomplete on the opening night. And, despite the fact that the rainy season was long over, that particular night, of course, it chose to rain. Journalists huddled to keep dry outside as guests were ushered inside to their seats. Some seats that were exposed to the open roof were already soaked, but there was nothing Imelda could do. That night there was no let up. It seemed to those of us watching the event that heaven was resolved to mourn its dead that night.

Imelda was, as usual, the last to arrive. On stage a chorus of hastily assembled patients from her Heart Centre began to sing as she entered the hall and swept down the aisle. They sang The Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah, “And he shall reign for ever and ever!” Except they replaced the word “he” with the word “she”.

At the end of their song, to the disbelief of the audience, each one stepped off the stage, bared their chests and walked among the front rows of the stalls displaying vivid purple scars from recent heart operations. Shocked gasps were followed by an embarrassed silence. People didn’t know which way to look. The emcee on stage proudly announced that these people had all received their operations at the new Imelda Romualdez Marcos Heart Centre.

At this point, of course, the audience was expected to burst into rapturous applause. But, by this time, the persistent wailing from the mourners outside echoed eerily through the hall as rumours of the disaster began to spread. The bizarre ceremony on stage made the audience uneasy and most gave hasty excuses and left.

By now Imelda’s regular guests included Cristina Ford, the ex wife of the American auto magnate, Henry Ford II, the actor George Hamilton, the pianist Van Cliburn, the chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer and Jack Valenti, President of the American Motion Picture Board. These people she referred to as “my gang” and, given a moment’s notice, they were ready to fly to her side anywhere in the world.

Imelda’s most notorious junket with her “gang” in tow was her trip to Kathmandu in March 1975 to attend the coronation and wedding of King Birendra. Before her flight to Nepal she was entertaining her “gang” and others, including the heart surgeon, Dr. Christian Barnard and the actress Gina Lollobrigida, at Malacanan Palace. But instead of ending the party when it was time for her to leave for the Himalayan capital, Imelda decided to take the party with her – without a thought for foreign protocol or expense.

She commandeered four Philippine Airlines planes, one for food, just in case the Nepalese food failed to please her friends’ palates, one for her entourage, which included six hairdressers, manicurists and medical personnel and two for herself, her family and friends. The trip was scandalous by any standards. A former classmate of the King recalled the dismay at court when, upon her arrival, Imelda walked straight up to the King, completely ignoring protocol and the waiting reception line, which included the King’s mother. According to the classmate, the Nepalese Royal Family was furious as word of Imelda holding her own court in Katmandhu and issuing her own invitations spread through Himalayan kingdom and abroad. But she was only repeating what she had done a few years previously at the Shah of Iran’s party in Persepolis.

During the next few days of festivities Imelda kept close to Prince Charles, whom she realized would attract most of the media attention. By placing herself at his side she could guarantee she would end up on every television screen and on the front pages of every magazine and newspaper the world over. The plan worked and, although the Prince of Wales remained impervious to her charms and refused Imelda’s invitation to visit Manila, another member of the British Royal Family would accept later the same year.

Imelda had been hatching plans to play host to a member of the British Royal Family for almost three years. And the fact that she had been refused by both the Queen and Prince Charles did not dull her determination but she also came to realize she would have to settle for something less. Imelda knew Princess Margaret’s weakness for attending extravagant parties and she planned to create the biggest party of all, one that the jet-setting Princess could not possibly refuse. She employed an Italian art dealer, Mario Durso, an acquaintance of the Princess, to convince, coerce or inveigle the Princess to visit Manila.

Finally, towards the end of 1975, her opportunity arose. Princess Margaret was due to fly to Papua New Guinea to represent the Queen at the Independence Day ceremony. The Princess asked Durso to inform Imelda she would be prepared to visit Manila on her return journey. This was the moment the First Lady had been waiting for. This was the time for her to pull out all the stops. She pleaded with Durso to insist that the Princess arrive in Manila on a Sunday so she could command all Manila’s schoolchildren to line the streets from the International Airport to Malacanan Palace waving British flags.

Plans forged ahead at full steam. No expense was to be spared. Imelda’s coterie of blue-frocked girlfriends, known as the “Blue Ladies”, were dragooned into preparing bacchanalian feasts for the Princess, at least one for every night of her visit. A suite of rooms in Malacanan was hastily redecorated to the Princess’s taste and Imelda’s international celebrity friends were invited, all expenses paid, to come to Manila to join in the fun. Manila was festooned with Union Jacks for almost a month. For the first time British television shows outplayed American ones on local television stations. And shops, such as Rustans Department store, owned by Imelda’s best friend Glessie Tantoco, were inundated by British goods, British fashions and British food.

Bulldozers were hastily put to work razing squatters’ huts on the route from the airport to the Palace. However, as had so often happened before, no sooner had the shanty homes been demolished and the squatters driven out, than the cardboard and corrugated tin houses went back up again. This scenario occurred every time Imelda expected a visit from a celebrity, foreign dignitary or overseas businessman. The result was always the same. Imelda would have a high white-washed wall erected around the whole area so that nobody could see in and the squatters couldn’t get out. Inevitably, the hapless residents inside would be forced to hack their way through the wall so it ended up looking like a giant honeycomb.

But, despite all these preparations, all did not go according to plan. The Princess fell sick with flu in New Guinea and informed the British Ambassador, Sir John Addis, that her arrival would be delayed by a few days.

Sir John, who had become a good friend and travelling companion of mine, later told me:

 “I dreaded telling Imelda that the Princess would not be arriving on Sunday as planned but, most likely, on the following Tuesday or Wednesday.” I could tell Sir John was relishing this story. “You can imagine Imelda‘s reaction,” he smiled, “She was not amused. All her plans had to be rescheduled.”

I could visualize the scenario. But even Sir John who was a diplomat of the old school, a quiet scholarly man, a world-respected authority on China and Chinese porcelain, became almost apoplectic whenever he discussed Imelda.

 

“What about the schoolchildren?” I asked.

“Ah, yes, the schoolchildren!” Sir John grinned, “You see I wasn’t able to give Imelda the exact day Her Highness would be arriving in Manila. And well, even

she couldn’t declare a national holiday for a whole week, could she?”

“So who waved all those thousands of imported British flags?” I asked.

I had heard rumours about this incident but I was eager to know from Sir John what really happened the day the Princess arrived. Sir John laughed. Despite a distinguished career in the Foreign Service and, as such, trained to be tactful at all times, he could never resist gossiping with me about Imelda. We were sitting beside the lake at his magnificent garden in Kent and, as he had many times during our long friendship, Sir John was prepared to let his guard down.

“Well, there was an argument as to whose car the Princess would travel in. Imelda obviously wanted to meet her at the airport and take her in her own car back to the Palace. However, I had to explain to her that technically the Princess was a guest of the Embassy and, as the Queen’s representative in the Philippines, I would be expected to meet her at the airport.”

I giggled. I could imagine the scene.

“Imelda must have exploded!” I said, “She’d been planning this for years!”

“She was definitely not happy.” Sir John chuckled. “I tried to cater to her vanity by saying that, as First Lady, protocol dictated that she and the President should wait and greet the Princess at the Palace. Eventually, she relented but not without a struggle. So off I went to the airport followed by a phalanx of limousines. I noticed that Imelda had been hard at work because the route was lined with thousands of men in grey overalls holding the British flag.”

Intrigued I asked, “Who were they?”

“Well, deprived of the schoolchildren, Imelda had replaced them with inmates from all the prisons around Luzon! Sir John giggled. “And, wait for this, Caroline, just in case the prisoners decided to make a communal bid for freedom she had sharpshooters from the Army and the Manila Metrocom hanging out of windows and suspended in the branches of trees above with rifles aimed at the them.”

“What was the Princess’s reaction to all these men in identical outfits?” I asked, “Did she realise who they were?”

Again Sir John laughed. “She looked amazed and then turned to me and in her very upper crust voice, asked, “Tell me, Sir John, are they all civil servants?””

“And what was your answer?”

Still chuckling from the memory, Sir John replied, “Well I said, “In a manner of speaking, Ma’am, yes they are!”

In 1986, during the “Peoples’ Revolution”, as it came to be called, newsreels and photographs emerged from Manila’s presidential palace, Malacanan, that filled viewers with a mixture of fascination and horror. There were the rows upon rows of discarded shoes, the obscene mountains of unused cosmetics, the 3000 bras and panties, leading most observers to ask themselves, who was this woman who called herself the “Goddess of all the Arts” and the “Star and Saviour” of the 54 million Filipino people?

Imelda never expected to be forced into exile. She had lived with delusions of her own infallibility for twenty-one years – and the US government was, in most part, to blame. While Imelda “shopped till she dropped” and her husband imprisoned, tortured or killed any dissenter, agitator or critic, successive US Presidents went out of their way to praise and support them both.

In 1980 former President Nixon called Imelda “our Angel of Asia.” In 1981, after a blatantly corrupt election, Vice President George Bush Sr told the couple:

“We just love your adherence to democratic principles and the democratic process!”

 

And, during the Marcoses state visit to Washington a year later, President Reagan heralded their dedication to “improving the living standards for all their countrymen” and called them, “Nancy’s and my greatest friends and America’s greatest allies in Asia.”

It seemed then the couple could do  no wrong in the eyes of each United States government, convulsed as it was in the aftermath of Vietnam and ever fearful of Henry Kissinger’s “domino theory”, a theory that never stood up to serious scrutiny even then.

In fact Marcos and Imelda never even considered themselves mortal. In one issue of Playboy magazine, recorded during the Marcoses exile in Hawaii, they were asked the question:

“Do you think of yourselves as Gods?”

To which Imelda’s immediate reply was:

“Yes, because we are on a divine mission to return to the Philippines and reclaim our destiny.”

