Heard and scene at oakwood

It is probably a hotelier’s worst nightmare. Armed men taking over his hotel and making it their headquarters while government forces hunted them down and tanks rolled on the driveway.

For people who work at such a place and are caught in such a situation, their automatic response seems to be to forgo their own safety for the sake of others. At least for the employees of Oakwood Premier, that was what happened last Sunday.

When it became clear that the rebel soldiers’ takeover of Oakwood was going to be long-drawn, the hotel staffers at the front desk furtively removed all printed lists of guests staying in the building as a precaution. Later, the paper copies were destroyed and the computer system was shut down. But before they pulled the plug, they made a change in their database: The title and name of one of their residents, Australian Ambassador Ruth Pearce, just in case the mutineers decided to check and use the hostages as their bargaining chip.

As guests wouldn’t be let out of Oakwood – armed junior officers were guarding every floor – the hotel’s staff couldn’t get in. But why would anybody want to go into a building occupied by 296 men armed to the teeth and ready to blow themselves up?

Oakwood senior executive Al Legaspi was one of the staff members who talked their way into the hotel as the soldiers barricaded themselves.

"When I received the call at two in the morning from Lani Generoso, the manager on duty that weekend, I was very irritated," he says with a chuckle. "I said to myself, ‘Why is she calling me at two o’clock?’ She was whispering, ‘Al, there are soldiers here.’ I said, ‘So what?’ She said, ‘They’re inside the building, occupying it.’ I turned on the TV, woke my wife up and said I was going to Oakwood. She became quite alarmed."

Legaspi kissed his two-month-old baby and proceeded to Makati. His wife said, "You’d better make sure your son sees you again."

Wilma Estaura, human resources manager of Oakwood, says, "I knew I had to go there when I realized that while the staff was looking after the guests, there was nobody looking after them. Besides, our GM and head of security are foreigners, I thought there should be somebody to help them communicate better with the soldiers."

It was also Lani who called her and told her what was happening: An initial group of 40 soldiers went through the ground-floor entrance and up the sixth-floor lobby where they later met with the hotel’s security manager Michael Brown and GM Robert Rosetti. Lani says, "The guards were shocked because every soldier was heavily armed. The soldiers were apologetic and said we shouldn’t be scared."

After that call, Wilma was shaking so hard that she asked her 21-year-old son Paul Michael to drive her to Makati. They left their car in Forbes Park and ran all the way to EDSA. They were stopped at Ayala Avenue and again at Rustan’s, but she insisted that they be allowed to go to Oakwood.

Finally inside the hotel, she was able to get a list of all the staff members inside who were either on duty or had come back when the news broke. By the end of the takeover, 35 Oakwood staffers walked away from the building on Sunday night – exhausted, shaken and relieved.

Ghost Town

On a regular Sunday, the streets of Makati’s commercial area feel like there’s a fair going on. Between 440,000 and 450,000 people enter the maze that is the Ayala Commercial Center, a series of interconnected malls that’s home to more than 1,000 shops and restaurants with Glorietta standing proudly right smack in the middle of commercial and posh residential buildings.

Last Sunday, it eerily felt like a ghost town with surreal images: Soldiers in camouflage wearing red armbands with historical symbolism – a breakaway revolutionary group from two centuries ago – and something you’ve always hoped you’d never see in the country’s only well-paved and green stretch of road: bombs.

While the staffers of Oakwood repeatedly say the junior officers were very kind, polite, that nobody even smoked in the lobby, and were profusely apologetic for the "inconvenience" they had created and that they "made it clear from the start they meant no harm to anybody," these very same soldiers were planting bombs around the buildings, the underground parking network and in planter boxes – enough explosives to blow the block and everyone in it to kingdom come.

TV crews caught these scenes and flashed them worldwide. The search engine Yahoo! in the first hours had the headline "Armed men take over Philippine commercial district" (and later modified to "rebel solders"). As everyone knows, BBC and CNN reported the incident, continuously running ticker updates all through Sunday, while local TV networks got their people out of bed to broadcast live.

You can almost hear the snide remarks around the world: The Japanese Ambassador was right. Spending "sleepless nights" in Manila because of security concerns, an observation that nearly cost the friendly relations between the two countries, is not as uncommon as we had hoped.

The STAR received reports after the mutiny that multinational companies were "seriously studying security measures for their foreign staff," which will be read by skeptics as "seriously studying if it’s worth investing in the Philippines." And you can guess the answer to that.

Ayala Land VP for Commercial Centers Winnie Nazareth is more hopeful in describing the aftermath. "It was understandably kind of slow Monday morning because people thought the mall was still closed, but toward the end of the day it was like nothing had happened."

Legaspi adds, "I think Filipinos have short memories."

Nazareth explains that the market of the commercial center is mainly local. "It’s not the first time that malls were threatened and our shoppers always come back right after something like this."

She says that travel advisories against going to the Philippines do not affect local spending but admits that foreign investors who might want to open new stores "might be affected. In the past, we have hosted a lot of foreign retailers who are looking for new locations. The minute they see the crowds here, oh my god, this is a shopping mecca."

Nazareth is keeping mum on the losses Ayala Land incurred that Sunday. "We don’t even want to compute it. It’s just like closing on a Good Friday. The malling industry is the most resilient in the country. You cannot keep people away. Besides, other things, like typhoons and diseases, affect shopping habits."

Oakwood’s longest-staying guest, financial expert Bill Yan, who shuttles between Hong Kong and Manila for a multi-national company, says the only time he felt fear was when he saw a BBC report saying the Australian Ambassador and an American were taken by soldiers. (The Ambassador was one of the first to be evacuated, in fact.)

