Friday, August 07, 2009
By Lynn Ockersz
The Island (Sri Lanka)

Late Philippine President Cory Aquino would be best remembered for being swept to power in a completely bloodless popular revolt against one of the most repressive of dictatorships in Asia. It was indeed a momentous moment in Third World political history in that the people had their say in the most decisive fashion with not ‘a shot being fired’.

It was Chinese communist icon Mao Tse Dong who famously stated that ’power comes from the barrel of a gun’ and this saying by the Chinese revolutionary had taken its place in the political ‘wisdom of the ages’, when the 1986 ‘People’s Power’ revolt in the Philippines stood the magisterial pronouncement on its head. The seemingly soundly entrenched Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship was eased out of office by the ordinary people of the Philippines who brought life to a halt for days on end in the archipelago by massing on the country’s highways in a show of phenomenal peaceful protest against their rulers, but power changed hands without a drop of blood being shed. The people wielded no violence to achieve their ends and the law enforcers largely refrained from coming down hard on the protesting public with a mailed fist. However, governance was not possible in a country which had ground to a halt and the people eventually had their say.