The ex President then chipped in:

“We are part of the achievement of being a God. That is what we are about now. An ordinary mortal would not be able to stand it. All of our statements now have to prove that we have not gone back to being ordinary mortals.”

But robbed of her personal fiefdom and her bottomless Treasury, with her own Swiss bank accounts frozen and nowhere to display her priceless jewels, Imelda Marcos presented a pathetic figure, hardly that of a deity. The Iron Butterfly’s wings had been severely clipped and, with it, her freedom to jet around the world at will. Her hard-earned memberships to the exclusive playgrounds of the privileged few had been withdrawn. Doors, once open by the rich, titled and powerful had been firmly slammed in her face. She complained that in Hawaii her telephone never rang and friends were always out when she called. The “enchanted fairytale” as Imelda once described her life, was over but, according to the Playboy interview, she saw it only as a “temporary intermission.”

When her husband died in exile, Imelda’s only dream for herself was a triumphant return to Manila. Forty years ago she had arrived in Manila with a beautiful young face, a dream in her head and five pesos in her pocket. Again she would arrive in Manila, this time broken but unbowed. She vowed she would seek the Presidency “for all those supporters who have anxiously awaited for my return.”

From her exile in Hawaii she made this promise to them. “I’ll go back with only five pesos and I’ll make billions and billions of dollars, because what I do comes from the heart and the brain – and I’ve got both!” 

But the support she expected had evaporated in her absence. The Philippines had moved on. Ferdinand’s corpse, she was told, would not be welcome, his body would have to remain in Hawaii. The housewife, Cory Aquino, who had become President by default negotiated Imelda’s return in exchange for access to some of the stolen money.

So Imelda bided her time, staging her political comeback to coincide with the inauguration of her former friend, the actor-turned politician, Joseph Estrada, an alcoholic womaniser who abused his position to such an extent that he, too, was toppled within his second year. And, despite, crawling down the aisle of Manila’s Cathedral on her knees to beg God’s assistance in returning her to power, Imelda has reluctantly had to give up all ideas of obtaining the Presidency and setting in motion the family dynasty that was her husband’s dying wish.

Later, when asked about this, and other similar, tactics by Fortune magazine, Imelda simply shrugged:

“I’m like Robin Hood. I rob the rich to make my projects come alive. It’s not really robbing. I do it with a smile !”

Her projects included literally hundreds of buildings. Palatial homes all over the world for her and her family, luxury condiminiums and office blocks, larger-than-life monuments of herself and her husband, numerous “love bridges”, health centres and art centres and a string of shopping malls and five-star hotels.

Imelda’s response to accusations of extravagance was simple:

“In the material world,” she explained coyly, “where everything is valued, when you commit yourself to God, beauty and love, it can be mistaken for extravagance ! But I have never been a material girl. My father always told me never to love anything that cannot love you back!”

And these words from a simple girl who went out of her way to obtain the world’s largest uncut diamond from Harry Winston, obviously so it could love her back, and not so she could outshine Elizabeth Taylor !

Imelda’s extravagance knew no bounds. She grabbed everything, bought everything, hoarded everything. Her excuse was that she was doing it for her “little people”. Like the “meek” in the Bible, she assured us, they would inherit it all.

“Everything I have is theirs,” she informed us journalists one day:

“I am their star and their slave. No matter how poor they are, whenever they see me they smile and they are happy!”

“THE WORLD IS A BOOK” Written and performed by Caroline Kennedy for “THE STUFF DREAMS ARE MADE OF”

Since I was very small I have always had an innate wanderlust. Day and night I would pore over books with photos of strange places, wild topography, fascinating people and exotic flora and fauna. These pages excited me like nothing else. Forget Alice in Wonderland, forget Winnie the Pooh, forget Little Women. As I grew up it was the writings of T.E Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger, Gertrude Bell, Francis Younghusband, Freya Stark, Margaret Meade and others that fired my imagination and became my Bibles.

And it was the words of San Augustin that became etched in my mind:

“The world is a book. And those that do not travel read only one page.”

Even at an early age I dreamt of writing a best-selling book about my about my wanderings, to write about people who didn’t resemble me, to learn about cultures different from my own and to live among tribes from as far afield as the mountain ranges of S.E. Asia to those of the Brazilian and Amazonian rainforests.  And I secretly hoped that someone, some day, would describe me as, “eccentric”, “fearless” and “inspiring”.

I wanted to be like Freya Stark, aged 85, astride a donkey, riding across the Himalayas. Her words resonating in my ears:

“To awaken alone in a strange place is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.”

And I made up my mind there and then that all my travels would be on my own.

It’s funny – looking back. I was single-minded. I was determined. And I was supremely confident – the type of arrogant self-belief that only comes with youth, ignorance and inexperience. I was so certain that I, like the renowned Arabist Gertrude Bell, would feel as comfortable sitting in a palace with kings as I would be squatting with nomads in a tent in the desert.

Over the decades I have travelled extensively – to the Soviet Union, India, Nepal, Africa, South East Asia, North America, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Middle East, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, the Antarctic, the sub-Arctic and Latin America.

During those travels I have shared an hermetically-sealed train compartment for 2 long weeks with three very drunk and very smelly Russian men as we crossed the vast Siberian tundra.  And I have had to demonstrate how tampons are used to four extremely perplexed male customs officials at the Siberian border who had never seen one before in their lives! They were convinced I was a spy and the tubes were mini telescopes I was using for my espionage work!

I have been robbed by a band of criminals as I walked alone to see the temples of Cheng Mai and I have been used as a police decoy to catch a serial rapist in Hong Kong. I’ve been toasted as an “honorary man” for my work in the refugee camps of southern Azerbaijan and I’ve been transformed into a living goddess by a remote Ifugao tribe living high up in the Cordillera Mountains of the northern Philippines.

I’ve illegally smuggled a terrified young Bosnian refugee girl in the back of my truck, away from the war zone, across 6 countries and into the UK, to reunite her with her parents. And I’ve been mistaken for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi by a large group of very curious, but obviously very ill-informed, Chinese journalists in Hong Kong!

I’ve taken and passed a Disaster Relief Operations Course with the British Army and I’ve delivered lectures aboard the luxury liner, the QE2, about the hidden wealth of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines.

I’ve hosted a birthday party in a prison cell for the Bolivian painter, Benjamin Mendoza, who was incarcerated for attempting to assassinate Pope Paul VI. I’ve played chess with Marlon Brando, played tennis with Al Pacino, sang on stage with Tony Bennett and giggled into my napkin as Monica Lewinsky dipped a cigar in brandy and rolled it seductively across her thigh at dinner. I’ve dined with King Hussein in Jordan, played charades with Princess Grace in Monaco and I have even sipped tea and watched horse-racing in front of the TV with our British Queen.

And what have I learnt from these unique, and somewhat surreal, experiences?  I have learnt not to take myself too seriously. I have learnt that listening to people is far more valuable than talking to them. I have learnt that a notebook and a pen is far more reliable than memory.  I have learnt that refugees who have little or nothing to offer are far more generous than people who have plenty. I have learnt that, in the words of the author James Michener:

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religions and avoid the people, you might just as well stay at home.”

And I have proved to myself that Freya Stark was right all along – that travelling on one’s own opens up many more doors than travelling with others.

As you can see parts of my dream have come true. I have also written a best-selling book although, sadly, it was not about travels. And to my delight I have, in fact, been dismissed as “eccentric” or just plain mad by many of my friends and family who watched me set off alone by train, at the height of the Cold War, across East Germany, Poland, Russia and Siberia. I have indeed been described as “fearless” by my fellow journalists in Manila. And I have been told I am an “inspiration” by the three people who matter most in my life – my children.

My dream has been to travel the world. And I still have new places to visit, new horizons to explore, new adventures ahead. But San Augustin’s words remain as relevant to me today as they always were:

“The world is a book. And those that do not travel read only one page.”

He was right, of course. To me the world IS a book and I better get moving again soon as I am only about half way through.”

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa has 296 steps to reach the top. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2010. If those were steps, it would have climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa 4 times

 

In 2010, there were 14 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 26 posts.

The busiest day of the year was June 16th with 47 views. The most popular post that day was Chapter 20 – The Octopus Man.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were mail.yahoo.com, mail.live.com, ph.yfittopostblog.com, facebook.com, and healthfitnesstherapy.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for www.anywhereiwander.wordpress.com, imee marcos children, imee marcos, alejo ganut marcos cronies, and “howard oxenberg” incapacitated.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Chapter 20 – The Octopus Man June 2010
1 comment

2

Memoir Blog # 24 Ninoy Aquino – The Boy Wonder of Tarlac February 2010

3

IMEE MARCOS IN LONDON June 2010

4

Memoir Blog #20 Early Days in Manila January 2010

5

Memoir Blog #17 Nothing Can Go Wrong January 2010
1 comment

The Railway Children of Saatli

Through the heat haze reflecting off the carriage roofs, through the belching smoke from the nearby asphalt factory, through the dustclouds whipped up by the unrelenting winds, you can catch a fleeting sight of them. Like phantoms, blurred, pallid, vague silhouettes, now here, now there, wafting in and out from behind the ancient railway wagons. Nimble, agile, fleet of foot. One moment in sight, a wisp of smoke, a puff of soot, then gone. Unreachable. Untouchable.

But when the air clears, there they are again. Or are they ? Is it my imagination? Are they an illusion, a mirage ? Could the dwindling light, the shadows, the dustclouds be playing games with the wind, perhaps ?

