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ANALYSIS
The once and future
coup
By Marco Garrido
MANILA - It might have
seemed like a coup d'etat. It might even have been
intended as a coup d'etat. But the soldiers who mutinied
last week not only failed to capture the seat of state
power, as a proper coup would propose, they seemed
remarkably ill-positioned to do so.
On July 27,
300 soldiers identifying themselves as being part of the
"Magdalo" faction (after the nom de guerre of the
first Philippine Republic president, General Emilio
Aguinaldo) occupied the Oakwood Premier hotel in
Manila's commercial district and ringed the neighboring
mall with explosives. Except for a few sympathetic
demonstrators, the soldiers lacked reinforcement and
other support. They had holed themselves up in the
five-star hotel, armed to the teeth certainly, but
without an apparent strategy on how to seize power. They
even let the hotel guests go, including Australian
Ambassador to the Philippines Ruth Pearce, spurning the
opportunity to use them as hostages. The rebel soldiers,
once entrenched, were at once immobilized. They could do
little more than make speeches and recount grievances.
This, however, would seem to be the "position"
they had in mind: a coup by inspiration, with the
soldiers counting on the merit of their claims to
impress the masses sufficiently to pour into the streets
and stage the actual coup for them. When it became clear
that revolt would not spontaneously erupt, even the
perceived leader of the mutineers, Navy Lieutenant
Antonio Trillanes, downgraded the status of their
undertaking. "We are not attempting to grab power," he
said, despite having initially boasted of a force more
than 2,000-strong across the archipelago. "We are just
trying to express our grievances."
Heroes and
pawns
Whether what happened last week was an
aborted coup d'etat or an elaborate demonstration of
grievance depends on the intentions behind it. These
intentions remain shrouded. The most patent explanation
is the one the Magdalo soldiers have openly presented:
they rebelled out of equal parts desperation and
patriotic dedication, because rebellion was the only way
to air their grievances. This sentiment, that the
Philippine political system is rotten and irreparable,
resonates with Filipinos, and the desire to amend this
system, or to upend it in order to redeem it, can seem
like an act of courage and therefore pardonable. This
interpretation of events makes heroes of the mutineers.
Indeed, many would embrace them as heroes - Trillanes
especially, whose good looks and ardent intelligence
recommend him for the part.
However seductive,
this interpretation is lacking. It seems too simple to
be credible as the only explanation for the mutiny.
For one, the grievances that had supposedly
motivated the Magdalo soldiers seem mostly spurious.
Those complaints that are legitimate - specifically
regarding the immense profiteering going on within the
Philippine military through procurement scams and the
sale of ammunition to rebel and bandit groups - are not
news. Other charges are plainly confabulated: that
Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes and Brigadier-General
Victor Corpuz had engineered the bombing of an airport
and wharf in Davao City some months ago in order to win
financial support from the Americans, and that the
escape of Indonesian terrorist Fathur Rohman Al Ghozi
had been deliberately arranged as an excuse for
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to declare martial
law.
It seems the more likely explanation is the
darker one: that larger political forces lay behind the
coup attempt and the Magdalo soldiers were, to an
extent, manipulated. The evidence suggests two possible
masterminds, perhaps working in tandem.
Two
uncovered safe houses for the soldiers belonged to the
aide and mistress of deposed former president Joseph
Estrada. Supplies, arms, and Magdalo armbands were found
in these houses. Moreover, the soldiers' weapons and
equipment were too expensive to be standard military
issue and suggest the kind of outside financing that
Estrada was capable of providing. Suspicion also falls
on Senator Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan, not least because
he has racked up a total of six coup attempts to his
credit. While the Philippines has amnestied him
consistently (and even elected him senator), the United
States has kept him on its list of international
terrorists. Honasan announced his presidential candidacy
days before the coup attempt; the Magdalo soldiers
distributed copies of his platform, the National
Recovery Program (NRP); and shortly after the soldiers
entrenched themselves, groups close to Honasan bearing
NRP banners began demonstrating in their support.
Honasan has denied involvement in the coup attempt but,
all the same, has gone into hiding.
What is not
clear is what the coup attempt was intended to
accomplish: simply to vent grievances and expose
malfeasance; to embarrass Arroyo on the eve of her State
of the Nation Address; or, as intelligence sources
suggest, to reinstall Estrada and then Honasan as
chairman of the newly established revolutionary council?
Nor is it clear whose intentions were primarily being
served - the soldiers' or their political puppetmasters'
- and to what extent these intentions diverged. Whatever
the exact recipe in this case, it would seem that
idealism and political calculation proved not only
compatible but a combustible mix.
