Rep. Satur Ocampo: Journalist, peace negotiator, people’s congressman

Rep. Satur Ocampo: Journalist, peace negotiator, people’s congressman

(Delivered to introduce Rep. Satur Ocampo on April 13, 2008 at Fr. Madden Hall, University of Toronto.)

It is with great pleasure and honour that I take on this privileged task of introducing our guest speaker this afternoon.

When the organizers approached me to introduce Congressman Satur Ocampo, I asked them, why me, and how did I earn that honour?

I was told, it was because Satur and I share two things: one, we were both business journalists in the Philippines; and two, we both have the distinguished honour of having a PhD attached to our credentials – PhD, meaning Philippine Detainee.

But allow me to be up close and personal with Ka Satur later in my introduction, as I deal with the official matters first.

In his own blog on the Internet, Satur simply describes himself as a journalist and partylist member of Congress.

Satur is the Partylist Representative of Bayan Muna (People First), of which he is the president. He is also Deputy Minority Leader of the Philippine House of Representatives.

Satur, just like our two other visiting Party list opposition Congressional Representatives Crispin Beltran and Luz Ilagan, is not your usual kind of congressman, or congressmen — those usually featured by cartoonists as hungry crocodiles greedily fighting amongst each other as they crave to have more for themselves of whatever would further fatten their already big bellies.

In fact, Satur is one of the few decent, incorruptible leaders in the Philippine legislature, indeed unlike many in Congress who have succumbed to the same kind of corruption and greed that have afflicted the top political leadership of the nation.

Satur, who prides himself of being the son of poor peasants from Pampanga, lives a simple life.

What he is known for is his courage and conviction in representing the real interests of the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed members of Philippine society, whether in the parliament of the streets, or the halls of Congress.

One can easily gauge this from the kind of legislation he sponsors, many of them aimed towards upholding human rights. especially in seeking justice for victims of extrajudicial killings.

A journalist by profession, Satur was a former vice president of the National Press Club, former assistant business editor of the Manila Times, and former president of the Business and Economic Reporters Association of the Philippines.

He was a generation ahead of my husband and I in journalism, and was among the journalists who had practised their craft with integrity and fought for press freedom during those dangerous years just before martial law. He was a close friend, colleague, associate and comrade of the late Antonio Zumel, the former president of the National Press Club who became a revered leader of the National Democratic Front.

Satur’s family is in fact a family of journalists. His first wife, Sheila Ocampo, who remains a good friend, was once an editorial writer of the Far Eastern Economic Review. Their son Sarni is a journalist, and so is daughter Nona, a journalist residing in Sweden, who had once garnered the most number of votes for directorship in the Philippine National Press Club — quite a feat for a woman journalist in Manila.

Satur married his best friend, soulmate and comrade, Bobbie Malay, a journalist who had opted to write for a Tagalog newspaper in Manila, after her educational stint in Paris. They have two children — Silahis and Anto — who have also become journalists by their own choosing.

When Marcos declared martial law in 1972, several journalists, specifically those known to oppose the repressive regime, were arrested and detained. To evade arrest, several journalists who were in the military’s list for writing stories critical to the Marcos leadership, went underground. Among them were Satur and wife Bobbie , my husband Hermie and I, and many others. We moved from one house to another as often as we could in Metro Manila during that time.

We crossed paths with Satur and Bobbie at least twice in those two years when we kept moving from house to house, finding ourselves briefly sharing a house just a stone’s throw from the military Camp Crame, only to part ways soon after to move to still another safer place.

In the brief time we were together, we got to know Satur, the business journalist, as a down to earth person, who proudly shared stories of his humble beginnings as a son of poor farmers in Pampanga.

Underground for us meant moving in the shadows to evade arrest, while engaged in creative ways to counter the oppressive rule of martial law.

Even while in hiding, Satur managed to establish strong links with colleagues in the profession, who, just like him believed that the repressive martial law — which had curtailed press freedom completely by shutting down all newspapers that published the truth — was the most crucial time for committed journalism to survive, if not to thrive.

In the process, an informal underground news network of some sort started to take shape, as journalists and other activists gathered news from the people about what was actually happening, and shared them with others in crude mimeographed form.

As published stories were fed to news contacts and spread around wherever they reached, an underground press network was born. Before long, various underground newspapers proliferated in the communities, independently run by anti-martial law activists.

At some point, however, the military caught up with many of us, and we were separately arrested and detained, with most of us subjected to various forms of human rights abuse.

Satur was among those tortured during detention. He was detained for a long time, that he is known to be the longest-held martial law detainee. At one point, he staged a dramatic escape from his military escorts, through the aid of fellow journalists, while he was on a temporary pass to attend the National Press Club elections.

He later emerged from the underground to become one of the negotiators for peace talks between the National Democratic Front and the Philippine government, a role he had ably performed with wife Bobbie, and Zumel.

Satur has persistently remained in the forefront of the Philippine struggle for social justice, this time, in parliament, unflinchingly and courageously representing the interests of the most vulnerable sectors and victims of human rights abuses.

This, despite having been himself subjected to various forms of persecution while carrying out his duties as an oppositionist lawmaker. In a regime that criminalizes legitimate dissent, Satur has had his share of trumped-up criminal charges and house arrests, only to be later cleared of them.

However, nothing seems to faze him, as he now even comes to Canada to bravely tell Filipinos and Canadians alike the truth about the present situation, including the continuing human rights crisis, in the Philippines.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us welcome the man who has tirelessly been fighting for freedom, peace with social justice, and democracy in the Philippines for over 40 years now — the honourable people’s Congressman Satur Ocampo.