But here they are, approaching me, seemingly hordes of them, though, in reality, probably far fewer. Closer now they come, grubby, barefooted figures of young children, bare, fleshless arms outstretched towards me. Clothes ragged, hair matted, limbs encrusted by soot. But it’s their eyes that catch my attention. Not the normal eyes of children. These eyes are unresponsive, dulled by hunger, by lack of motivation, by boredom. They are lustreless, unflickering eyes of children, old beyond their years, some born, some growing up, all living on the railway lines of Saatli.

Home to these children are abandoned railway wagons, no more than corroded metal junk heaps, destined decades ago for the scrap merchant’s yard.  Windowless, airless, dank. No ventilation, no light, not even the winds penetrate these dark hovels. Life inside these improvised dwellings is lived in perpetual darkness. Stifling in summer when the brutal rays of the sun blister everything in their grip. Freezing in winter when the ill-fitting sliding doors offer no protection against the bitter, howling gales and the persistent snowstorms.

The only shade now – not trees, for there are none here – but the back-breaking space beneath the wagons. Here the weak ones sit, day after day, singly and in groups, hunched up, cramped, listless, pitiful. The lack of animation evident in their dispirited expressions, their vacantstares and their inability to  brush away the invading army of flies which voraciously seek out their eyes, their mouths and any available open sore on their bent and feeble bodies.

Under a white shroud, like a mummified corpse, lies a woman the impoverished medical system in this country has either forgotten, neglected or, deliberately, ignored. Mind confused, right side paralysed by a minor stroke, she lies, day after day, mumbling words only she can understand.  A despairing old man, her husband, puts his ear to the faintly moving lips beneath the veil covering her face, vainly trying to interpret their meaning. He shakes his head, desolate, for he can do nothing for her but watch over her and caress her shrivelled, veined hand. A small disabled boy lies next to her, dribbling, moaning, wretched, his unfocussed eyes infested by the myriad flies.

I watch this scene, moved and saddened, yet somehow transfixed. Reluctant to intrude but, nevertheless, wanting to be a part of it. I move closer. At the same time, voyeur and participant, observer and player, detached yet intimately involved.

And, as I squat down beside them a cast of characters crawl in and out from under this wagon. A heavily pregnant mother, panting furiously, brow sweating, her swelling draped in purple nylon, heaves her weighty body under the train and settles herself gratefully in the shade. An old woman, doubled up by age and defeated by years of arthritis, drags her distorted limbs painfully under the carriage, sinking, with a sigh, onto the temporary coolness of the metal track. A young man, a soldier from the war with Armenia, his left leg blown off by a recent encounter with a landmine, discards his ancient crutches, stumbles forward, then flops inelegantly down onto the ground beside her. Turkeys, geese, hens, ducks, cats and dogs, ever willing to fill their empty, worm-infested

bellies, scratch for crumbs of food among the feet of this motley cast.

The children have joined me now. In swarms they come, hurtling up the track, pursuing me with chants of “Arnu Swarznegger,  Bruze Lee, Junclode Vundam!” Simulating karate chops, high kicks and beefcake muscles, they have suddenly come alive. For one brief moment, no different from children anywhere. For foreigners are few here and so arouse immediate curiosity. Those that do come rarely stay. Few have time to sit for a while, to chatter, to play and, above all, to listen. They come with nothing and they leave with nothing, for the railway wagons are inhospitable, uninviting and offer little in the way of comfort to the visitor.

The children, their dead eyes sparkling now, jostle around me, pushing, shoving, touching, eager to get a closer look. One or two grasp my hands, help me to my feet, lead me on. Others, naturally shy, hold back, quietly observing me from a distance.

I spend some time here, with my new friends. But can I really call them my “friends” when I know, in no time at all, I shall be leaving them ? I shall go home and, in all probability, I will forget them. And yet, I know there is this feeling, they will continue to haunt me, these railway children of Saatli, these images of despair, so young, so vulnerable, so needy.

It is evening now. Dusk’s shadows, distorted and kicked in all directions by the unpredictable winds, throw dancing patterns over the broiling, dusty ground, flickering images, like a monochromatic kaleidoscope. The sun, falling in the west, vast, shimmering and aflame, paints the sky cinnamon. Plumes of cinder smoke, gusting from the factory chimney stack, release a delicate network of fluffy ashen threads across its sinking path.

I watch in silence, holding a child’s hand, as the gently fading rays turn to a soft, golden apricot before finally being swallowed up by the welcoming earth. I squeeze that little hand in mine. I must go home now. Night comes swiftly here in Saatli. But no matter how dark it becomes, no matter where I am, wherever I go I will still see those children’s eyes, not normal children’s eyes. Eyes of children, old beyond their years.

Caroline Kennedy is the In-Country Co-ordinator of Leonard Cheshire International in Azerbaijan, working with refugees with disabilities.

 

A Home Away from Home

A HOME AWAY FROM HOME

by Caroline Kennedy

You could almost be forgiven for thinking, on your first visit to the simple, single-storeyed wooden structure that is Echo House, that you were slap in the middle of a typical rural setting anywhere in the world – green fields stretching out to the horizon, grazing cows switching their tails to ward off flying insects, geese scratching in the yard, ducks weaving in and out of the bullrushes in a nearby pond, the odd turtle sunning itself on the banks of a fast-flowing river. This could be the place to recharge your batteries after a heavy week of work in the city, somewhere to breathe in clean air, feel the breeze caress your cheek, stroll barefoot in the grass, switch off from the world outside, relax and unwind.

There is little here to break the silence except the evening chorus of bullfrogs searching for a twilight romance, the distant whistle of a train passing beyond the meadows, the occasional bark of a startled dog woken from its slumber by an approaching shepherd and his unruly flock.

Look closer and you will find clues as to which country you are in – men, in groups, sitting idly under the shade of an overhanging tree, sipping tea and playing dominoes. Their women, gaily coloured, in the fields, backs bent double, picking cotton. The sun-scorched domes of a local mosque shimmering silver and ready to topple down in the midday heat.

Look behind the scene and this image of idyllic pastoral life is cruelly shattered. Even Echo House itself, at the centre, is deceptive. It is not someone’s rural hunting lodge but a rundown guest house offering but the barest accommodation and an alarming lack of sanitary and hygienic facilities.

To its left is what remains of a Soviet oil exploration site. Delapidated buildings, crumbling masonry, a huge, tangled web of corroding pipes, metal ropes and disintegrating pulleys. Antiquated, rusting machinery lying idle. Gaping, cavernous pits filled with rotting refuse, discarded tins, broken glass and stagnant, festering water – a breeding ground for the local malarial mosquito. This is the children’s playground of Echo camp in Saatli, Azerbaijan. This is my place. This is where I lived, on and off, during the last decade. This is where I lived for the best part of three years. This was my home away from home.

But “home” holds many uncomfortable secrets, has tragic stories to tell, has painful memories to share. Stop by the main gate as you enter, talk to Abil, the young man who, day after day, stands sentry there. Watch him valiantly walk towards you, agonising step by agonising step, his legs forming a figure of eight. Courage, resilience and a determination not to be beaten by his own unavoidable fate compels him to carry on – to heroically resist a walking frame, a pair of crutches or, even, a stick to support his frail body. But that, he knows – and I know – is how he will end up. Like his sister, Gamila, and brother, Azef, before him he will eventually succumb to the genetic disorder that has savagely claimed first their limbs and then their minds.

And what of his family ? What of his mother and father who could only watch helplessly as, at the age of 13, first their daughter and then their two sons began, stumbling, falling, losing control of their legs  These are internally-displaced people driven out of their homes by the invading Armenian army. No time to collect their belongings, no time to think where they are heading. No time for anything but sheer panic. The father, alone in his car at the time, unable to find his wife and his three totally dependent, paralysed children. Scouring the countryside, searching everywhere, looking for a familiar face in the straggling line of refugees fleeing down the road. Driven mad by fear of never seeing them again. Of losing them forever in the desperate scramble to get out of the way of the approaching enemy.

This is the Aliyev family. These are my friends. Reunited now, after that dreadful night ten years ago. Living in one room, one flight up in a disused and abandoned factory building. Lumps of masonry falling down as we talk. The daughter, Gamila, sits on a chair by the door, day after monotonous day. In the same place, never moving, never seeing the outside world. Just sitting in the same spot for a decade now. The mother, her back aching from carrying her sons up and down the stairs, prepares tea and jam for me.

But I feel ashamed. I feel helpless. I feel guilty. There is nothing I can do for these children. The father says I have done enough. That my friend and I are the only people to have cared about them, to have listened to their story, to have shown compassion, to have lent a shoulder to cry on. But in his heart, he tells me, he always knew there would be no magical cure, no miracle treatment, no new surgical intervention that could ever help improve his children’s condition. He knows they are condemned to their fate and, having lost them briefly once, he and his wife would never contemplate placing them in an institution. So I tell him that all I can do is give them wheelchairs to make their lives easier.

And so, at last, the day before I left Echo House, we delivered three shiny new wheelchairs to their door. Asef wasted no time trying his out, Suddenly, for the first time, experiencing the thrill of independence. Mobile, carefree, proud. He is immediately surrounded by curious, jostling children all eagerly wanting their turn to push him around in his new machine. The mother and I stand off a little from the crowd. Watching silently this excited, chattering, laughing group, our arms around each other, shedding tears. This is an emotional moment for both of us.

Young Abil, aloof and brave, still stands defiantly, sentry at the gate, refusing to acknowledge the wheelchair that waits for him but knowing, one day soon, he will have no choice. And what of Gamila ? She still sits by the door of her first floor room, now in her wheelchair, and I wonder if she will ever see the outside world, ever touch the grass, ever watch the birds fly, ever see the men playing dominoes under the overhanging tree, ever hear the women singing in the cottonfields or ever see the sunrise over Echo House.

 

What If?

What If?

