Presidential leadership can only be upheld by GMA backing up Oakwood pledges

There has been so much confusing blamecasting and hype over how the "putschists" who occupied the Oakwood luxury apartments, Glorietta should be brought to trial and "punished" that yesterday the chairman of the group which negotiated the surrender of the mutineers, Ambassador Roy A. Cimatu, called us to a meeting in Makati to reiterate in specific terms what had been promised the officers and men in order to convince them to surrender.

For the first time, General Cimatu showed the rest of us a copy of the report he had made to President Macapagal-Arroyo through Executive Secretary Alberto G. Romulo last July 28, the day after the Magdalo mutineers had been taken into custody and trucked "back to barracks." It was complete, we saw, and left nothing out.

In sum, the Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief, GMA, had been fully informed that the final deal was that the Magdalo group (as the mutineers were officially described) "agreed that they would face the consequences of their actions as provided for in the Articles of War."

That’s very clear.

I submit that it’s time for the President to put her foot down and back up the agreement made by her government negotiators with the "rebels" or whatever they may be ultimately called, and discourage the judicial sideshow launched a few days ago by Interior and Local Government Secretary Joey Lina and the Department of Justice’s state prosecutors who’re seeking to put the Magdalo officers and men – 321 of them being "charged" – on trial in a Regional Trial Court. This was not the deal.

You don’t change the terms of a surrender agreement after the armed mutineers, rebels or coupsters – whatever you label them – have laid down their arms, defused the explosives they laid around the prospective battle zone, and trustingly put themselves into the hands of military justice.

There’s a loud hue and cry, of course, which apparently has put the President off her feed and somewhat off-balance, (but I trust she’ll recover) to the effect that those "vicious coup plotters" must be tried in civilian court in order to drum into the heads of any prospective putschists that in this democracy "civilian authority must be paramount over the military."

This argument looks attractive, since the principle is absolutely correct – but it disgracefully begs the question. After all, the elected President of this country is the civilian authority. Therefore, by wielding her authority over this problem, our Chief Executive demonstrates civilian predominance. She remains a civilian, indubitably, even when she exercises her concurrent powers as Commander-in-Chief of all our armed forces.

In the Middle Ages, philosophers and philsophasters used to debate endlessly over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. In a country of 40,000 heat-seeking lawyers, which we are, legal questions and colatillas can be debated in and out of court till kingdom come. But in this case: A deal is a deal.

What the government pledged the Magdalo "rebels" was trial under the Articles of War – and this is what the President must guarantee they will get.

If the agreement, as crystallized in the five-page after-action "Memorandum for Her Excellency President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo" by General Cimatu, is ignored and an added form of prosecution adopted, then who will ever have faith in government pledges in any future negotiations?

The GRP or Government of the Republic of the Philippines, unless plans miscarry, will soon be entering into peace negotiations with the new leadership of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) – Al Haj Murad, or his representatives – in Kuala Lumpur. These talks, if and when they materialize, will be held under the sponsorship of Malaysia’s Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. GMA herself, acknowledging the support of the United States in pushing through these peace talks, has announced she hopes US President George W. Bush will "witness" the signing of a peace agreement – even if only by video connection, or what the newfangled technology provides.

How can the MILF insurgents, say 10,000 of them, be convinced the Philippine government will comply with what is pledged in the future by its negotiators if the "Oakwood Five" putschists and their, say, 321 – or more– followers in that 20-hour siege are doublecrossed after they surrendered their weapons and disarmed their explosives?

The horrible bomb blast last Tuesday which devastated the posh J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta’s business district (a place where Australian Prime Minister John Howard stayed in his last visit there, and frequented by many foreign emissaries and VIPs) gives us a vivid idea of what might have happened to Oakwood, Glorietta, the Inter-Con Hotel, Rustan’s and the surrounding area, studded with buildings and apartments, if the mutineers had not been induced to give up, and a serious firefight had ensued.

