The military reempowered
May 2nd, 2003
The brutality of the torture and murder of Oriental Mindoro human rights activists Eden Marcellana and peasant leader Eddie Gumanoy, the disappearance of filmmaker and Cultural Center of the Philippines awardee Virgilio Catoy, and the abduction of the group they were with last Monday are reminiscent of the worst excesses of the martial-law period.
That they happened, that previous to the Marcellana-Gumanoy murders other murders, abductions and disappearances were happening, and that elsewhere especially in Mindanao the military raids residences with impunity and “invites” people for questioning, suggest that in some parts of the country at least, martial law need not be declared; it is here. It is as if it were the 1970s all over again, and as if the country had not removed a dictator at all. For this President Arroyo, either in default or as part of an undeclared policy, must bear the primary responsibility.
The worst part of martial law was not the world-class theft of public resources and treasure that it concealed. It wasn’t even the steady decline of the economy as corruption and cronyism ran rampant, nor the resulting slide of the majority of Filipinos into the lowest depths of poverty.
The worst part of martial rule were the killings, the torture, the massacres of entire communities, the abductions and forced disappearances of thousands of men, women and even children by an unrestrained military, of which at that time the police was a part.
The inevitable result was military empowerment, in terms of its realization that its monopoly over the legal use of arms endowed it with an advantage no argument, no logic and no law could challenge. Because there were no efforts to exact accountability—no truth commission or impartial tribunal looked into the culpability of either individuals or institutions in the Marcos-led conspiracy to install a dictatorship in 1972—the overthrow of the Marcos regime did not mean the military’s unlearning that lesson in power.
The clearest signs that military power was a genie that would not return to the bottle were the series of coup attempts that destabilized the administration of Corazon Aquino from 1987 to 1989.
Although these attempts abated during the Ramos and Estrada years, it did not mean that the threat of a politicized military’s attempting to either take power for itself or to install its own preferred political patrons had disappeared.
Threats of destabilization whenever the interests of its leading officers appeared to be threatened thus continued even during the Ramos and Estrada presidencies. Those threats became more pronounced both during and shortly after Mrs. Arroyo’s assumption of the presidency via People Power 2.
The possibility of destabilization through military adventurism is still mentioned today during periods of crisis. It can be argued, however, that it has become far less serious, primarily because the military in the Arroyo administration has become a power center in itself—i.e., it doesn’t need to destabilize the government because in the sense that its voice is among the loudest and most heard in government, it is already in power.
The reempowerment of the military in the Arroyo administration was evident almost from day one, when Mrs. Arroyo acknowledged the military’s supposedly pivotal role in her capture of the presidency in 2001 rather than that of the civil-society groups that provided the warm bodies during People Power 2.
It continued with her reneging, as Estrada did with the help of then-Armed Forces chief of staff Angelo Reyes, on the Ramos government’s commitment to the continuation of the peace talks with both the armed Left and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
It proceeded apace in the Philippine reengagement (despite the constitutional ban on foreign troops and bases) with the United States military via the Balikatan exercises and the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement.
Even more pronouncedly was it manifest in Mrs. Arroyo’s surrender of the presidency’s powers to make policy in Mindanao, when, in February this year, Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes unilaterally launched a military offensive against the MILF in Pikit. Especially crucial, incidentally, has Reyes’s role been in facilitating the US military’s continuing presence and troop augmentation in Mindanao.
It is in Mindanao where military ascendancy is being demonstrated every day to the entire country. Mrs. Arroyo’s declaration of a “state of lawless violence” in Davao (on the heels of two bombings community and human rights groups suspect were carried out precisely to sabotage the peace talks between the government and the MILF) has resulted in the further empowerment of a military that previous to that declaration was already arresting and detaining suspected “terrorists” (including an entire family of one of the victims of the Davao airport blast) without the benefit of warrants of arrest, and in blatant usurpation of the police’s civil authority.
Heavily armed and backed by armored vehicles, the military has several times also raided Muslim communities, entered private residences without any legal basis, and “invited” community leaders for questioning.
However, Mindanao has other rivals as demonstration sites for the military’s exercise of its restored, martial-law powers. Unnoticed by the Manila press, Mindoro has been the site of two years of continuing human rights violations—arbitrary arrests, harassment, disappearances and summary executions—for over two years. Literally hundreds of human rights violations have been recorded there not only by local and national groups, but also by such international organizations as the Nobel Laureate Amnesty International.
Amnesty confirms the claim of local organizations—peasants’, women’s and human rights groups—that “grave human rights violations” are being committed in the Philippines.
“Such violations,” says Amnesty, “include disappearances, torture, extra-judicial executions and arbitrary arrests carried out by the Armed Forces of the Philippines or militia groups. Local NGOs have expressed concerns that some militia groups enjoy tacit support from the AFP.”
In Mindoro, says Amnesty, where there is “a significant military presence and reported high level of rebel [NPA] activity, there have been increasing reports of human rights violations committed against civilians.”
The most recent AI report on the Philippines is in fact on the abduction of the Marcellana-Gumanoy group and the disappearance of Catoy, whose whereabouts and fate are still unknown.
Dozens of activists from such legal organizations as the party-list group Bayan Muna have been murdered in Mindoro Oriental, the Marcellana-Gumanoy killings being only the most recent. These murders have been ignored by the government, and have gone unnoticed by an apathetic and biased press, most of whose decision-makers have dismissed them as unworthy of being reported because the victims were in their minds leftists and communist sympathizers.
This time not only some sectors of the Manila press but Mrs. Arroyo as well have expressed interest, primarily because the killings have been so brutal—and circumstantially suggestive of military responsibility—that they cannot be ignored.
Both the family and the organizations of Marcellana and Gumanoy are skeptical that the usual Arroyo pledge to “bring the perpetrators to justice” will amount to anything, and they may be right. Mrs. Arroyo has made that pledge so often it now sounds like a skipping 78-rpm record. And no one seriously believes that the police and other government agencies will ever have either the will or the courage to accuse the military of anything.
But if there is a positive side to the brutality committed against Marcellana and Gumanoy, both of whose bodies showed signs of torture, it should be citizen realization that the one characteristic that made martial law what it was—a military undeterred by either law or argument, and certain in its power and impunity—has been restored in parts of Mindanao and Mindoro at least. The likelihood is that, similarly unnoticed, the same process is going on elsewhere in this unhappy land. Only citizen awareness and organized resistance can expose, and perhaps stop it.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, April 26, 2003)