Aquino Memorial

Slain Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino will be honored next month at a memorial service sponsored in part by his former Harvard colleagues.

Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA), where Aquino spent a year as a fellow, is planning the memorial service along with MIT's Center for International Studies.

The service, scheduled for November 7 at St. Paul's Church in Cambridge, will feature speeches by scholars from both schools. Aquino had also spent a year at the MIT Institute during his exile in the United States.

The purpose of the service "is to commemorate a colleague who was very close to us and to show the respect in which we held him," said Acting CFIA Director Joseph Nye, who will be one of the speakers.

Nye recalled that he spoke to Aquino shortly before he returned to the Philippines last summer and was gunned down by an assasin as he stepped off the plane.

While Aquino knew that he faced dangers, "his feeling was that he had to go back to bring democracy to his country," Nye added.

Other scholars scheduled to speak at the service included Benjamin Brown, former director of the CFIA fellows program; Eugene Skolnikoff, director of the MIT center; and MIT professor Lucien Pye.

In an unrelated development, a former Mason fellow at the Kennedy School of Government has formed an organization dedicated to the democratization of the Philippines. Heherson Alvarez, who studied at the K-School in 1981-82, said that the group will encourage Filipino nationals living in the United States to boycott Philippine taxes, as well as foster civil disobedience in that country.

He said that 1500 people from around the country have joined the group.