Who is Julian Assange, and why is the world agitated over him? The Manila Times – The Manila Times

For Tagalogs, just drop the ge in the name, add an S sound at the end and you get to have a more or less correct pronunciation of the surname of Julian.

At any rate, December 29 was the day a group from the Filipino intellectual community sought to contribute to the worldwide campaign of preventing the extradition of Julian Assange from the United Kingdom to the United States.

As it turned out, the event at the gate of the US Embassy on Roxas Boulevard became a lesson on how not to conduct a lightning rally. This kind of attack is done, as the name suggests, lightning-quick, with barely a minute or two allowed for the participants to voice out all that needs to be said, then disperse just as quickly to avoid apprehension by authorities.

From the coffee shop where we assembled on the east side, we had to walk over to the pedestrian lane northward, cross over to the west side and walk long again to reach the southernmost gate of the embassy where we expected to do our heroics.

Well, for the opportunity of doing bravura at such a growing twilight of our years, why not?It had been half a century ago when in another rally at the embassy on a rainy morning, our hundreds were blocked by a big contingent of policemen led by Western Police District Commander Col. James Barbers at the intersection of the boulevard and T.M. Kalaw Street.

A girl comrade, Ka Estrel, from Makibaka surreptitiously sidled up to me, slung on my shoulder a cloth bag containing something, which she described in this wise: Ganyan ang pinasabog sa Plaza Miranda. Pagbunot mo ng pin, ihagis mo. Four seconds, sasabog yan (Thats the kind that had been blasted in Plaza Miranda. Once you have pulled out the pin, throw it. Four seconds, it will explode.) Moments later, the police made a determined charge to dispel the rally. Pillbox blasts from activists rent the air as the rallying crowd withdrew to the Luneta grounds. That was a signal to unleash my bravado. But impelled by some sudden quick decision, I kept the grenade untouched in the bag, which I lugged on nonetheless as, rushing with the escaping crowd, I found myself leaping into the hallowed base of the Rizal Monument, which was guarded 24/7 by two Marines soldiers. At the mad approach of the pursuing policemen, the Marines guards eye-signaled me to stay put where I was crouching low, unnoticed by the pursuers. I did as signaled and by that, averted what would have been a more gruesome episode than Plaza Miranda. The Marines soldiers did right by themselves in any case. Had they told me to the police, I would have thrown the grenade then and there and would have gone down in history as the boy who blasted Rizal the second time around.

Memories were seizing me as I flowed with the very few Assange advocates crossing the pedestrian lane to the US Embassy grounds. No Ka Estrel was around to provide me with ordnance (next I heard about her was that she died in Cebu in an encounter with government forces); what I wielded, as did the others in the group, was a tarpaulin signage that read Free Assange. We were supposed to spread the tarps the minute we positioned across the southernmost gate of the embassy, which was proximate to the Philippine Navy Club. But even as we were only just approaching the spot, policemen in battle fatigue uniforms blocked our move. They were not as belligerent as the troops that chased us away in that 1971 rally. Mild mannered and even sounding apologetic for their interference in our moves, they reminded us that we had no permit and that we could not conduct the action in the vicinity of the gates. Two among us, leaders of the once-militant National Association of Free Labor Unions, flashed their signs nonetheless and began their agit-prop.The policemen, more than a platoon in number by military reckoning, were betraying increasing belligerence in preventing our move, even indicating an intent to arrest us if the event came to a head.

For one steeled in mass actions in the pre-martial law era, the move we were doing was a lost cause. It had been decades since I last stepped on the US Embassy environs, and only at that time did I realize that the area is on police watch around the clock. I flashed my Free Assange sign one last time and then folded it up for good upon being admonished by the troops that I was not supposed to do it there: Nandito po kayo sa US Embassy. Bawal po mag-rally dito (You are in the US Embassy. You cannot rally here).

But of course!

Does not the Philippines, in fact, continue to be under the umbrage of America? The Military Defense Treaty (MDT) of 1951 continues in full force together with the military alliance treaties it has mothered through the years, i.e., the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) of 1998 and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) crafted by the Benigno Aquino 3rd administration to allow America to use Philippine military bases as if they were USown, not subject to inspection by Philippine authorities!

I shouted with joy to the heavens when President Duterte abrogated the VFA last year, only to swallow my glee when Duterte suspended the abrogation indefinitely actually restoring its full effectivity to this day.

A year ago, I proposed the creation of a movement called SCRAMDT for Scrap the MDT, seeing the treaty as, indeed, the mother of all United States machinations to keep the Philippines in tow of American geopolitics. The MDT has become the benchmark for how a Philippine president is independent of America.

And so, with the faltering gait of an octogenarian, I toed the line of the Free Assange move that morning of December 29 entertaining no idea whatsoever that we will get what we wanted. If we cannot break our own chains from America, how could we ever gain freedom for somebody not our own.

But surely Assange, the renowned founder of Wikileaks, has become a worldwide cause clbre for having exposed American atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq. For criminal charges not necessarily connected with his internet escapades, he earned a prison term in the United Kingdom but avoided imprisonment by seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Britain. However, with the change in administration in Ecuador, Assange lost his asylum status and fell back into British custody. Advocates of press freedom the world over fear the Australian cybertechnology expert would be expatriated by Britain to the US to face criminal charges there and meet with possible capital punishment.

Assange, therefore, stands today as an icon whose death punishment would amount to the death sentence for universal freedom of expression.A worthy cause indeed.

As we say in Tagalog, Ang sakit ng kalingkingan ay kirot ng buong katawan (Thepain of the small toe is the ache of the whole body).

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Who is Julian Assange, and why is the world agitated over him? The Manila Times - The Manila Times