Panic triggers attack mode
May 22nd, 2004
Not only Fernando Poe Jr. is shooting himself in the foot by prematurely announcing his victory and generally confirming his inadequacies. The Arroyo government is, too. In the brief span of four days, it has succeeded in planting the seeds of suspicion in millions of otherwise complacent minds that it might indeed have orchestrated not only the nation-wide assault against the six party list groups its National Security Adviser claims are communist fronts, but also large-scale fraud during and after the May 10 elections.
The fraud is fairly well-established, as is the disenfranchisement of close to a million voters. What is yet to be proven is whether the disenfranchisement was selective and not the result of plain Comelec incompetence—and whether the fraud was enough to put Mrs. Arroyo in the winning column at the expense of her chief rival Fernando Poe Jr.
If large-scale fraud did occur, whether the administration did orchestrate it would need no additional proof, since the first would prove the second. If it was large-scale (or as the favored media cliché would put it, “massive”), it would surely have been orchestrated by the administration, since only a government in power could have done it.
At least three government acts this week suggested that the poll monitoring groups might be on the verge of establishing that the fraud was not localized and isolated, but national and widespread—and that the administration is panicking, and going into attack mode as a result.
Among the signs that it’s panicking was the Department of Justice’s threatening media organizations with criminal suits should they disseminate “false news or information on the results of the elections in the country tending to cast doubt on the credibility and integrity of the May 10,2004 exercise.”
Almost at the same time, the Commission on Elections stopped Channel 5 television’s own quick count on the argument that the station had no authority from the Comelec.
On cue two days later, Philippine military intelligence, still caught in a time-warp somewhere between 1972 and 1986, leaked a report to the media which claimed that Patriots, one of the leading poll monitor groups, was not only another “communist front” just like the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, the United Church of Christ, and every other organization you can name, but was also involved in another EDSA-type plot.
From the usual police sources as well as from Malacanang, meanwhile, came the usual warnings against “destabilization,” and threats of using “the full force of the law” against those protesting the conduct of the elections.
The dominant impression is of a government falling into a siege mentality, and striking out indiscriminately. The context in which these government acts occurred is indeed threatening. But the threat is not to the government’s stability or even to Mrs. Arroyo’s proclamation.
The bigger threat is to the integrity of the electoral system itself– in the hardening of complacency among a citizenry weary of the entire sorry business called Philippine politics, and, among the poor, eager to address such problems as where to get the money for Junior’s school supplies, clothes, and transportation allowance as another school year opens and the typhoon season begins.
Among the middle classes, the imminent danger is widespread indifference to the critical issue of whether there was indeed fraud. The indifference is a repeat of their passivity before Mrs. Arroyo’s use of their taxes during her campaign. The middle-classes’ fear of a Poe victory had blinded them to the long-term damage to the political system Mrs. Arroyo’s use of government resources would cause, and had led them to look the other way while she got away with it. After May 10, their relief at Poe’s seeming defeat has curbed their enthusiasm for uncovering and protesting large-scale fraud, because if established it could mean that Poe had lost the count but won the election.
Poe’s camp has not been very helpful. It has committed one faux pas after another, starting with that idiotic May 11 display in Makati which claimed fraud despite the tabulation of only 2% of the votes. It continued in its focused task of undermining its own credibility by choosing as anti-fraud spokesmen such sterling examples of political virtue as Francisco Tatad and Ernesto Maceda. The very latest is Poe’s claiming victory on no basis including the KNP’s own count, which shows him leading, yes, but not irreversibly. Poes’ camp has cried wolf so often few are likely to believe it even if a wolf the size of Luzon were found.
A handful of organizations has nevertheless persisted in documenting complaints of fraud. Some of these are Church-based, but not Church-directed. What explains the institutional Church’s silence in these elections is that it is even more fearful of a Poe victory than it had been of Estrada in 1998.
No matter. The point is that the groups involved are monitoring a process every Cory, Eddie and Gloria has said at some point is critical in a democracy: an exercise meant to determine the people’s will.
To undermine these groups now is to imply that they’re onto something, and to prevent the media from disseminating what they find is to suggest that it’s best to keep it hidden.
Does it matter whether they’re fronts of this or that group? It does—it certainly matters if Patriots is a communist front or a gang of clerico-fascists fronting for the Jesuits. But in the end it is not what they are, but how they’re able to document what they claim to have found, that matters most.
Right now, even prior to Patriots’ other threatened revelations, what’s established is that the May 10 elections were among the worst in current memory for the number of voters disenfranchised (some 900,000 according to the Social Weather Stations) and the number of those killed (some 145 so far).
Equally noteworthy are the casualties the group now leading the party-list elections, Bayan Muna, as well as its kindred organizations, have been taking. Two Bayan Muna leaders were shot dead on May 13. The Anakpawis-Quezon chair had been shot the previous day, but survived the attack. In Tacloban, two Bayan Muna officers and two Anakpawis members were arrested May 9 and detained without charges. In Angeles City the Bayan Muna headquarters was raided by armed men who carted away office equipment.
From across the archipelago have come reports indicating a systematic campaign against Bayan Muna, and the five party-list organizations the military has tagged as “communist fronts”: Anak Pawis, Gabriela, Anak ng Bayan, Migrante, and Suara Bangsamoro.
This is as unprecedented as the number of deaths in these elections. Since the enactment of the Party List Act (RA 7941) in 1995, the party-list system had been largely ignored as inconsequential by the military and the traditional parties, among other reasons because much of the electorate is not even familiar with it.
An admission of the failure of the political system to represent the majority, the Act since 2001 has enabled under-represented groups—identified by the Act in its Section 5 as “labor, peasants, fisherfolk, urban poor, indigenous cultural communities, elderly, handicapped, women, youth, veterans, overseas workers and professionals”—to send representatives to Congress.
But apparently because “ideological groups” (whose participation is specifically sanctioned by the Act itself in Section 3) were among those which succeeded in 2001, the military and its allies, including those Right-wing organizations masquerading as liberal and even Leftist, now regard the party-list system as a threat to landlord, big business, and dynastic dominance in government.
The killings, harassment, threats and other acts carried out by military and paramilitary groups against the six party-list groups are patently orchestrated at the highest levels of the government’s security apparatus. (National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales after all set the tone and the policy when he declared open season on Bayan Muna and company by calling them “communist fronts.”)
On the other hand, the growing panic in the Arroyo government could indicate fear that the fraud, violence, vote-buying and disenfranchisement of voters that also went on will be exposed as similarly planned, coordinated and executed at an even higher level, meaning Mrs. Arroyo’s herself. Thus the government attempts this week to intimidate, discourage, and frighten into silence the poll watch groups as well as the media on which they must rely in making their findings public.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com)