By Caroline Kennedy

 

What if? What if you made your way home from work one day, or from shopping in your local supermarket or, like 14 year old Merima, walking home from school and, just as you do everyday, you turn the corner to enter your street… But…what if…where your street used to be there is a huge, gaping crater…and, further up the road, past the sprawling bodies, the scarred buildings, the rubble and the debris….is the crumbling, smouldering shell of your home. Everything you once owned is gone….and worse….everyone you once shared your house with has vanished.. perhaps missing, perhaps injured, perhaps even dead…..What if this happened to you….?

This is exactly what did happen to Merima, one of many refugees I was involved with during the course of my work over the past decade. Today the UNHCR is protecting more than 27 million people like Merima, primarily women, children and the elderly, who have fled war, conflict, disaster, ethnic violence or persecution. Add to those the number of displaced people and it reaches a staggering 50 million, in other words, one in every 115 people on this earth. In Bosnia and Croatia where I was working at the time refugees and displaced people numbered close to 3 million.

Merima was just one of them…And her crime? Being an ethnic Muslim…I found her, alone, frightened and withdrawn in an illegal refugee camp at Culineca on the outskirts of Zagreb , the capital of Croatia. The conditions there were among the worst I had seen in any camp. There were over 6500 people living there with no clean water, no electricity, no cooking, no sanitation and no medical facilities. Typhoid, hepatitis, head lice, scurvy, respiratory and intestinal ailments were rampant, not to mention cancers, kidney diseases, heart diseases and diabetes.

Slowly, with the aid of an interpreter, I managed to coax Merima’s story from her:

“I was naughty that day,” she began, dabbing her eyes with her sleeve, “I was wrong….and now I shall never be able to tell my mother I’m sorry….I came home from school so late…I stayed behind to play with my friends…I arrived home about dinner time…..It was winter. It was dark..I couldn’t see anything…I couldn’t see my house…I didn’t know what to do….But then someone grabbed me, told me to run with them….told me there were trucks leaving, that we had to get on them…there was no time to look for my family..they told me the mosque had received a direct hit…the mosque was right next to my house…they had seen my father come out of the house…they had seen him fall….and that was it.”

Gradually, over two days, I heard Merima’s whole story. Prior to this her two older brothers and her father had been rounded up and taken to Tronopolje, one of the worst of the Serb concentration camps where they had been subjected to the most appalling and brutal torture. To this day, nothing more has been heard from her brothers. But her father, suffering ill-health on top of his torture, was likely to die in camp and, in a rare display of compassion or embarrassment by his Serb captors, had been released.

Naturally Merima, her mother and sister were overjoyed to see him alive. Their elation, however, was to be short-lived. A week later the bombs dropped on their village. This was 18 months earlier and Merima had heard nothing from them since. She had no idea whether they had survived, whether they were in another camp somewhere or whether they had all perished together in their house.

I was determined to find out. Merima lent me the only mementos she possessed of her family – some small faded photographs she kept in her purse. It was not much to go on. I contacted all the main aid agencies in Croatia, such as the UN, the Red Cross, Medecins sans Frontieres and the UNHCR. I showed them Merima’s photographs and they all shook their heads.

On my return to England some weeks later I looked up an international Muslim aid group in Birmingham who I knew had been organizing mercy flights for severely injured Bosnian Muslims to receive medical treatment in the U.K. and Europe. It was a long shot, I knew. But God or Allah must have been on my side that day. Someone there recognized the family name. They were fairly convinced that Merima’s father had been flown on a medivac flight to the UK for treatment. I couldn’t breathe…The excitement was almost too much.  I didn’t dare believe my luck. I mean, what if he was actually here?….What if he was in this country?

I waited for what seemed like an eternity as files were scrutinized and names and photographs were checked and compared. Finally confirmation was made and I found myself ferried by chauffeured car to the General Hospital in High Wycombe. There I found Merima’s father, still a very sick man, her mother and her younger sister at his bedside. Then came the problem. How was I to break the news to them? In the back of the car on the way to the hospital I had rehearsed it again and again but now the time had come I was still totally unprepared.

In the end I couldn’t find the right words so I simply hugged Merima’s mother and pressed photographs I had taken of her lost daughter into her hand. With tears in my eyes I made a promise, a very rash and foolish promise, a promise I knew I would instantly regret. Not knowing whether I could possibly fulfill it, I promised her I would return to Culineca camp and bring Merima back to the UK with me.

Eight weeks later I arrived at Culineca.  I was appalled by what I saw. The place was now a bomb site. I was told it had been declared a health hazard by the government, a political euphemism for “undesirable”, and just the day before I arrived had been razed to the ground by bulldozers. The refugees, I was informed, had all been rounded up, loaded onto trucks and transported to various other camps around Croatia. Unwilling to board the trucks, some had fled, others had hidden themselves. I panicked…Oh,  my god, what if  Merima was lost? What if I couldn’t find her…? What would I tell her parents? I couldn’t bear to think about it…Amid the rubble, I shed tears of frustration, disbelief and bitter disappointment..

But, suddenly, as if by some miracle, there she was standing in front of me, a mere child but one of the few who had stubbornly refused to leave.  I rushed towards her shouting the good news as though she could understand. She threw her arms around me sobbing. I handed her a letter from her parents and an English postcard of a bright red London bus from her sister. Through an interpreter I explained that, in order to be reunited with them, she would have to travel with me through seven countries and seven borders and I only had her parents’ papers and a letter from the Muslim organization to get her through. I told her there could be very serious problems, setbacks and delays, we might even be turned back and, at the last minute, she could even be refused entry.

Merima had never travelled before in her life. She was very car sick, terribly frightened and eerily silent the whole way. She knew so little about me and I realized it must have crossed her mind more than once that I could be kidnapping her. We had no interpreter on the journey home so all I could do was hug her, squeeze her hand and smile reassuringly despite the dreadful lingering fear we would not succeed. The British border was the one I feared most and, by the time we reached there, I had decided the only thing to do was to smuggle Merima in, by whatever means necessary. If caught I knew I risked imprisonment. But,at this final stage I could not take the chance of her being interrogated by some unfriendly immigration officer and turned away because of her lack of papers.  So, as we climbed back into our truck after crossing the English Channel, I hid Merima under a pile of sleeping bags. In sign language I told her to keep completely still, completely silent. I then held my breath as we approached the immigration.

Fortune again was on our side. The officers on duty asked a few simple questions but failed to look in the back of the truck and waved us through. Again, I hardly dared breathe. I felt the sweat pouring down the back of my neck. All I could think of was what if we both got caught. Merima would have been returned immediately to Croatia and I probably would have ended with a custodial sentence.

But we had made it, the final hurdle. A few miles down the road, when the coast was clear, I called Merima to emerge from her hiding place. “We are going to find your Mummy now,” I said, hugging her as she clambered over the seat and joined me in the front. I think she understood me for this was the first time I had ever seen her smile.

Finally, two hours later, on the concrete steps outside number 48 Dersingham Road in High Wycombe Merima and her family had a tearful reunion. Merima’s first words to her mother were: “I’m sorry”.

Merima and I had both been extraordinarly lucky. On an illegal operation such as this any amount of things could have gone disastrously wrong. But it helped that she was a very trusting and very brave little girl.

Even so, ever since then, neither of us can stop asking ourselves questions….all of them beginning with what if?

 

February 1994

 

A Small Miracle

A SMALL MIRACLE

Today I witnessed a miracle. A small boy running down a corridor, kicking a ball with his left foot.  Not much of a miracle, you may think. It happens all the time. But this was a hospital corridor. And two weeks ago this small boy was condemned to die, unseen by a doctor and unmourned by any but his family and closest friends. His left leg – the one he was now kicking with – almost entirely decomposed.

For the past five months Mushvig has been lying on his bed unable, even, to stand. His whole left side, from the waist down, rapidly rotting away from the severe burns he received when his family tent caught fire.

Not once had he seen a doctor. His family had no money to pay for any kind of treatment.  All his devoted, but increasingly despairing, mother could do for him was to pour boiled water on his wounds, pick off the necrosed flesh and hope for a miracle. This was the state Mushvig was in when my medical colleague, Shirley Ludlow, and I found him. The miracle was, not that Mushvig might survive, but that he was still alive. It was a miracle the infection hadn’t spread into his bloodstream with the swift, decisive and inevitable result – death from septicemia.  It was obvious Mushvig had been blessed with an almost impregnable immune system. Only this had saved him. It was a miracle he had been found – just in time – by people who could help him.

The rain had been pelting down ceaselessly in the refugee camp at Saatli, Azerbaijan. Shirley and I were drenched and dishevelled after many hours trudging through the thick mud, visiting every tent, every hut, every family, checking every illness, every injury and every disease. And there, in a mud hut, 8 feet square, which he shares with his family,  was Mushvig lying on his bed and smiling at us serenely. His sick grandfather asleep on the floor. The men gathered round, grim-faced, hushed voices. The women weeping silently into their sleeves. A makeshift wooden frame, supporting the pus-soiled bedlinen, lifted the sheet clear of Mushvig’s left side. Like statues in some ancient diorama – trapped in time – tragic – each frozen in his own melancholic thoughts.

Abruptly, disturbing this immovable scene, a bedraggled hen, seeking shelter from the persistent downpour, flapped noisily through the open door, shedding sprays of water and rainsoaked feathers.  For one brief moment the motionless figures relaxed their pose, their eyes following the startled bird’s ludicrous antics around the room.Trapped and frightened it squawked  hysterically before settling itself unsteadily at the foot of the bed, eyes dilated, beak open,  panting nervously.

Wiping away tears, Mushvig’s mother, drew back the sheet to reveal the extent of her son’s injuries . Through an interpreter she whispered she was convinced her son was going to die – and there was nothing she could do.