The President had done her part by wisely, and quietly, extending the "deadline" for such an assault to be launched by government forces , and holding back the massively superior forces and armored units poised to move in, led by Army Maj. Gen. Efren Abu of Task Force Libra and Maj. Gen. Emmanuel Teodosio, commandant of the Philippine Marines. Then there were the police SWAT and SAF unit of PNP Director-General Jun Ebdane, raring to punch in. Imagine a pocket war erupting in the heart of Metro Manila’s financial district?

The rubble and blood would have made fine viewing on worldwide television – and we inside would have been ketchup.

It’s nice to pooh-pooh the danger, once it is past, and not a brick has been chipped, or a single bullet fired in anger, but I kid thee not it was dicey there on the ground in the final four hours when we negotiated.

Ambassador Cimatu is not just a former AFP Chief of Staff, but a seasoned combat soldier who saw much action in Mindanao and commanded the famous 4th Infantry "DIAMOND" Division, and even led the first Philippine contingent to East Timor, joining the Australian Forces which landed in Dili to restore order to the rioting and massacre and quell the arson-plagued situation.

Yesterday, Cimatu recalled there were moments when he wondered that Sunday evening, when we were talking to the barricaded mutineers, whether we, ourselves, would get out alive. Certainly, we had been "dialoguing" way past the President’s given extension of deadline for the attack, which was "seven p.m.".

Another consideration which weighed heavily on our minds, trapped inside for those hours as we were, was whether the "putschists" were just buying time, counting on the deepening darkness to conceal the mounting of a counter-attack from "outside" by some unsuspected military unit which had clandestinely joined the mutiny. Personally, I’ve no wish to overdramatize (journalists should cover the news, not seek to make news ourselves), so I’ll have to admit that my greatest worry was whether I had made a mistake when I personally requested the President to delay her order to attack. Owing to this postponement, I had been concerned, the Oakwood mutineers might have been an unwitting pawn in fostering that deception.

But nothing untoward ensued. An agreement was struck. All’s well, we believed, that ends well.

And now all this controversy. Susmariosep. This is a country of bocaderos and garrulous folk who’ll talk, investigate, and "press release " ourselves to death.

* * *

I think much was set straight, and spelled out accurately, when Cimatu, and Navy Commodore Tirso "Pip" Danga (who was not just one of the lead negotiators, but as Camp Aguinaldo Base Commander has full custody of the Magdalo’s core group of five leaders plus an added sixth in the ISAFP detention center) appeared Tuesday on Ms. Pia Hontiveros’s "Strictly Politics" program on ABS-CBN.

This is where Cimatu and Danga reiterated that the mutineers had surrendered on condition that they be placed under the "Articles of War".

Those court-martial proceedings won’t get them off the hook – they could result in long imprisonment or even execution in extreme cases. Whatever the outcome, I repeat that’s what the Oakwood agreement strictly stipulated.

Also on the show to confirm the same thing was Philippine Air Force Lt. Col. Eduardo Oban, and later Navy Capt. Feliciano A. Angue, both of whom had been with the negotiating team inside Oakwood.

Captain Angue, recently returned from stint as attaché in our Embassy to the Court of St. James (London), had been "court martialed" himself years ago for the strangest of "crimes." He was court-martialed when he exposed corrupt practices in the military in his area of assignment. One of the charges leveled at him had been his going to the media without the permission of his superior officers!

A latecomer on the show, but also very candid, was Undersecretary for Special Concerns, Abraham Puruganan, who had sat on my right during the Oakwood talks. (To my left had been Col. Danilo Lim, commander of the Scout Rangers. Lim, a West Pointer, and at the time a Captain had been one of the early RAM-SFP-YOU putschists whose troops occupied Makati’s golden mile for four and a half days in December, 1989, and had been sentenced after Court Martial to three years in prison.)

Puruganan, who had been a Major in the same force, had gone underground, then been arrested, finally getting released by the amnesty granted by President Fidel V. Ramos in 1995. He had never returned to the military service, but worked his way back to a new career, he recounted, "thanks to the blessings of God."

I was interviewed, too – but not in the TV station – only by "phone patch". Pia simply rang me up while I was completing my column. Alas, the connection was awful, and my voice came out like I was choking on Metro Manila’s pollution, but what the heck – one of my perennial drawbacks is not to possess the rich tones of those used to buhay artista.