Does he think foreign investors will still be interested in the Philippines? "Those who know the Philippines, those who have been here, I think they are hopeful about the country. But those who don’t know it…it gets a lot of bad press. Tourists especially, if they don’t know the country, wouldn’t want to go. Every time there’s a bombing in the south, friends from abroad call and ask if I’m okay. They’re not familiar with the geography, they don’t understand that Manila is far from Mindanao. It’s almost like crying wolf – this time I was really in the middle of it."

In those hours that he was in his apartment, he received no fewer than 50 calls on his cell phone, from as far as Copenhagen to Washington, DC from those who had seen the news on TV. At one point, he was talking to a friend and had two calls on hold.

So, no, it wasn’t just an ordinary Sunday that "inconvenienced" everyone. Not even by Philippine standards.

It wasn’t any ordinary "coup" or "siege" or "mutiny" or "press conference" either. Instead of trying to grab power, they grabbed the attention of the world – pity they couldn’t do it without the bombs and hostages.

At one point on Sunday, the staff of Oakwood was given a copy of the rebels’ statement. They were gathered in one place and one staffer was asked to read it aloud to the rest.

Jonet M. Ramirez, Oakwood senior sales manager, says, "That actually calmed us down."

Their complaints were heartbreakingly familiar. In effect, corruption in this country is killing our people – from the selling of firearms to the enemy, to the holes in their boots, to their non-existent morale, to their daily ration of one can of sardines and some rice.

There was passion and fire and idealism, everything that makes a good soldier, but there was something missing: evidence. The one thing that separates rhetoric from reality.

The Evacuation

GM Robert Rosetti and Michael Brown negotiated with the five or six leaders the evacuation of guests while Jonet Ramirez and Al Legaspi arranged alternative accommodations and transportation.

There were between 550 to 600 guests staying at Oakwood that weekend, many of them local families who had availed of the hotel’s weekend package.

Rosetti says, "My main concern was obviously the safety of the customers and the staff. They said to follow instructions and we did." Rosetti has been in the hotel business for 26 years – with posts that have included the Middle East, Europe, the US and Asia – and says this is the first time he’s ever experienced an event like this.

Michael Brown, himself a former US military man, says nobody could have prepared for this event – not even a military base. "The security measures we have in place at Oakwood are absolutely adequate and sufficient for normal crime and terrorism. This thing that happened was so far off the scale, a military base wouldn’t have been able to stop them if they wanted to take over."

In the first few minutes of the siege, the soldier that Brown talked to said they were looking for "rebels," but when Brown got on the phone with the authorities to verify it, he was told on the phone that the soldiers at Oakwood were the rebels. The junior officer told him to hang up the phone.

"At their instruction, we gathered the guards and the staff up to the sixth floor and tried to make them comfortable as it was probably going to be a long night. I made it very clear that we’re a hotel, we’re full of families and children, and the officers recognized that very clearly and were insistent that they didn’t mean to hurt anybody at all."

By 6 a.m. on Sunday, Rosetti got the go-signal to evacuate the guests. They did it by tower (Oakwood has two) and it was so organized and calm that it felt "like people were just in line to board a plane." The evacuation started at 8 a.m. and finished at 10:30. Oakwood senior sales manager Christine Gella, chief finance officer Leo D. Abot and other staffers set up command centers at the hotels, printing out all their cell phone numbers and distributing them to their guests.

Rosalinda Diegor, a Filipino based in Honolulu, flew in at 11:30 on Saturday night and checked in at Oakwood. By the time she was transferred to the bay area hotel, she was feeling the first signs of post-traumatic stress: anxiety, upset stomach and shaking all over.

"As a Filipino, you’ll always want to come back to your country, no matter what," she says while relaxing at the pool area of Oakwood three days later. "As for tourists…I don’t know."

Last People Out

The staff was asked to remain in Oakwood after the guests had been evacuated. Throughout the siege, they weren’t allowed to make outside calls or receive them, just in-house commu-nication with the guests. One soldier told them he had received instructions to confiscate their cell phones, but he knew they had to be in touch with their families so he told them to just shut them off. The staffers put their cell phones on silent mode and made their calls discreetly, and in the early hours, Jonet even made a call under an office desk.

Wilma says, "What’s funny is that one of the lady guards of Michael wanted to get hold of her husband. So she asked one of the soldiers if she could borrow his cell phone. The soldier gave it to her and after that, the husband started calling the soldier’s phone every once in a while."

During the 22-hour siege, Oakwood people got to eat only by midmorning of Sunday. Chef Jerome Cartailler cooked omelet and rice for his colleagues and the 50 soldiers stationed at the Oakroom restaurant.

The leaders had asked Rosetti and Brown to arrange for eight apartments that they could use. The soldiers had cooked there, in the cafeteria and the basement. What did they cook? Wilma says, "rice, sardines, cup noodles and instant ginataan."

"The rooms that had a large number of people were cluttered and messy but the other rooms that were occupied by a normal number were not only kept clean, but they told me that they used some of the dishes and they washed them," Brown says. "They were incredibly concerned about leaving things as they were. They made it very clear that they recognized this was not their property, they were just temporarily here."

She adds, "At the Oakroom, some of them were watching TV in the gameroom as GMA gave her ultimatum. They had a meeting right away. Antonio Trillanes was seated at a table by himself, making phone calls. Nobody was cursing at GMA, they were just watching. Then Trillanes chatted with my son. He said, ‘You’d be out before the deadline.’"

When 5 p.m. was nearing, the Oakwood staffers grew tense. They started to pray the rosary, some were crying as they did.

Then negotiations broke through and around 7, they were allowed to go, leaving behind almost 300 soldiers and perhaps just as many journalists and politicians.