Fading people power in the
Philippines By Donald Kirk
MANILA - The images of heroic scenes from
Philippine history faded in the sun and rain, just
as they are fading from the popular consciousness.
No one stopped to look at them as streams of
traffic roared by on Epifanio de Los Santos Avenue
(EDSA), the 10-lane highway that binds the
municipalities of Metro Manila.
The
slogans in some of the photographs read like pages
from ancient history, and the heroic figures of
the Victory Monument, outside Gate Five of Camp
Aguinaldo, were ignored, their
outstretched arms reaching
for a dream that seems almost forgotten. It was 21
years ago that hundreds of thousands of people
packed EDSA, denouncing the regime of Ferdinand
Marcos, his wife Imelda, their son and daughters
and the coterie of "cronies" who had been ruling
the country with profligate abandon.
It
was then, at the height of the revolution, that
Juan Ponce Enrile, who had served Marcos as a
faithful defense minister, turned against him,
crossing EDSA to join General Fidel Ramos in Camp
Crame, the home of the Philippine National Police.
Those were days of wild hopes, the assurance of a
brilliant future, relief from threatening voices.
The words "freedom" and "liberty" echoed
through the crowds - and on the editorial pages of
newspapers springing to life again after having
been banned by the Marcos regime. Nowadays
editorials lament that the anniversary passes
almost unnoticed except for ritual statements and
speeches, one by President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo, others by her foes, some of them
banded together in an amalgam called "Genuine
Opposition".
It's not that many people
really want a return to the bad old days, but the
sense prevails that not a lot has really changed.
Or, if there has been change, it has not been
change for the good. Instead, the news is of
reports of killings by police and army personnel
and their henchmen, of a United Nations report
that corroborates stories of so much bloodshed as
to defy claims of "isolated incidents". There is
the promise of "special courts to try political
and media killings", as a government spokesman
puts it, and the promise of observance of "the
rule of law" and an end to "election-related
violence", but such assurances are less than
reassuring.
The sense of business as usual
is implicit in the response of military
commanders, notably that of the chief of staff of
the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), General
Hermogenes Esperon Jr, who basically confirms the
report by the UN visitor, Philip Alston. In
response to Alston's view that the armed forces
are in "a total state of denial" about their
misdeeds, Esperon engages in more denials even
while expressing rote recognition that "there are
extrajudicial killings".
Not that the
AFP's defenses against such accusations are
totally wrong. No one disputes the existence of
twin insurgencies from one end of the country to
the other - the Muslim revolt in the Sulu
archipelago and southern Mindanao, insurgents from
the New People's Army in mountains from Mindanao
to northern Luzon. Certainly Esperon's rhetorical
question - "Is he [Alston] saying that the NPA is
more credible than me or the AFP?" - is not
irrelevant, considering the NPA's own record of
killings in the name of a revolt that has few real
sympathizers. Nor can anyone doubt Esperon's boast
of "fighting the communist insurgency for the past
39 years".
Familiar
complaints On the streets of this teeming
metropolis of at least 10 million, if not 12
million, half of them confined by tawdry shanties
lining expressways and waterways and the tracks of
a decrepit railroad, among other places, people
complain not about the communists but about
general lawlessness and rising inequalities.
"Business is bad," says a car salesman who
counts as a member of a diminishing middle class.
"You can't tell how people are doing by the
numbers," notably the stock market, property
prices and a rising gross domestic product. "It is
the rich people who are getting richer, while
everyone else is getting poorer."
That's a
familiar complaint, one that I have been hearing
on just about every trip I've made here since
1968, when I first interviewed a young and
terribly convincing president Marcos in
Malacanang, the presidential palace. He was less
convincing when I saw him again in Malacanang in
the run-up to his downfall, spewing forth "facts"
and "figures" in such wild profusion that it was
impossible to keep track of what he was talking
about.
Surely, I thought in those heady
days of Marcos' downfall and the rise of Corazon
Aquino, decked out in those angelic yellow
dresses, the Philippines at last was on the road
to renewal, and so it was for a while. Then came
disillusionment with Aquino, hardly a
revolutionary as a member of one of the oldest and
wealthiest landholding families, and the election
of Ramos, efficient, almost visionary, but unable
to put into action many of the reforms and
projects that he promised.
The election of
Joseph "Erap" Estrada, sinking it seemed into a
sea of late-night red-wine parties and a reversion
to the past, led to another wave of heady idealism
in 2001 culminating in EDSA II, when crowds again
took to the streets, filling EDSA as they called
for his downfall. But EDSA II was hardly the same
as EDSA I.
The seizure of power by
Estrada's vice president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo,
hardly captured the popular imagination,
especially when she was finally elected president
on her own in 2004 in a charade that was delayed
by contentious vote-counting and tainted ballots.
Nonetheless she prevailed over Fernando Poe, like
Estrada a popular actor, who might have gone on
challenging her politically had he not died of a
heart attack in the midst of the furor.
In
the midst of anniversary statement-making, when
commentators devoted much space to wondering why
no one seems to revere the EDSA revolution as such
a great moment in national history, one message
came through clearly. There will, as the banner
headline blared out in one of the major papers, be
"No more Edsas".
The source for that
remark was President Arroyo herself - who seems to
want it both ways. Yes, she wants people to
memorialize the anniversary, the heroism of those
who defied the dictator and battled for liberty.
But she certainly does not want it happening again
to her embattled administration. In the first
EDSA, and then in EDSA II, the armed forces were
on the side of change.
But what would the
rest of the world think if it happened again and
another military-backed revolt unseated the
government - her government, in fact?. No way, she
said, would the international community support "a
country whose political system is hopelessly
unstable". Filipinos might be liked and even
admired as "among the finest people in the world"
while condemned as people "who always shoot
themselves in the foot".
She also had a
practical consideration - one that might count for
business people but would hardly be of interest to
most of the rest of the country. "Who would invest
in the Philippines," she asked, and "how would we
finally bring the gains of the economy to the
average Filipino" - the essence of "people power"?
If that phrase recaptured memories of nuns
blocking tanks and students carrying banners in
the face of guns, it is basically forgotten now.
Instead of huge crowds in front of the Edsa
Shrine, down EDSA from the Victory Monument, at a
corner beside one of Metro Manila's greatest, most
glittering shopping complexes, there was Ramos
re-enacting the great moment of success. But no
one else from those days was there. Arroyo spent
only a few minutes before the shrine, shielded
from any fresh threats to her rule by hundreds of
police.
The AFP, under international fire
for its recent role in extrajudicial killings,
might today declare itself "stronger" and
"united", as a military spokesman put it. But
Benigno Aquino III, namesake and son of the
martyred former senator "Ninoy" Aquino, whose
assassination returning from exile in 1983 sparked
the whole series of events culminating in EDSA,
had another view. Aquino, now running for the
Senate, said no one should forget the meaning of
people power.
"EDSA is about people
fighting against poverty and ensuring that
democracy is never again threatened," he reminded
an audience on the campaign trail.
True
enough, but the rhetoric may be lost as Arroyo
defends herself against more threats to her rule -
and the AFP supports her with the assurance, as
emblazoned across another newspaper page 1, that
the "coup culture is dying" - perhaps, though not
stated, along with the spirit of what EDSA and
people power had meant in the first place.
Journalist Donald Kirk is a
frequent visitor to the Philippines and is the
author of the books Philippines in Crisis: US
Power Versus Local Revolt and Looted: The
Philippines after the Bases.
(Copyright
2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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