On the air, as well, was one of the detainees’ high-profile lawyers, our old friend and Mindanao gadfly, former Governor Homobono Adaza, who boomed that there was no coup, no rebellion, etc. Let’s see how he develops that argument in court.

Pia’s "coup" is that she suddenly had one of the mutiny’s core leaders, Navy Lt. S.G. Antonio Trillanes on the phone for a surprise "interview".

Trillanes asserted, in response to Pia’s queries, that he had hundreds of affidavits "proving" their group’s allegations of corruption in the military. Abruptly, and dramatically (unrehearsed?), Trillanes’ surprise interview was cut off, with Trillanes saying: "the ISAFP is telling me to put down the phone."

Afterwards, we learned how ABS-CBN had managed to get Trillanes on the telephone in the detention area. Apparently, someone had rung up the ISAFP guards and said that he was Trillanes’ lawyer. Sneaky – but it proved effective.

* * *

Buoyed up by the good marks she received from the latest Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey, the President must restudy the situation and support what her Oakwood negotiators had promised. Palabra de honor, word of honor, should be adjudged more binding than scribbles on a piece of paper. This is the way an honorable leadership leads an honorable nation.

As for the "detainees", thus far they have refused to submit themselves to that other venue, the Regional Trial Court. This was not the agreement, they insist, and rightly so. To my knowledge, they have declined, through their lawyers, to submit counter-affidavits. As even Justice Undersecretary Manuel Teehankee admitted on TV yesterday – but he spoke in the context of another case, that of Senator Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan and six others – someone accused can decide to remain silent and cannot be forced into "self-incrimination".

I think the DILG and the DOJ throwing this case to a civilian court is a no-brainer – and counter-productive. It’s not that our military must be treated with special favor or kid gloves – but an agreement on which a surrender by armed mutineers is based must be honored, not betrayed. For double-dealing sends a signal to other rebels about the sincerity and reliability of government pledges, whether these are to the MILF, the Communist New People’s Army and the National Democratic Front, or any other insurgent movements. If government pledges are written on water, who’ll deal with the government?

As this writer brought out at the concluding phase of the Oakwood "negotiations", the pledge that the putschists be placed under the "Articles of War" had to be made indelibly clear, for once those young officers and men laid down their weapons, defused their explosives and booby traps, and submitted, as General Cimatu had proposed, to "a return to the barracks", they would have given up their only bargaining chips, and would have made themselves defenseless before a resentful government and populace.

As one of those who negotiated in there, I feel personally responsible. So do, when we discussed the matter yesterday, the government negotiators headed by Ambassador Cimatu himself. They are men of their word.

Alas, as Cimatu admitted in a TV interview a day or two before, "I’m not a lawyer," and what’s happening, he said, was "beyond his control". Madam President: It is not beyond your control. You’re the one who can and must set things right. Those mutineers will – and they know it – face the music. But it must be according to the agreement.

The final but equally important point I’d like to bring out is that the funny situation, with civilian State Prosecutors now racing to outpace the Court Martial is that the RTC court might issue "warrants of arrest". Sanamagan. This is a terrible invitation to an absurd situation.

The – let’s call them "detainees" – are already in the custody of the Armed Forces, whether in the ISAFP, the Bonifacio Navy facility, and elsewhere under military discipline. (The core leaders are in ISAFP.)

A "warrant of arrest" would have the police demanding that the military surrender the detainees now in its custody to the PNP, to be transferred to detention cells in Camp Crame. What a comedy. And let’s not forget: That’s from where al-Ghozi, two Abu Sayyaf terrorists, recently "escaped," not to mention all those other celebrities from the Pentagon Gang to Drug Lord Henry Tan.

I pray that, on reflection, the President will call a halt to the nonsense fostered by some slavering and over-acting members of her Cabinet (some of them threatened by the situation) as well as over-emotional advisers, civil society representatives, and hardlining business groups. This is a time for firmness, indeed, but it must be coupled with common sense, Realpolitik – and true leadership.

The "backers" of this "rebellion" must, of course, be tracked down. But the officers and men who surrendered must receive the kind of "day in court" they were promised before they laid down their arms. And this means in the military justice system.