Our double curse

In the cover story of the latest issue of Time Magazine, correspondent Anthony Spaeth says that in the minds of many, People Power is "a national pride, but also a curse – a Pandora’s Box that…should be permanently welded shut."

President GMA evidently agrees with him, although the irony of a primary beneficiary of People Power now proclaiming its irrelevance to the political fortunes of this country cannot be missed. But, strangely enough, many agree with her.

Still, there is another, arguably more serious, curse that has afflicted this country since 1986. Spaeth believes that "For people power to succeed, two elements are required: masses on the streets, and a split between the President and the military."

Many analysts have observed that the 1986 February Revolution marked the rise of the Armed Forces of the Philippines as a potent political force. But since then, a habitually interventionist military has come to be regarded as more of a curse on civilian authority than an unqualified blessing.

The leading role a faction of the military played in 1986 is acknowledged to have been a key to the dismantling of a dictatorship. The AFP’s "withdrawal of support" was a critical factor in the unseating of a duly elected President in 2001. Their continued support is now seen as essential to staving off destabilizing forces trying to oust GMA. Whoever the President is, in other words, his or her political fortune seems to be determined by whatever direction the winds blow inside the AFP.

To start with, there is conceivably no worse indictment of People Power than Spaeth’s assessment that the phenomenon "looks good just about everywhere but the place of its birth."

Having "changed the world as we knew it," in such places as South Korea, Pakistan, Myanmar, Indonesia and the former states of the fractured Soviet Union, Spaeth notes, democracy has "failed to transport the Philippines to a prosperous or stable new world." Some are even saying, he reports, that dictatorship would be useful, at least for a few years. I wonder who he’s been talking to and who they’re saying this short-term benevolent dictator ought to be.

Still, there can be no disagreement that 20 years after Ferdinand Marcos was driven from power, again quoting Spaeth, coup attempts by disgruntled officers and soldiers remain a chronic problem, corruption has not subsided and the economy has not risen to Asian Tiger status.

The situation has even allowed two politically well-situated children of FM to claim, with some plausibility, that corruption in government is worse today and that things were "better" under Marcos. Many will quarrel with these assertions but the point seems to be that political and economic deterioration have not been significantly checked since 1986.

The military’s prominence in any alleged "destabilization" is justified under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution which states in relevant part: "The Armed Forces of the Philippines is the protector of the people and the State." Mainly on the strength of this provision, in 2001, then AFP Chief of Staff Angelo Reyes famously withdrew his "support" from his Commander-in-Chief. For reasons of his own, which to me still remain inexplicable except for what might have been Angie’s pragmatic view of the trajectory of events, he turned against a President who, as far as I can recall, was among his staunchest backers.

Skeptics point out that the proper context of that infelicitous statement about the AFP’s protective role, which is found only in the 1987 Constitution, is actually set forth in the sentences which precede and follow it.

The first sentence of Art. II. Sec. 3 reads: "Civilian authority is, at all times, supreme over the military." The third sentence of the same provision says, "Its (the AFP’s) goal is to secure the sovereignty of the State and the integrity of the national territory." The AFP, it seems clear, is not given carte blanche to decide when and how the people and the State need its "protection." This is no open ticket to intervene in extra-Constitutional steps against a President and a civilian government whenever the military thinks that civilians have botched governance and it can do better. The dangers of this kind of prerogative are too patent and well-documented to have to argue here.

Discontent within the military usually starts with pretty mundane stuff: corruption in the top officer corps, blatant disregard for the welfare of fighting men in the field, favoritism in career advancement. As many others have stated, if the military cannot even run its own affairs fairly, honestly and efficiently, what makes it think it can run civilian government any better?

At the same time, all the talk about which military units remain loyal and which have "crossed over" to the rebels allows the corrupt but well-entrenched officers to divert attention away from the reforms which need to be immediately implemented, regardless of who calls for them.

I write this towards the end of what has been a tumultuous day. The President has issued Proclamation No. 1017 which declares a state of national emergency pursuant to Article 12, Section 17 of the Constitution. It’s still too early to say whether this declaration is a benign exercise of emergency powers, or whether it will turn out to be a de facto martial law. GMA has denied that this Proclamation is, in any shape or form, an attempt to install martial rule. It would be probably more prudent to make comments after some time has passed.

Once again, events are playing themselves out in a familiar pattern. I don’t know who’s using whom, whether it’s opportunistic politicians using disgruntled elements of the military, for whatever reason, as the "armed component" or "mailed fist" of its effort to unseat GMA, or whether it’s a frustrated military faction using naïve civilians to get to power and, having gotten there, stay there until they’re good and ready to let go.

This, I suppose, is what is meant by a curse. Having given them a taste of how it feels to be able to influence political events, the generals and colonels in the top echelons of the AFP have gotten quite used, thank you, to that role.