During this whole semi-tragic, semi-farcical scene, the object of everyone’s attention – Mushvig – was smiling. Through the pain, through the sight of the decaying flesh on his shrunken limb, through his family’s grief and fears, Mushvig was still smiling. Impervious to the confusion around him. Oblivious of the despair he was causing. And, mercifully, ignorant of the very real peril his life was in.

There was no doubt in our minds. Mushvig must get to a hospital as soon as possible. It was only a matter of time before his mother’s conviction would be realised. Left like this Mushvig would surely die – it was just a question of when. Any small infection could set him on a downward spiral from which it would be impossible to save him. There was no time to seek authority from London. We had to make our decision there and then.

That night Shirley and I hatched a plot around the kitchen table. We realised any plan we made would require the signatures of two men – Azerbaijan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the International Commission for Humanitarian Assistance, Dr.Izzat Rustamov, and the country’s Minister of Health, Dr.Ali Insanov. We would also need a surgeon willing to operate on Mushvig for free. There was only one surgeon I knew who would volunteer.- Professor Agshin Bagirov at the Academic Institute of Traumatology.

We invited Professor Bagirov to visit the Saatli refugee camps with us. He was very excited at the prospect. He told us he had, as yet, never seen a refugee camp, even though almost a million people, his fellow countrymen, had lived in hundreds of refugee camps and settlements all over Azerbaijan for the past four years  since the end of the conflict with Armenia.

As we approached the camps, the Professor was like a horse champing at the bit. He couldn’t wait to see all the patients we had found, including Mushvig.  During the three hour car journey, he confirmed to us what we already knew, that only those refugees who had relatives who were doctors or surgeons received free, or any, treatment for their conditions. Otherwise they were left to die. It was as simple, as stark and as brutal as that.

The Professor told me simply: “Any refugee patient you and Shirley refer to me I will be their relative.”

The only cost to us would be the medicines, the dressings, the transportation and the food. I was touched by this very genuine offer. Considering that Professor Bagirov, arguably the country’s top orthopaedic surgeon, earns the equivalent of $500 a year and that the country’s health system is so impoverished this was an astonishing gesture.

To illustrate this dire situation, Professor Bagirov regularly visits car garages, mechanical workshops and light engineering works to obtain old screws, nuts, bolts and other pieces of scrap metal for use in his orthopaedic practice. Shirley and I had watched him a few weeks before as he illustrated how to clean and sterilise industrial nuts and bolts and rig them into frames for patients requiring mechanical fixation of broken limbs. He had demonstrated how he designed and fitted these contraptions to suit each particular injury. He showed us xrays of how he had lengthened bones up to 30cm without the use of invasive surgery – simply by screwing the bolts tighter every day.

All this was going through my mind as we drove the Professor and his student, Rustam Talichinsky, towards their first refugee camp. I wondered what their reaction would be. I needn’t have worried. The Professor constantly repeated how grateful he was that we were making it possible for him and Rustam to help their fellow countrymen. It was their pleasure and their duty to help those who could not afford the treatment they needed.

By the time we arrived the word had spread around the camp and, although we had taken all necessary precautions to make this visit as secure, as unobstructed and trouble-free as possible, lines of hopeful patients presented themselves to the two surgeons all along the way. Epileptics, diabetics, arthritics, TB patients. Children with broken limbs, old fractures and burns. Babies with hernias, talipese and hydrocephalus. Soldiers with war injuries, psychiatric disorders and nervous diseases. All approached us hoping for a free miracle cure. The camp doctors were unaware of most of these cases and seemed surprised at the sheer number. Despite our efforts to hold the crowd back, the Professor and Rustam refused to turn anyone away. To some they could offer help. To others, sadly, they could not.

At the end of a long day we arrived at Mushvig’s hut. His family still holding vigil at his bedside, still grim-faced, still weeping. But despite his condition having visibly worsened, Mushvig was still smiling serenely. Professor Bagirov and Rustam concurred with our initial opinion. Mushvig needed to be operated on without delay. On their return to the Institute a room would be prepared for him. The burns specialist would be consulted and an agreement secured with the Institute’s Director and staff. The Professor told us he hoped Mushvig would be the first of many refugee patients. And he had no doubt that everyone in his hospital would be prepared to treat any of our referrals free of charge.

The next obstacle was securing the right vehicle to ferry Mushvig three hours away to Baku. There was no way, in his condition, he could be accommodated in the back of a car. He would also require specialist support for the journey. In other words, we decided, he must be taken by ambulance. Both Shirley and I were very low on funds at that point and hiring an ambulance ourselves was out of the question. But there was, we felt,  a solution.

A few weeks earlier we had met Khalid Khan, Director of Save the Children U.S. We had got on very well and he had asked us to call him any time we had a project he could support. This, we decided, was the time and the project. We visited him and showed him and his Medical Director, Jeanne Russell, the photographs of Mushvig. By the time we left the office’s entire staff had gathered around to look at the photos. All, without exception, shaking their heads in disbelief, “how could this boy still be alive?”, gasping with horror at the sight of the decomposed leg, wiping away tears. They simply could not refuse. They promised us our ambulance.

Nurses, doctors, anaethetists and kitchen staff welcomed Mushvig and his mother on  their arrival at the Institute. He was already a celebrity. Everybody had heard of him and everyone turned up for his admission.

During the past weeks Mushvig has become a favourite with them all. And, ever ready for a photo opportunity, even the brother of Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev visited the boy. Mushvig’s smile, his bravery and his determination to get back on his feet and kick a ball have won them all over. His devoted mother cooks for him, cleans for him and remains at his side at all times. She still bursts into tears every time she sees me. She flings her arms around me, clasping me tightly, and sobs in my shoulder. Now they are tears of joy. She will never forget Shirley and me, she says, we have given her back her son.  She wants to go on television and tell the world. Mushvig’s sisters tell me we have given them back their baby brother – the brother they love – they will never forget us. Mushvig’s father also has tears in his eyes. He never expected his son to live, he will always be grateful to us for helping his family when they didn’t have the money to save his son’s life.

The wounds are healed. The anguish and the waiting are over.  Mushvig has just undergone his second set of skin grafts and will go home to Saatli in a few days time. It is the turn of another small patient, a little girl, Nagiz, from Camp I. Nagiz was injured and her baby brother died in their mother’s arms while fleeing from the gunfire of the invading Armenian soldiers. Happily, Nagiz’s injury was not life-threatening but, without proper surgical intervention, she would sustain a permanent and unnecessary disablement. As I leave the Institute both mothers tell me, “All the mothers from the Saatli refugee camps will be eternally grateful to Professor Bagirov and his team. We will never forget his kindness.”

And Mushvig himself ? Smiling he tells me he wants to become an English teacher because two English ladies saved his life!

Caroline Kennedy is the In-Country Programme Director of Leonard Cheshire International in Azerbaijan, working with refugees with disabilities.

 

A Home Away From Home

You could almost be forgiven for thinking on your first visit to Echo House, a simple, single-storeyed wooden structure, that you were slap in the middle of a typical rural setting anywhere in the world – green fields stretching out to the horizon, grazing cows switching their tails to ward off flying insects, geese scratching in the yard, ducks weaving in and out of the bullrushes in a nearby pond, the odd turtle sunning itself on the banks of a fast-flowing river. This could be the place to recharge your batteries after a heavy week of work in the city, somewhere to breathe in clean air, feel the breeze caress your cheek, stroll barefoot in the grass, switch off from the world outside, relax and unwind.

There is little here to break the silence except the evening chorus of bullfrogs searching for a twilight romance, the distant whistle of a train passing beyond the meadows, the occasional bark of a startled dog woken from its slumber by an approaching shepherd and his unruly flock.

Look closer and you will find clues as to which country you are in – men, in groups, sitting idly under the shade of an overhanging tree, sipping tea and playing dominoes. Their women, gaily coloured, in the fields, backs bent double, picking cotton. The sun-scorched domes of a local mosque, shimmering silver, ready to topple down in the midday heat.

Look behind the scene and this image of idyllic pastoral life is cruelly shattered. Even Echo House itself, at the centre, is deceptive. It is not someone’s rural hunting lodge but a rundown guest house offering but the barest accommodation and an alarming lack of sanitary and hygiene facilities.

To its left is what remains of a Soviet oil exploration site. Delapidated buildings, crumbling masonry, a huge, tangled web of corroding pipes, metal ropes and disintegrating pulleys. Antiquated, rusting machinery lying idle. Gaping, cavernous pits filled with rotting refuse, discarded tins, broken glass and stagnant, festering water – a breeding ground for the local malarial mosquito. This is the children’s playground of Echo camp in Saatli, Azerbaijan. This is my place. This is where I lived, on and off, during the last decade. This is my home away from home.

But “home” holds many uncomfortable secrets, has tragic stories to tell, has painful memories to share. Stop by the main gate as you enter, talk to Abil, the young man who, day after day, stands sentry there. Watch him valiantly walk towards you, agonising step by agonising step, his legs forming a figure of eight. Courage, resilience and a determination not to be beaten by his own undeniable fate compels him to carry on – to heroically resist a walking frame, a pair of crutches or, even, a stick to support his frail body. But that, he knows – and I know – is how he will end up. Like his sister, Gamila, and brother, Azef, before him he will eventually succumb to the genetic disorder that has savagely claimed first their limbs and then their minds.

And what of his family? What of his mother and father who could only watch helplessly as, at the age of 13, first their daughter and then their two sons began, stumbling, falling, losing control of their legs  These are internally-displaced people driven out of their homes in the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh by the invading Armenian army. No time to collect their belongings, no time to think where they are heading. No time for anything but sheer panic. The father, alone in his car at the time, unable to find his wife and his three totally dependent, paralysed children. Scouring the countryside, searching everywhere, desperately looking for a familiar face in the straggling line of refugees fleeing down the road. Driven mad by fear of never seeing them again. Of losing them forever in the desperate scramble to get out of the way of the approaching enemy.