In the
tradition
This latest coup attempt falls squarely
within a tradition. Uprisings, whether raucous
demonstrations, spontaneous insurrections, or full-out
coup attempts, have been common in the Philippines over
the past two decades. The administration of Corazon
Aquino was besieged by a series of coup attempts, some
coming perilously close to success, such that simply
having survived them counts as its greatest achievement.
Arroyo had to quell an uprising of Estrada supporters
just a few months into her presidency.
This is a
tradition born of unlikely parents. The father, as it
were, was the period of martial law under president
Ferdinand Marcos (1972-81); the mother was the 1986
People Power movement that removed Marcos from power.
Taken together, these two events had the effect of not
only increasing the power and provenance of the
Philippine military but of promoting it as an
alternative instrument of regime change.
During
the martial-law era, the military was released from its
normal legal constraints and given a free hand to combat
the communist and Muslim insurgencies as it deemed fit.
Its influence extended into all levels of society.
Officers were hand-picked by Marcos. Those favored were
feted with privileges such as political office or
executive positions in state-run companies. The more
tenuous Marcos' hold on power grew, the more he relied
on the military as the main prop of his regime.
The People Power movement in 1986, or EDSA 1
(after the thoroughfare where the masses converged,
Epifanio de los Santos Avenue), represented a radical
realignment of forces: key military leaders had
abandoned Marcos to join the Catholic Church and middle
class in demanding his ouster. What was dubbed People
Power could never have succeeded without the backing of
military strength. EDSA 1 was meant to restore democracy
by re-circumscribing presidential power within its
institutional limits. However, by bypassing the
institutions that manage legitimate democratic
transition, it may have hurt its cause more than helped
it. An alternative precedent had been set for achieving
regime change, one that emphasized direct action outside
institutional boundaries and which, inadvertently,
preserved the role of the military as a decisive factor
in this change.
While Aquino did her best to
subordinate the military to civilian authority - she
retired generals, made peace with rebel groups, included
leftists in her cabinet, and charged a human rights
commission with investigating and publicizing military
abuses - her predicament undermined her efforts. Like
the Magdalo putsch, the coup attempts (six in all)
besetting the Aquino administration seemed motivated by
a deep sense of grievance. Such groups as Gringo
Honasan's Reform the Armed Forces movement (RAM),
themselves heroes of EDSA 1, felt betrayed by Aquino,
whom they saw as being unfairly critical of the military
while coddling insurgent groups. However, as the Davide
Commission, tasked with investigating the causes of the
1989 coup attempt, concluded, these grievances were
tethered to the desire to recover the power and
privilege the military had enjoyed under Marcos.
While the Aquino administration survived the
juggernaut of coup attempts, it emerged profoundly
debilitated. Its weakness showed in its reliance on the
United States for help in quelling the 1989 coup; in its
failure to punish the putschists decisively (all were
either amnestied or lightly sentenced - 50 push-ups for
the first set of rebels); in the economic damage it
sustained on account of the coup attempts (US$1.5
billion alone for the 1989 attempt); and most
especially, its weakness showed in its dependence on the
military as the guarantor of its continued existence.
Constant coup attempts, emerging from within military
ranks, had made the military as indispensable as it was
volatile.
A crisis of legitimacy
Coup
attempts abound during transition presidencies precisely
because of their fragility. Their legitimacy is
question-marked by the very means they assumed power:
outside the proper institutional framework for
democratic regime change. And yet, at the same time, the
administrations preceding these "accidental
presidencies", despite having been legitimately elected,
had forfeited their mandates to rule.
This
tumultuous period of unfit and accidental presidents has
traumatized the institution. In the past 20 years, the
legitimacy the presidency demands in order to be
effective, in order at least to be accepted as rightful,
has only once materialized: during the administration of
Fidel Ramos - who, perhaps not incidentally, had close
ties to the military. Otherwise, legitimacy either
inhered in the person and not the office (Aquino and
Arroyo) or in the office and no longer the person
(Marcos and Estrada). As a consequence, persistent
questions of legitimacy bred instability by encouraging
power-hungry and righteous destabilizers. Plundering
presidents had to face People Power; accidental
presidents had to contend with coup attempts.
In
one unguarded moment, Trillanes illustrated the extent
to which he and his confederates had lost faith not only
in President Arroyo but in the institutions subordinate
to her. When asked by a broadcaster why he could not
submit his demands to the proper forum, he retorted,
"What proper forum?"
Because the Magdalo
putschists felt they lacked recourse to genuine
institutional venues, staging a coup became not their
last but their primary resort. This is a dark option
showing no end in sight. Circumventing institutions
through uprising or rebellion - a scene already too
often replayed - only further weakens them, deepens
their crisis of legitimacy, and invites the
proliferation of destabilizers.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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