Unity
January 22nd, 2003
Commemorated on January 20, when Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. swore then-Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo into the presidency, the second anniversary of People Power 2 this year occurred less than three weeks after Mrs. Arroyo’s December 30 speech.
Ever hopeful, although perhaps clutching at straws, many Filipinos thought that by announcing her withdrawal from the 2004 presidential elections, Mrs. Arroyo would refocus her government’s priorities towards the reforms implicit in People Power 2’s successful campaign to oust then-President Joseph Estrada.
Mrs. Arroyo did not disappoint in that regard, at least not in making the expected public statements. On occasion after occasion, Mrs. Arroyo announced, and then renewed, her claimed focus on reforms, at the same time that she called for unity among the political parties and among Filipinos as a whole.
Apparently, however, she meant only among some Filipinos, not all.
In apparent response to her December 30 speech, Speaker Jose de Venecia proposed the transformation of the government into one of national unity, with the participation not only of the elite political parties, but also of civil society as well as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the National Democratic Front.
The immediate response of the political opposition in the Senate to that proposal was to shoot it down, primarily because it could not imagine, much less countenance, a government in which those groups fighting the government would be part of it. The administration senators mostly kept a stony silence, but in so many words eventually opposed it.
Mrs. Arroyo herself expressed her preference for “a government of cooperation” instead of national unity, presumably because a government of national unity, as demonstrated in countries as diverse as Macedonia and South Africa, will mean sharing some power with those groups previously denied participation in governance.
Less than a month after de Venecia made it, the government of national unity proposal was dead in the water, primarily because the basis for the unity part of it was never made clear, the only concession to that imperative having been vague statements about the government’s “national reform agenda.”
Exactly what this agenda is has not been explained. But it doesn’t require a doctorate in politics or economics to see that what it is, is mostly more of the same policies, programs and approaches that have been in place in the Philippines since the Diosdado Macapagal presidency accepted IMF conditionalities in the 1960s.
These include the further encouragement of foreign investments and a commitment to the rush to globalization that began during the presidency of Fidel Ramos, and not much else that’s new. Of course there is the usual pledge to address poverty through billion-peso projects—the very same projects that from administration to administration have not reduced poverty but rather enriched their administrators—and incidentally, dead silence over the obvious need for an aggressive family planning campaign.
Neither has Mrs. Arroyo announced any departure from such policies as her government’s military re-engagement with the United States, which among other consequences has brought U.S. troops back to these shores, and threatens to turn certain parts of the country into sites for what have been called “facilities” but which might as well be military bases.
And yet these programs, the country’s decades-long commitment to the conditionalities of international lending institutions, the equally hoary policy of encouraging foreign investments, and the Arroyo government’s unconditional support in exchange for military aid for U.S. strategic interests to the extent of inviting U.S. troops into the country and pledging its support for the impending U.S. war on Iraq, have been issues of contention for months and even years.
In short, the “reform agenda”—an agenda that for decades has borne only the bitter fruits of mass impoverishment, political instability and ethnic conflict—which would be the basis of the unity Mrs. Arroyo has been asking for is itself the very basis for the country’s many divisions.
The haziest part of Mrs. Arroyo’s calls for unity has precisely been the basis for it, a fact that did not escape even the elite opposition, but which certainly was the understandable, immediate concern of the MILF and the NDF.
Apparently, however, the “reform agenda”—repackaged by the Arroyo technocracy, and of course approved by the international lending agencies and the United States government—is non-negotiable, and neither the MILF nor the NDF should have taken the noises about a “government of national unity” seriously, because that agenda would not have been open for discussion.
This at least is evident from the Arroyo government’s attracting and even initiating expressions of support from the civil society groups that have been uncritical of it. At the same time, it has excluded from its consideration, as if they did not exist, precisely those groups which have argued against the disastrous economic and other policies that for decades have been in place in this country, and to which Mrs. Arroyo has contributed such initiatives as the joint U.S.-Philippines Balikatan military exercises and the Mutual Logistic Support Agreement.
The commemoration of People Power 2 this year was thus specially symbolic of the Arroyo government’s continuing dedication to unity only with those groups and interests that agree with it, and to excluding all those with an alternative view.
While Mrs. Arroyo spoke before a group of her political allies, members of the economic elite, military officials and high Church dignitaries at the EDSA shrine, her police was dispersing with water cannon and truncheons the members from the urban poor and middle class of at least three organizations which had wanted to be at the EDSA celebrations. Denied permits—which given the constitutional guarantee of free expression should be issued as a matter of course—the marchers were denied access to the very shrine that commemorates their own historic involvement in People Power.
Although one commentator referred to them as “rabble” in contrast to the coiffed, perfumed and couturiered attending the rites at the shrine, the EDSA marchers were led by party-list representatives Liza Masa and Satur Ocampo, who in Congress represent precisely those alternative views that any reform government needs to hear the most if it is serious.
In her address at the shrine, Mrs. Arroyo pledged instead to pursue “the spirit of EDSA II,” which she identified as “the powerful answer of the weak to the corruption of the powerful,” through a billion-peso campaign against corruption.
Ironic words, because spoken in a situation reeking of irony. Of course People Power 2 was about a people weary of, and no longer willing to tolerate corruption. But it was also about participation and free expression—about people gathering unmolested at the EDSA shrine on Jan. 16, 2001, and marching to Malacañang in the early morning of the 20th without being stopped by truncheons and water cannon, or threatened with automatic weapons in the hands of police SWAT teams.
Though she was no doubt at EDSA on Jan. 20, 2001 to reap the fruits of other people’s labors, that part of the “EDSA spirit” Mrs. Arroyo apparently missed. Unrelenting in her belief that it was the traditional power centers in this country, particularly the military, that put her in power, on January 20 this year she refused to allow “the rabble” to come to the shrine.
Instead she put battalions of police between herself and those groups that had provided the warm bodies that ousted Joseph Estrada in 2001, thereby demonstrating, not the unity she claims would lead us to a better future, but the continuing disunity that, based on the refusal of the powerful to heed the powerless and to yield one inch of ground to their legitimate demands, has brought this country to its present state of ruin.
(abs-cbnNEWS.com, January 21, 2003)