This is the Aliyev family. These are my friends. Reunited now, after that dreadful night ten years ago. Living in one room, one flight up in a disused and abandoned factory building. Lumps of masonry falling down beside us as we talk. The daughter, Gamila, sits on a chair by the door, day after monotonous day. In the same place, never moving, never seeing the outside world. Just sitting in the same spot for a decade now. The mother, her back aching from carrying her sons up and down the stairs, prepares tea and jam for me.

But I feel ashamed. I feel helpless. I feel guilty. There is nothing I can do for these children. The father says I have done enough. That my friend, Shirley, and I are the only people to have cared about them, to have listened to their story, to have shown compassion, to have lent a shoulder to cry on. But in his heart, he tells me, he always knew there would be no magical cure, no miracle treatment, no new surgical intervention that could ever help improve his children’s condition. He knows they are condemned to their fate and, having lost them briefly once, he and his wife would never contemplate placing them in an institution. So I tell him that all I can do is give them wheelchairs to make their lives easier.

And so, at last, the day before I left Echo House to return to London, Shirley and I delivered three shiny new wheelchairs to their door. Asef wasted no time trying his out. Suddenly, for the first time in many years, experiencing the thrill of independence. Mobile, carefree, proud. He is immediately surrounded by curious, jostling children all eagerly wanting their turn to push him around in his new machine. The mother and I stand off a little from the crowd. Watching silently this excited, chattering, laughing group, our arms around each other, shedding tears. This is an emotional moment for both of us.

Young Abil, aloof and brave, still stands defiantly, sentry at the gate, refusing to acknowledge the wheelchair that waits for him but knowing, one day soon, he will have no choice. And what of Gamila ? She still sits by the door of her first floor room, now in her wheelchair, and I wonder if she will ever see the outside world, ever touch the grass, ever watch the birds fly, ever see the men playing dominoes under the overhanging tree, ever hear the women singing in the cottonfields or ever see the sunrise over Echo House.

IMEE MARCOS IN LONDON

I had been making excuses all week but I knew the time had come to make up my mind. The Philippines Ambassador, the former anti-Marcos journalist J.V. Cruz, had warned me about the impending arrival of the Philippines’ first daughter for some time. Imee Marcos, my old nemesis from Manila, was going to be in London along with her new husband, Tommy Manotoc, as part of their round the world tour.

JV had been an outspoken anti-Marcos columnist on the Manila Times when I first met him in the late 60’s, But, like so many other prominent journalists, he had eventually been seduced by Marcos’s offers of money, power and position. In JV’s case, his loyalty had been bought first by an Ambassadorship to Germany and then, when he had proved his loyalty, to the Court of St. James. Even JV’s younger brother, Jun, had benefited from Marcos’s largesse towards his new Ambassador. First Jun Cruz was made Minister of Finance and then he was nominated head of the GSIS, the Government Service Insurance System. But, like all other favours the Marcoses dispensed, there was a price to be paid. Imelda expected her cut. In this case it was the GSIS that she used as her own private bank to finance many of her multi-million dollar projects. And both Jun and JV had to look the other way.

I had known JV from my Café Indios Bravos days. He would drop by occasionally to receive or share the latest political and social gossip, to down a glass or two of whiskey and to cast a jaded eye around for any pretty, available girl. But now, in 1983, he was the essence of civility, his normal casual attire abandoned for a Savile Row pinstriped suit. And, instead of being content with a simple roof over his head he was now living in the vast Philippine Embassy residence on London’s exclusive Kensington Palace Gardens, known locally as millionaires’ row.

“I’ve got strict instructions from Imelda,” JV told me over the phone, “not to let Imee and Tommy out of my sight while they’re in London. They’re my responsibility. I’ve arranged a week of parties, theatres and sightseeing. But,” he hesitated, “there’s one night I just can’t be with them. Please can you and Ben take them off my hands that night for me, please.”

JV was pleading. Although Ben proved fairly easy to convince when I discussed it with him later, I was extremely reluctant. Ten years earlier I had crossed swords with Imee on Philippine television. And, like her mother, I knew she was unlikely to have forgotten the exchange. Imee had arrived at the Channel 3 studio that night with an arm encrusted in vast uncut emeralds, the like of which I had never seen before. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence at the time because there was a story doing the rounds in Manila that several Andean miners had lost their lives excavating the world’s largest flawless emeralds intended for the First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Romualdez Marcos.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the huge green rocks circling Imee’s wrist. And, being in a playful mood, I just couldn’t resist the temptation to remark on them. Live on air I asked:

“Those are the most magnificent emeralds I’ve ever seen, Imee. Did you ever find out exactly how many men died digging them out of the Colombian mountains?”

Flustered Imee hurriedly tried to obscure the offending jewels by covering them with her other arm. I could see she was uncomfortable but I had started, so I persisted.

“I heard your mother has yet to pay the bill, is that right?”

The presenter, Elvira Manahan, who was one of Imelda’s coterie of “blue ladies”, pulled one of her characteristic Phyllis-Diller-type expressions and let out a nervous giggle. Her husband Dr. Manahan, Manila’s top gynaecologist, had delivered Imee and the other two Marcos children so I realized this must have been acutely embarrassing for her.

I waited for an answer but Imee looked straight through me. For once the bright, intelligent First Daughter, who was being groomed to succeed her father, didn’t have a ready answer. Elvira coughed and tried to change the subject. But I knew my friends would expect me to pursue the subject until I got an answer. And youthful arrogance got the better of me. Besides, I was enjoying myself.

“How much do you think they’re worth – $50 million, $100 million? What would you say, Imee?”

Composing herself, Elvira reprimanded me:

“Now, Caroline, that’s an unfair question. Imee wouldn’t have any idea. They were gifts from her mother.”

While I was wondering how Elvira knew that for a fact, she turned to Imee:“

Now tell me about your life, Imee, are you planning to continue at Princeton in the Fall?”
I was tempted to say, “If the Philippines can afford the bill!” for it was well known that funds to educate the Marcos children were extracted not from Marcos’s modest presidential salary of $6500 per annum but from the Philippines treasury. Like everything else in his life, Marcos automatically expected his political dynasty to be paid for by the people.

I was also tempted to ask Imee about the rhinestone-encrusted jeans she had been reported wearing during a recent summer barbeque in Long Island. Except that, another guest reliably informed me, they weren’t actually rhinestones at all but real diamonds. Sadly, at this point, my instinct for self-preservation got the better of me. I had almost been deported once, Betsy, Henry and many of my friends had been jailed and now I had my own children’s safety to consider. So I let it go and we twittered on about innocuous subjects that required little soul-searching, little animosity and zero confrontation.

I had not spoken to Imee since then. And now JV was asking me to look after her and her basketball coach husband, Tommy, for a whole evening.

“Come on, Caroline,” Ben coaxed me, “it won’t be that bad.”

So, very reluctantly I agreed. My brother-in-law, Elliott Kastner, had a new musical, “Marilyn”, about the life of Marilyn Monroe running at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand so I reckoned I could invite Imee and Tommy to that. By going to the theatre I imagined, we could keep the conversation to a minimum thus avoiding dredging over old animosities. I called Elliott, explained the situation and he reserved some complimentary tickets at the box office for us. He suggested I call the manager of the theatre to warn him that I would be bringing the daughter of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. The manager was extremely courteous and offered to make all the necessary security arrangements, take us into the private VIP bar during the interval and arrange for us to meet the actors backstage at the end of the show.

I knew two of the main actors, Stephanie Lawrence, playing Marilyn and Judith Bruce, playing Marilyn’s mother, so I called them to say we would be dropping in after the performance. Everything was in place. “Sorted”, I thought, almost looking forward to the evening. But how wrong I was. I should have known that nothing involving any member of the Marcos family is ever that simple.

I spoke to Imee the day before the event. I gave her the name and address of the Adelphi Theatre and told her exactly what time we should meet there. In order to avoid misunderstandings I asked her to write it all down.

“Everything’s clear,” she told me.

“And please make sure you’re there ten minutes before curtain‘s up!” I said as politely as I could. And then, more pointedly,  “Theatre starts on time in England.”

“Sure, no problem!” she replied and put the phone down.

At the allotted time, Ben, the theatre manager and I were waiting patiently in the lobby.  Five, ten, fifteen minutes – half an hour – passed and still no sign of Imee. Yet again, just as it always did in Manila, the theatre curtain was forced to wait for a member of the Marcos family. As the audience inside began to hiss and boo, the red-faced manager could wait no longer. He gave the nod for the show to begin. My heart sank. I visualized Ben and me waiting in the lobby all night. I was indignant. This was discourteous not only to the management but also to the actors and the audience.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, seven stretch black limousines rolled up outside the theatre. Doors flung wide open and uniformed men, carrying armalites, spilled out onto the pavementt. I watched in horror as some of the armed minders rushed inside and others surrounded the perimeter, effecting a cordon sanitaire around the theatre.  And, when they decided the venue was safe, they snapped their fingers, whispered into their walkie-talkies and nodded the go-ahead for Imee and Tommy to emerge.

By this time people in the street had stopped dead in their tracks. They stared incredulously, probably wondering who on earth deserved such a massive security operation.

I, too, couldn’t believe my eyes. This was like finding myself in a cheap gangster movie. I couldn’t help thinking that nobody in London would even recognise Imee Marcos, let alone care who she was or what happened to her. Nobody in London was ever likely to threaten her physical harm or kidnap her. Well, nobody that is, except, of course, her own parents who had already proved they were more than capable since they managed to “kidnap” the hapless Tommy Manotoc following their daughter’s hasty marriage to him. And all for the simple reason that Imelda didn’t approve of him. When the scared young man was finally “released” from a month in his secret mountain cave and when his supposed captors, the NPA Communist guerrillas, had been suitably “punished”, Tommy emerged into daylight for the benefit of the television cameras looking healthier and more robust than he did before he “disappeared”.

