The economy is the least of our worries

It really pissed me last Sunday watching and listening to all those politicians go on television saying that the Oakwood incident is bad for our economy. Duh!!! That’s telling me something that even FPJ knows. Maybe that was something that needed to be said in 1989 when Gringo led the coup from which our economy never quite recovered. The economy then was on the way up so that Gringo and his cohorts really screwed up this country.

In the context of that tense Sunday morning however, the economy was the least of our worries. The economy’s close to dead anyway and business confidence couldn’t get that much lower. It was not so much that another coup attempt would cause the peso to fall even lower or that tourists would abandon the country in horror. It was the sad state of our military establishment dramatized by the mutiny that was a cause for worry.

Taking the law into their hands was wrong and they must face court martial. But then again, they showed their goodwill by releasing the guests trapped in Oakwood even if that deprived them of human shields.

The Oakwood rebels ended up doing what I call a photo op coup. As they say, onli in da Pilipins! It is possible that some politicians took advantage of them. However, it also seemed the young officers were sincere and were more after the front pages and all that airtime, not to mention those minutes on CNN and BBC and, I am told, a whole page in the Los Angeles Times.

The trouble with this country today is that you have to do something really dramatic and outrageous to get any serious attention. Our attention span is often too short to absorb the complexity of serious issues. We have also grown so cynical that any corruption charge elicits nothing more than a yawn. Frustration must have driven those officers to play their last card.

I am sure those officers exhausted internal mechanisms to get their grievances addressed and got nowhere. I understand some of them even had a dialogue with Ate Glo, but despite assurances from both sides, something went terribly wrong that forced their hand. In the end, Oakwood enabled them to get not only media spotlight but also Ate Glo’s undivided attention.

Oakwood was an indictment of the leadership of Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes. It speaks a lot when Ate Glo had to tap Ambassador Roy Cimatu to fix the royal mess. Whether Secretary Reyes believes it or not, there has got to be some unspoken loss of confidence on him by the President. The relationship will not be the same again even if Ate Glo still feels beholden to him somehow.

If Secretary Reyes has any decency left, he should irrevocably resign if only because the disaster happened in his turf and during his watch. Worse, he was item one in the rebels’ list of gripes. His duty as an officer and a gentleman is to protect and isolate the President from the mess even if he has to take the fall, not drag the President down with him.

His offer to undergo investigation by a super commission sounds hollow without an offer to, at the very least, go on leave. As it is, he will always be suspected of using the powers of his office to influence the investigation’s outcome.

At any rate, the military organization he heads must have lost some amount of its respect on the former general, probably enough to make him less effective than he should be. That’s a good reason to quit now. Maybe Ambassador Cimatu should take his place, if only so that Cimatu can follow up on the promises he made to the rebels last Sunday.

I was not surprised at all when the rebel officers laid out their charges against Reyes. It is difficult to believe Reyes benefited from the corrupt acts listed down. But we have heard enough about military weapons and bullets being sold to enemy forces for quite a while now. At the very least, Reyes is guilty of doing nothing that was effective to stop that.

This is vintage Angelo Reyes. I initially thought he was one tough and straight military officer who would modernize and clean up the AFP. He impressed me as the kind of officer we need in the armed forces. He is obviously just an ordinary career-oriented officer who played it safe and played politics at the expense of the service.

He disappointed me when he dismissed whistle blower Admiral Willie Wong as Philippine Navy Chief some years ago. The navy officer made the mistake of going after corruption in the Marines. It was ironic that the honest, simple living and gutsy Admiral Wong got the boot for doing his job. We never heard anything by way of Reyes going into the bottom of the Marines mess after Wong left the service. His philosophy probably is, what the public does not know won’t hurt them.

That seems to also be the prevailing philosophy when some of our civilian leaders insisted last Sunday morning that the problem was isolated in Oakwood. How can anyone responsible say that? The grievances aired by the Oakwood gang are so obviously generic and it is reasonable to expect their sentiment to be more widespread in the military establishment than officials are making us believe.

Still, for the sake of government’s credibility, the rebels should face court martial, not the 30 push-ups that FVR imposed on coup plotters in his time. But let us make sure that the officers recommended by the Senate defense committee for court martial in connection with the Lamitan debacle should be tried too. Sen. Jun Magsaysay lamented that his committee’s recommendation is gaining no headway within the military establishment.

Actually, my initial cynical reaction after I heard the grievances of the Oakwood rebels is that those young and intelligent officers shouldn’t complain about their frustrations with the military organization. They must accept responsibility for their stupid career decision to join the military in the first place. The military organization had been rotten for a long time and surely, they must have known this, even as cadets in the academy.

Then again, if only the criminally inclined, the corrupt and losers who prefer to play it safe with their personal careers join the military, we would all be in trouble. It is just as well that some idealists, misguided as they may be, are still crazy enough to sign up with the armed forces.

I have met some young officers whose idealism sounded pretty much like Navy Lt. Sg. Antonio Trillanes when I served as a judge in Metrobank’s outstanding soldiers competition the other year. They have impressed me as highly capable, well-motivated and patriotic young men who can lead this nation in the future better than it is being led now. I came out of those long interview sessions proud to be a Filipino and hopeful that when our generation of leaders is finally gone, the new one is going to be a whole lot better. It is a pity if we waste their promise by allowing a corrupt system to eat them up.

Let us not belabor the negative impact of Oakwood on our near dead economy. Our economy will recover quickly enough, as soon as we have cleaned up our bureaucracy (including the military) and have laid the basis for a professional military establishment focused on assuring our security rather than enriching themselves by making some crooked money here and there.

We survived another serious made-for-television kind of crisis. But the causes are real and yet to be addressed. So the crisis continues, still begging for urgent top-level attention. Hopefully, our leaders won’t relax too soon.

Damn

Now, here’s Dr. Ernie E.

The priest is repairing the church fence. A boy is standing nearby for a long while. The priest asks him: "Do you want to speak with me, my son?"

"No, I’m just waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"Waiting to hear what a priest says when he hits his finger with a hammer."

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]