Plots and conspiracies
June 8th, 2004
Someone should be, or should have been, advising the leaders of the Philippine National Police and the Armed Forces of the Philippines in the fine arts of public relations.
Since the week after the May 10 elections, both have been talking about “destabilization plots” and even coup attempts involving—of course—the usual suspects in the opposition, the protest groups and even the New People’s Army.
So often have they made this claim in the last three weeks or so that they’re beginning to sound like a damaged 78- rpm record.
What’s more, they’ve also revised the details of the so-called plot so many times that it’s assuming all the characteristics of a story made up to demonize the opposition and protesting poll watch groups, and to frighten everyone into hurrying up the congressional canvass and getting Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Noli de Castro proclaimed.
They began with a story straight out of the pre-martial law period. It alleged a “Leftist-Rightist” conspiracy called “Aklas Bayan” to obstruct the canvassing, foment protest, and install Fernando Poe Jr. president, presumably on the argument that he’s the real winner in the May 10 elections.
The Marcos echoes of this story didn’t help its credibility any. Neither did the fact that National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales and police and military spokesmen couldn’t seem to get their stories straight, much less coordinated.
Gonzales was at one point all urgency, warning the country over every mass medium known to man or beast that terrible days were ahead. He revised his own doomsday predictions later by belittling the very same plot that he, the PNP and the military had in the first place claimed existed.
Like Gonzales, the police and the military also blew hot and cold. Last week both were blowing cold, and were uncharacteristically silent.
Both now predict a stormy week for the nation. They’re not talking about the weather but about what could happen in the next few days as the virtual stand-off between the administration and the Fernando Poe Jr. wing of the opposition persists, and delays hound the canvassing of votes for president and vice president.
A police spokesman had earlier claimed that the “Aklas Bayan” the government claims to have uncovered had failed to recruit enough people to launch mass protests. Both the Poe opposition as well as the groups the PNP and AFP claimed were plotting some kind of coup attempt have denied any such intention. PNP chief Hermogenes Ebdane had also apologized for tagging the poll watch group Patriots as part of a “Leftist-Rightist” conspiracy to grab power.
But both the PNP and AFP still insist that a conspiracy by the Poe wing of the opposition and other groups to prevent the proclamation of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and to grab power for themselves could be launched this week.
A military intelligence report, says the Philippine Daily Inquirer, maintains that an opposition boycott of the congressional canvassing of ballots for president and vice president would trigger protest actions that would eventually lead to a demonstration at the EDSA shrine. What’s more, it insists that Patriots, despite Ebdane’s apology, was still in the thick of the plot, recruiting participants for the protest actions that would culminate at EDSA.
The tendency to dismiss police and military claims about an opposition-led conspiracy is understandable. These claims have been notoriously inconsistent as well as unverified. Many of their allegations, which they pass of as fact—among them an earlier one that said that Patriots was paying protest participants P200 to P800 each—have been so outrageous only the hopelessly naïve would believe them. Their partisanship is also obvious.
But none of these makes the existence of a right-wing conspiracy impossible. Such a conspiracy would most likely be without the involvement of the left, given its evaluation of the Poe camp as primarily directed by some of the worst dregs of elite politics, thus the vacuity of the “Leftist-Rightist conspiracy” theory.
The opposition—or at least a wing of a wing of it (the adventurist faction of the Estrada group)—did try to remove Arroyo in May 2001 via what it insists was EDSA 3.
The same adventurist faction of failed coup plotters—which includes at least two senators and their allies in several organizations of police and military officers—is intact, and could link up with the disaffected junior officers in the Armed Forces represented by the Magdalo group behind the failed coup attempts of July, 2003.
There are also the groups among Joseph Estrada’s urban poor constituencies, the depths of whose disaffection with government and the social and economic system are well-nigh unfathomable.
An opposition-led conspiracy would install Poe and cause the release of Joseph Estrada only as a short-term, interim goal meant to assure popular support. The realization of the almost two-decade coup plotters’ dream of finally installing a civilian-military junta would be the medium- term goal, which in the relatively long-term could yield to the installation of strong-man rule in the Marcos tradition.
It is doubtful if, other than for the immediate purpose of depriving the Arroyo wing of the elite of political power, the conspirators would have gone any further in their plans in terms of policies and programs of government. The latter are after all the least of the concerns of Philippine politicians, and eludes the understanding of Philippine police and military leaders.
The likelihood is that, in the event that they succeed, they will improvise as they go along, as most coup plotters all over the world who succeed have. The main point at this time would be to seize power and consolidate it—at the cost of the Bill of Rights, of course.
If such a plot does exist, it can only fail with the help of the citizenry, including the very poor who could be misled into supporting an undertaking that would not only use them to further the ambitions of a handful of conspirators, but would also turn against them eventually.
This means arming citizens with enough information to prevent their being sucked into an enterprise that would be to their disadvantage and the country’s. For that information to be taken seriously, the sources need to be credible.
Thanks to their own sorry records of saying one thing and doing another, and changing their stories to suit the political intentions of the moment, neither the Arroyo government nor its police and military are.
Where is the source credible enough for the citizenry to be suitably forewarned? Nowhere, perhaps because neither the Church nor its civil society allies are convinced of the truth of the police and military claims that there are plots and conspiracies afoot to complete the destruction of the electoral system—or because this country has simply run out of institutions its people can still take seriously.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com)