But nobody was about to drag Imee off the streets of London and hold her against her will. Nobody was about to make an attempt on her life. Nobody was going to hold her for ransom.  This was exhibitionism at its most vulgar. This was simply a very successful attempt at drawing attention to herself. And, whether it was her own idea of making a dramatic entrance or “Daddy’s” orders for protecting his anointed heir, I never did find out. But seven decoy cars and nine armed bodyguards seemed, in my opinion, definitely excessive.

By now the manager was at his wits’ end. Armed guards were illegal in London and with them posted inside and outside the theatre so flagrantly he felt he was bound to get into serious trouble with the law.

“Can’t you ask her to get rid of them?” he whispered to me, as Imee swept into the lobby.

“I doubt it,” I replied, “the Marcoses are a law unto themselves. Nobody tells them what to do! That’s tantamount to suicide where they come from!”

I greeted the newlyweds and introduced them to the manager. There were no apologies but then I didn’t expect there to be. There was more hissing and booing from the audience as we were escorted into the theatre in the middle of Scene 2 and blindly groped our way in the dark towards our seats in the middle of the front stalls. I cringed as people making space for us to pass, were forced to stand up, dropping their bags, coats and boxes of chocolates, their seats swinging shut with loud thuds.

Feeling no guilt at all, Imee then whispered to me:

”What’s going on? What’s the story so far?”

Trying to keep my voice as low as possible I whispered back. I could feel the glares in my direction as I explained the plot. I desperately wanted to leave, preferably in the dark, so no one could see me and point the finger.

In the interval, as promised, the manager led us around to the private bar. He offered us drinks and then left. I started to make small talk.  Where had they visited, who had they met on their travels, that sort of thing. I finally plucked up the courage to ask Imee the question that had really been on my lips.

“Didn’t you feel really bad leaving your baby behind?”

“Oh, yes, I miss him terribly,” Imee replied.

“Surely you could have brought him with you, I mean with a yaya (nanny) so you could still have gone out and enjoyed yourselves?”

“Yes, but Daddy wanted me to leave him. He thought it would be safer.”

“But,” I persisted, “I heard you were breastfeeding. Did you have to stop, just like that?”

I was really dying to know the answer to this. But, before Imee had a chance to reply, the composer Tim Rice and the actress Elaine Paige turned round to talk to us. More introductions and more pleasantries and then the bell rang and it was time to return to our seats.

When the play was over, I escorted Imee and Tommy backstage. Imee was at her sparkling best. She talked, she laughed and, like her mother, she turned on the charm – but, if I or the actors were hoping for an apology for her late arrival, we were destined to be disappointed. Judith Bruce turned to me and whispered,

“Well, Caroline, I’ve known you a long, long time but you always manage to surprise me with the people you know! Who on earth will you show up with next?”

Graciously, like a well-rehearsed politician, Imee made her excuses to leave. Ben and I walked her back to the lobby where the theatre manager was waiting patiently. As soon as they spotted her the bodyguards sprang into action, raised their armalites, swivelled their eyes to scan the lobby and the street outside and fell into step behind her. She shook hands with the manager, thanked him for his arrangements and made her way through the glass doors out onto the Strand. The seven cars were waiting, engines revving. As she stepped into one of them, the minders piled themselves into the others and, with horns blaring and screeching tyres, they were off down the Strand. Ben and I stood, beleaguered, on the pavement. There had been no goodbyes for us, no thanks for arranging the evening and, despite the seven stretch limos, no offer of a lift home.

Later that same summer I found myself sitting on a sofa next to Imee’s younger sister, Irene. She and her new husband, Greg Araneta, were visiting London on their honeymoon. I now had a perfect opportunity to ask Irene why Imee had left her baby Ferdinand at home.

“Daddy thought it was safer for him to stay in Manila,” Irene replied.

“But I think I heard her saying she was still breastfeeding…”

“Yes, she was.” Irene sounded bored.

But I was intrigued.

“How on earth did she continue to do that when she was travelling around Europe?” I persisted.”

Irene glanced at me as though I was stupid.

“Simple, Caroline!” she laughed.  “She just expressed her milk everyday and then Daddy sent a Philippine Airlines plane to wherever she was and it would bring the milk back!” Irene shrugged her shoulders as if to say – isn’t that what every mother does when she’s away from her newborn baby for several weeks?

Now I understood why all my friends had been complaining during that time that all the Philippine Airlines flights to Europe had either been delayed or cancelled. The solution was obvious. The presidential dairy run was abducting the planes and flying Imee’s precious breast milk back to Manila. This is when it really dawned on me that the Marcoses lived on a totally different planet to the rest of us.

Chapter 20 – The Octopus Man

“THE OCTOPUS MAN”

Chapter 29

Ben had always been fascinated by people of all backgrounds, mainly as subjects for his photography and paintings. For some years before I met him he had already established an artist/model relationship with a scavenger in Tondo, the squatter area of Manila, where he had been brought up. The scavenger’s name was “Sabel” and she spent her days wandering through the downtown streets rummaging through gutters, rubbish piles and garbage bins in an endlesssearch for discarded plastic bags that she used as clothes. Every day her appearance changed. Like some organic sculpture she added or discarded bags of all colours, shapes and sizes so that her shape, too, evolved.  Sabel took on the appearance of some dreamlike sculpture. And Ben could not resist. Through his exhibited work “Sabel” became famous. Everyone in Manila knew her.  It always struck me as ironic that some of the richest, most prominent, families in the Philippines had paintings of the penniless scavenger “Sabel” hanging on their living room walls.

One day when the circus was in town, Ben suggested we check out the “freak” show. I was hesitant, never having visited one before and not knowing quite what to expect. But, out of curiosity, I agreed to go along. And that’s when I met the Octopus Man.

I remember clearly my first encounter with him. I remember feeling nauseated, of wanting to turn away my face, to run and hide, pretend he didn’t exist. I didn’t want to stare at him. I didn’t want to appear rude,. And I didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable. Oddly, I realized later, it was only me who felt uneasy because, as he told me, he was so used to people staring at him that it no longer bothered him.

“That’s why I am here, after all, Caroline,“ he said, “for people to look at, to wonder on, to pity and to jeer.”

The Octopus Man was, in fact, only a teenaged boy and part of a circus side-show in the Philippines. I had already walked through a tent containing Siamese twins, joined at the head, been greeted by their weeping mother, been told there was nothing that could be done, no operation that could ever save them.

I had already met “Little Lucy”. At only 18 inches this tiny person told me she was proud of her poster title, “The World‘s Smallest Woman”. She, in turn, had introduced me to a giant, Carlos, all 7 feet 8 inches of him although unfortunately,  he said, he could not claim to be the world‘s tallest man, that title currently belonged to an American. Carlos the Giant was obviously very fond of Little Lucy. He scooped her up and cradled her gently in the palm of his left hand as though she was a porcelain doll, tickling her tiny ribs with his right index finger to make her laugh. And when he placed her back on the floor beside me he did so with great care, making sure she didn’t fall.  She reached up, took me by the hand and led me to her “boudoir”. In contrast to the other room where Little Lucy had to be picked up and placed on the sofa, here everything was in miniature – chairs, dressing table, bed, all handcrafted to suit her diminutive size. I had no choice but to sit on the floor. I was not sure at that moment whether I even wanted to stay.

Little Lucy saw my discomfort immediately, felt me searching for a way out. Her tiny hand pointed to the tent flap.

“There,” she said, “you can leave if you want.”

She smiled at me.

“But I would like you to stay as I want you to meet my friend, Ramon.”

It seemed I had no choice so I smiled back.

“It’s OK really,” I tried to sound more confident than I felt. “It’s just that…”

“I know,” she nodded, “you’ve never done this before?”

I had to admit it was my first visit to any “freak” show. And now here I was backstage meeting the so-called “freaks”. The mere word “freak” upset me, didn’t it upset her, I asked.

“I’m used to it,” she replied. “I probably don’t think of it the same way as you do. And what else would I do?”

I had to agree there were few options open for someone like Little Lucy.

“I could sit at home, hide from the world, feel sorry for myself,” she was answering her own question, “or I could be part of this family, seek attention, have people look at me, talk about me, photograph me and perhaps, “she winked, “end up on television and be famous.”

“It’s possible,” I answered, “but would you want that?”

“Carlos the Giant was on television once. He said he liked it, said I should go on with him next time,” she laughed, a tinkling high-pitched laugh, “but I don’t think my mother would let me – and my little sister would be very jealous!”

Her laugh was contagious, I found myself joining in, feeling more relaxed. “Freaks”, it seemed, had a sense of humour, something I’d never thought about before. I was startled and somewhat ashamed by my reaction. For why should they be any different from us? Why should they not love, laugh, cry, sense, feel and live like us? After all, the only reason they had to join a circus side-show or a “freak” show was to make an honest living like the rest of us, not to depend on others to support them.

“Shall we go meet Ramon?” Little Lucy’s voice interrupted my thoughts. She jumped down from her chair and walked towards me. Taking my hand she drew me up off the dirt floor and I followed her out of the tent.

“Who is he, this Ramon?” I asked as we strolled across the grass, passing tents on either side of us.

“Ramon? Oh, he’s the Octopus Man,” she smiled, waving her hand at a male torso, no arms, no legs, sitting propped up by pillows against the wheels of a dilapidated caravan.

“Bring your friend round to meet me, Lucy,” the torso shouted to our retreating backs.

Lucy turned, waved again, “Later, Ricky, we’re off to see Ramon right now!”

