The Trillanes Affair
August 18th, 2003
In 1893 an artillery captain in the French Army was accused of treason. Alfred Dreyfus was charged with providing Germany with a list of secret French military documents. He was convicted in 1894, reduced in rank and transported to Devil’s Island to serve a life sentence. But Dreyfus’s story did not end with his conviction. “The Dreyfus Affair” instead dragged on for 12 years before being laid to rest in 1906.
In 1896, or just about the time the Katipunan waged the first republican revolution in Asia, Lt. Col. George Picquart, head of French military intelligence, discovered that another officer, and not Dreyfus, had provided the Germans the information Dreyfus had been accused of writing and transmitting. The relatives and friends of Dreyfus also uncovered the same evidence at about the same time.
To save face, the French Army court-martialed the real culprit, but acquitted him. In 1898 the successor of Picquart confessed that he had forged the documents that had led to Dreyfus’s conviction. He was arrested and killed himself in prison.
In all this time Dreyfus remained in Devil’s Island, the tropical hell-hole the French abandoned as a prison for its worst criminals only in the mid-1930s, and was tried for the second time only in 1899, or five years after his conviction. He was again found guilty, but his sentence was reduced to 10 years. But another government took power in France, and his sentence was nullified and Dreyfus pardoned. Only in 1906 was he restored to the army, and even decorated with the Legion of Honor.
The prevailing anti-Semitism in France and much of Europe at the time helps explain the injustice committed against Dreyfus, who was a Jew. The anti-Semitism issue was only one of others his case provoked, however. The Dreyfus case became the most important public issue in France, dragging into it allegations not only of anti-Semitism in the French Army, but also of corruption and incompetence, and the moral bankruptcy of the conservative government and its agencies.
Lt. SG Antonio Trillanes IV is no Dreyfus, and in any case is only one of some 300 officers and men of the Armed Forces of the Philippines against whom charges of treason, coup d’état and others are likely to be lodged. Neither he nor his cohorts are on trial yet, either. But he and his co-conspirators have nevertheless provoked a Philippine version of the firestorm of controversy that one can imagine must have engulfed France in the late 19th century.
The Oakwood Mutiny, or the Trillanes Affair, may in the end not have the same shelf life as the Dreyfus Affair, even as Trillanes may yet turn out to be as guilty as Dreyfus was innocent. But it has this early sharpened already existing divisions within the military, and widened the chasm between the administration and the opposition. It has also provoked a fierce debate within the intellectual community.
The most striking thing about the debate is that it is not about Trillanes and company’s guilt or innocence, but over the validity, or lack of it, of their claims about corruption in the military, the Arroyo government’s supposed plan to remain in power beyond 2004 through a “palace coup” and the restoration of authoritarian rule. Above it all, the debate is on whether the problems of Philippine society are beyond solution except through a coup or a revolution.
Judging from their performance before the Feliciano Commission so far, Trillanes and a fellow officer, Capt. Nilo Maestrecampo, are not the ideal articulators of the case for a coup, an act usually defined as the violent seizure of political power by a band of conspirators. Trillanes, for example, may have risen to the highest possible level of intellectual discourse in the military. It’s a level sufficiently low to give the University of the Philippines, where he studied public administration, a bad name. On the other hand, Maestrecampo made a name for himself on Wednesday by being as inarticulate as a drill sergeant.
The bottom line, however, is that both deny that their July 27 occupation of Oakwood Hotel was either itself the coup, or part of any coup attempt, describing it instead as a “spontaneous demonstration” meant to air their and their colleagues’ grievances.
It’s a claim that can strain the credulity of the most naive, including 10-year-old children. If the Oakwood occupation was anything, it was not spontaneous. Neither was it, in the manner of leftist (or for that matter rightist) protests, a demonstration. Few demonstrations are ever spontaneous, in the first place. They do not occur without any prior preparation like mobilizing participants, preparing streamers and placards, etc. A demonstration would be truly spontaneous only if several thousand people individually and without any prior communication came together at a specific place, armed only with their grievances.
The difference with what Trillanes and company did at Oakwood was not so much in its being obviously planned. It was primarily in the so-called demonstrators’ being armed to the teeth, and their ringing the hotel with explosives. For the Oakwood event to compare to protests favorably, protesters will henceforth have to bring guns to Plaza Bonifacio or the EDSA Shrine rather than streamers, and seize control of the protest venue.
Despite the mutineers’ obvious failings, which apparently include the Philippine military’s chronic dependence on discredited politicians, they have nevertheless provoked the debate on whether the Philippine crisis is serious enough to defy solutions other than radical ones, the most radical being either a coup or a revolution.
There’s a belief that the military can be the savior of this country, and it’s not rampant only within the military establishment. Exasperated by the country’s decades of backwardness, certain economists who used to call themselves nationalists have said so, and even urged the military to take action. On the other hand, the debate on whether what the country needs is a revolution has been preempted by the fact that it is already in the throes of a protracted one, i.e., the 34-year guerrilla war being waged by the New People’s Army to seize power.
What the debate reveals, however, is acceptance of at least part of the Oakwood mutineers’ claims, their inarticulateness notwithstanding. Despite themselves, their charge of military corruption appears unchallenged. There is also enough cynicism about the government among the public at large, academics, opinion leaders, business, thoughtful media practitioners, and even among some officials for them to assume that the government is either unwilling, unable, or both, to address the country’s problems.
This helps explain why there are forums that have been called to discuss the mutineers’ supposed plan of governance, the National Recovery Program. Despite consensus among those who have read it that it offers neither new perspectives nor groundbreaking solutions to the country’s troubles, and sounds like a term paper prepared for a class in Public Administration 101, like Trillanes’s papers on Navy corruption it has become an object of serious study and discussion.
How low has the level of public discourse fallen. Apparently, so desperate have the informed sectors of the citizenry become that they are prepared to look at anything and to think of even the unthinkable, among them the wishful thought that the military could be a liberating rather than the enslaving force that it has always been in our history, to find solutions to the country’s problems.
What this suggests is that the danger to the existing order is not so much the capacity for mischief of a few soldiers who believe that they can create “a revolutionary situation” by occupying a five-star Makati hotel. It is the actual development of a truly revolutionary situation not only in society at large, but now also in the minds of the most articulate of its citizens. The Trillanes Affair, and the possibility of its being repeated, is not so much the danger to the elite order as that order’s own historic failure to change.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, August 16, 2003)