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Trial and Execution

The exile in Dapitan ended after four long years, when Rizal was accepted as a
volunteer physician to work with the Spanish army in Cuba. On July 31st, 1896, he
boarded ship and was brought to Manila, where he remained on board under tight
military guard for a month, waiting to be transported to Spain. Meanwhile, the
Philippine Revolution broke out under the leadership of a warehouse worker,
Andreas Bonifacio.

When Rizal reached Barcelona, he was brought back to Manila to stand trial by court
martial. He was accused of instigating and leading the rebellion, which as an exile
and prisoner he was not physically capable of doing. Months earlier, moreover, when
Bonifacio sent a messenger to Rizal in exile to ask for his support, the nonviolent
Rizal strongly repudiated the plan as ill-prepared and likely to produce useless
bloodshed. The court martial was firm, however, and expeditious. The trial itself, on
Dec 26, took only one day. In the early morning of Dec 29, the accused was notified
of his conviction and of the death sentence to be carried out the following day.

Soon after learning of his fate, Rizal asked some Jesuits to visit him, and they spent
much time with him in his last hours. Disillusioned while in Spain by the church's
opposition to liberal ideas and to his own politics, he had given up the practice of the
Catholic faith. According to Jesuit testimony, Rizal received the sacraments, after
much resistance and intellectual struggle, on the evening of his death and wrote and
signed a document of retraction from Masonry. On the following morning he was
married in a religious ceremony to a young Irish woman with whom he had lived in
Dapitan. The Spanish press in Manila reported these events, but Spanish credibility
was at its lowest. Many believed the story was sheer Jesuit fabrication, a view held
by some historians to this day.

For 300 years Spain had imposed political unity on the disparate tribes, village clans,
petty kingdoms and linguistic groups to which the inhabitants of the Philippines
belonged. This cohesion was the product of Spanish force backed by the church,
which was at that time tied to the Crown by the "patronato real". The intermittent
uprisings that had punctuated Spanish rule had been localized and ineffective-until
the Revolution of 1896, which was national in character. That national revolution
was founded on the awareness of a people living in a vast archipelago of some 7,000
islands that they were one nation bound by a common culture, history and destiny.
Before the late 19th century there was no such general consciousness, and
"Philippines" was nothing more than a geographical term. By reason of his brilliance
of mind, courage of conviction and forcefulness of language and imagination, Rizal
was the Filipino who contributed most to this national consciousness.

Rizal's execution further strengthened the resolve of the revolutionaries. They

declared independence on June 12, 1898, in a document echoing phrases from the
U.S. Declaration of Independence and established a republican form of government.
The Philippines was the first colony in Asia to stage a national revolution, declare
independence, form a republic and, thereby, send a discomforting message to the
colonial powers in that vast area.
The republic, however, was short lived, because the United States of America, in
fulfillment of its "Manifest Destiny", embarked upon its own colonial enterprise.
While the new Philippine Republic was consolidating its governance of the entire
country, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States for $20 million. The
American military then successfully subdued the islands in a bloody conflict kinown
in American records as the "Philippine Insurrection", but called by Filipino historians
the "Philippine-American War." Though the aim of independence was frustrated by
the American intervention, the execution of Rizal ands its aftermath awakened the
peoples of the rest of Asia to the essential fragility of colonial rule and to their own
capacity to form themselves into modern nations. The message was not lost on
Rizal's contemporaries, Gahndi (1869-1948) and Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925), or on a
much younger man, Nehru (1889-1964).

In recent decades, historians of Marxist orientation have characterized Rizal as a

bourgeois thinker repudiating a proletarian revolution. They also attribute his
apothesis as a national hero to the new American government, which preferred the
non-violent Rizal over the revolutionary Bonifacio, as a model for the Filipinos. But
Rizal, weho defies Marxist molds, has survived such iconoclastic efforts. The fact is
that Bonifacio's rebel band of common people had idolized Rizal even before his
death, using his name as a password in their secret meetings and as a rallying cry in
battle.

In Rizal's writings, particularly the novels and the farewell ode to his country, "Ultimo
adios,"written just before his death, Filipinos see themselves, their history, culture
and ethos. A case in point is the "little revolution" of 1986 against Ferdinand Marcos,
when tanks on the Epiphania de los Santos Avenue, a thoroughfare in Quezon City
that runs between the military installations Camp Auginaldo and Camp Crame, were
stopped by prayers, flowers and people power. Suddenly concrete meaning was
given to Rizal's words: "I do not mean to say that our freedom must be won at the
point of the sword.... But we must win our freedom by deserving it...by loving what is
just, what is good, what is great to the point of dying for it. When a people reach
these heights, God provides the weapon, and the idols and tyrants fall like a house of
cards, and freedom shines with the first dawn."
Rizal's political thought is critical to the current peace process in Mindanao, as
Filipino Muslim schloars point out. His search for the common past, for what Filipinos
had been before Spain stopped the advance of Islam and set clear demarcation lines
between Christianized inhabitants and Muslim communities, provides a historical
perspective within which to search for a common ground between Muslims and
Christians. The recent peace agreement with the once secessionist Moro National
Liberation Front is, in fact, an effort to integrate the Muslim minority into the nation.

What is particularly distinctive in Rizal's concept of the Filipino nation is its emphasis
on education. While some nationalist movements in 19th-century Africa and Asia
assigned primacy to the state, which was often viewed as a means to nationhood,
Rizal considered the basis of nationhood not to be race, ethnic origin, religion or
language, but a commonality that derives from education. The binding factor is the
broadening of the mind.

That quest invariably links the Philippines to the rest of Asia, which today has the
world's fastest growing economies and is moving, after five centuries of
marginalization, to center stage in world affairs. What Asia needs for its
"renaissance," stated Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in an
international conference on Rizal held in Kuala Lampur, is the humanism of Asian
thinkers like Rizal. Economic prosperity and political stability, Asia's twin obsessions,
must be guided by those universal moral principals and human values, ancient and
ever new----the dignity of the human person, equality, justice, human rights---for
which Rizal gave his life. The pursuit of prosperity within the context of freedom and
democracy, against the contrary advice of such sages as Lee Kuan Yew, the long time
leader of Singapore, and the tempting examples of some neighboring countries,
flows from Rizal's political philosophy. It may likewise be the unique contribution of
the newly emerging Philippine economy to the growth and development of the Asia
Pacific region.

Submitted By: Bryan Arabiana

BSN II ʹ 3

Submitted To: Dr. Edwin Mabilin