I soon discovered that either I had to slow down my normal walking pace or Little Lucy had to run in order to keep up with me. I decided on the former, after all she was supposed to be leading the way. I finally paced it to take one step to her four. She giggled when she saw me concentrating.

“I don’t mind running,” she said, “it’s good for the figure. We little people tend to put on weight easily, you know.”

Again, something else I’d never thought of. I had already learnt a lot this day, I told her, and there would be many more lessons, I felt sure, by the end of the day – humility, compassion, respect and the hardest one of all, stepping outside one‘s natural comfort zone.

“Oh, Caroline, you sound so serious,” she mimicked, “life is one long lesson, didn’t you know? Just remember to laugh whenever you can. That’s what I do.”

Little Lucy what a plucky lady you are, I thought. And aloud I asked, “How many Little Lucys are there in the world?” It seemed to me that every freak show had their only Little Lucy.

“Oh many,” she giggled, twisting her long dark hair in ringlets around her fingers, “and I’m in contact with most of them…They call me the original but I‘m not really…“ She looked up at me, “Guess how old I am?”

Now this was something I hadn’t considered. How old could she be? By her size she would only be two or three, a mere toddler. By her looks she could be in her teens. By her coquettishness she could be in her twenties. And, by her wisdom, she could be a wise old woman. It was impossible to tell. I shrugged my shoulders, nonplussed.

“Come on, guess!” she commanded, enjoying herself immensely. “You must have some idea!”

“Not a clue,” I said and told her the reasons I found it hard.

“Just a little guess….please,” she pleaded.

“Well, let‘s see,” I frowned, “25?”

Little Lucy laughed out loud. She shouted to an elderly woman bent double over a laundry tub.

“Hey, Beatriz,” she shouted, “my friend here thinks I’m 25!”

The old woman turned. I expected her to straighten up but she didn’t. She shouted back, her eyes staring not at Little Lucy but at the ground at her feet. I realized then Beatriz must have a crippling spinal disability and was unable stand up straight, her whole life was spent looking at the ground.

“What does your friend know about age?” Beatriz laughed, “What does your friend know about suffering? What does your friend know about anything?” She turned back to the laundry tub, plunging her hands into the soapy water.

“Beatriz is not an old woman,” Little Lucy whispered, “simply a defeated one. She’s only 38 but has lived on the street all her life. Her parents didn’t want her. Her family didn’t want her. Her friends didn’t want her. Nobody wanted her. So she came here, only a few months ago. Now she’s one of us.”

I looked back at Beatriz. I was glad she had found a home with people who cared.

“So, how old are you?” I asked.

“The same age as Beatriz,” Little Lucy laughed her tinkling high-pitched laugh again. It was hard not to laugh with her. “That surprised you, didn’t it?”

It certainly had. I walked ahead thinking about how I came to be in this place with these strange people. I felt Little Lucy tug at my jeans.

“Here…we’re here!” she announced, steering me towards a tent with a primitive sign announcing in large red painted letters “Come Inside – See The Octopus Man“. Beside it was a crudely painted image of a man’s head superimposed on the body of an octopus. I hesitated, drew in a deep breath. I was not sure I wanted to go inside. Little Lucy grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the tent entrance.

“Come on,” she said, “you’ll like him, I promise…You won’t regret it.” She disappeared inside and I felt compelled to follow.

Seated on a wooden bench at the far side of the tent was something terrible. Could it be a visual trick, I wondered. Was this for real? Please, I begged to myself, don’t let it be for real. Meanwhile Little Lucy was rushing forward, grabbing the thing’s legs, the thing’s three legs. I felt sick, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see more.

“Here Caroline…this is Ramon…Ramon, this is Caroline!” she beamed, still hugging his legs. The thing bent over and kissed the top of her head.

I knew I had to shake hands – but then, which hand? This Ramon had three arms as well as three legs. But he was smiling at me and holding out one of his hands.  With the other two he scooped up Little Lucy placing her on his lap. She wriggled coquettishly, still beaming. Was this love, I wondered?  I stepped forward and shook the extended hand. By now I was feeling quite ill and desperately wanted to make a swift exit.

“Sit down,” Ramon said, pointing one of his arms towards a chair. Feeling faint I was happy to oblige, to get my breath back, to refocus my attention. I could hardly bring myself to look at him and, from what he said to me, I knew he instinctively felt my shame.

“I cannot say I am sorry for the way I look,” he said, “that is how I am. I cannot help it and I cannot do anything about it. Doesn’t the Bible say “be thankful for all God’s mercies?””

“I’m afraid I am not too familiar with the Bible,” I answered, forcing a smile, “I’m not religious.”

“I understand,” Ramon smiled back, “nor am I really…but it does have some things to say that are helpful to live by. Love thy neighbour as you love yourself.”

“I bet Caroline is wondering how you can love yourself, Ramon,” Little Lucy giggled, snuggling up to him.

Again I felt distinctly uncomfortable. She was absolutely right, of course, but I wouldn’t want to admit it, least of all to Ramon.

“It’s easy, Caroline,” Ramon’s smile widened. “People tell me I’m special. I’m different but I’m special.”

“And we like being special, don’t we?” Little Lucy interrupted.

Ramon nodded. “I’m only seventeen but I’m the only boy in my class who has a job.”

“Yes, he’s earning money here to put himself through college, I’m so proud of him.” Little Lucy beamed again. ”He’s a top grader in his school.”

I now realized this was more a mother – son relationship rather than a boyfriend – girlfriend one. My nausea was beginning to dissipate, my head starting to clear. Again I was faced with something revelatory. The Octopus Man not only attended a normal school but he outshone his classmates. He was earning money to go to college. He would probably do well, be a high achiever. Little Lucy had every right to feel proud. No wonder she wanted me to meet him.

Aloud I said, “I’m really impressed, Ramon. Congratulations. What are your favourite subjects?”

“History, politics…and I love geography,” he answered, “I want to read about people I will never meet and places I will never visit.” He grinned at me. “Lucy tells me you’re a traveller. Tell me about the places you‘ve been.”

“Oh, yes please, Caroline!” Little Lucy clapped her tiny hands.

And so I did. And they were a rapt audience, their eyes widening when I recounted vignettes of my trip across Russia and Siberia, their smiles broadening when I described my experiences since arriving in the Philippines. Every time I hesitated, Little Lucy clapped her tiny hands and shouted, “More!”

And so it went on, a long afternoon we spent together. Ramon gleaned as much information from me as he could, repeatedly asking questions, gaining knowledge. Occasionally he would shake his head solemnly, whispering, “I’ll never see that for myself!” And Little Lucy would reply, “Oh yes you will Ramon, you really will! Remember what we agreed?”

And Ramon would smile, “Yes, Lucy, you’re right. I will.”

Towards the end of the afternoon I felt comfortable enough to ask Ramon about his extra limbs.

“Ah,” he joked, “you’re no different from all the rest. You want to see them, don‘t you?”

I felt embarrassed. I had been caught out. “I simply want to know you better,” I said,“know what you have to live with.”

“So that you can feel pity for me, so that you can feel fortunate for yourself, is that it?” Ramon sounded disappointed for the first time.

“No, that’s not what I meant at all. I’m sorry.” I hoped I hadn’t hurt his feelings. In my confusion what I said had come out all wrong. I merely meant I was curious to know how he remained so positive living with the kind of terrible disability he had. I still couldn’t understand it. But nor, it seems, could I explain myself without sounding offensive.

I apologized again.

“No worries,” Ramon smiled, “I understand.” He started unbuttoning his shirt and trousers, revealing the source of his disability. An extra arm extended from below his right armpit, an extra leg hung limply from below his belly button. And, high up on his chest, just below his left collar bone, an extra ear protruded surrounded by a mass of black hair.

“Meet my twin, Rafael,” Ramon said.

I thought I was fully prepared for a shock but discovered then that I wasn’t. My head reeled, I thought I was going to faint.

Sensing my discomfort, Ramon asked, “Aren’t you going to ask me if I can have them surgically removed, that‘s what people usually ask?”

“No,” I stuttered, “that’s not what I was going to ask you. But, now that you’ve mentioned it, would you? Could you?”

Ramon looked at me. “The answer to your second question is ‘yes, apparently it’s surgically possible’ but the answer to your first question is ‘no’. This is my twin brother and I couldn’t destroy him. He lives with me, I live with him. We live our lives together, forever.”

The lessons I was learning that afternoon were almost too much to absorb. I knew I would have to leave Ramon, Rafael, Carlos the Giant, Beatriz, Ricky the Living Torso and Little Lucy soon in order to collect my thoughts, think about what I had seen and heard, imagine myself in their world, how I would live my life, what my attitude would be, how I would cope. They had done so much for me, opened my eyes to so many things I had simply blotted out before as just too painful, too pitiful or too unpleasant. They had helped me lose my fear of the unfamiliar, taught me to accept the unacceptable, broken down my natural barriers. With them I had met human beings with every conceivable physical aberration yet it was me, me who was supposed to be “normal”, who felt distinctly “different”.

But what had I done for them? A simple answer – nothing. Yes, for one brief moment I had transported them to other worlds, given them glimpses of places they would surely never see, introduced them to people they would surely never meet. That thought made me sad. I had gone through the gamut of emotions that afternoon with them. I had felt perplexed, awed, disheartened, fearful, sickened, inspired, happy and now I felt an overwhelming sadness, not for them but for myself. But what right had I to feel sad when faced with these exceptional lives? Later, back in my own room, I reflected on what Little Lucy had said:

“Just remember to laugh whenever you can. That’s what I do!”

I smiled. At that moment I knew they would be OK, those two, Little Lucy and the Octopus Man, they were survivors, they were special, they would definitely be OK.