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Monday, July 28, 2003
Amante: State of the nation
By ISOLDE D. AMANTE
IN the late 19th century, the Magdalo group was the faction that shut down the Katipunan. Yesterday, it shut down a mall.
More than their names, the two groups are bound to have something else in common: defeat and eventual obscurity, if they’re lucky, or defeat and infamy, if they’re not.
The young officers and followers of the new Magdalo group make up less than one percent of the entire Armed Forces. But in their mutiny, they accomplished something that will be impossible for the military to do. They gained the Left’s approval.
While admitting differences in agenda and methods, the Communist Party of the Philippines “expressed agreement with the Magdalo group’s aiming to overthrow the utterly rotten Arroyo government and its military’s high command.” Bayan Muna expressed no support for the mutiny, but called it “a fatal indictment of the rottenness and failure of the Arroyo administration to effect genuine reforms in society.”
In a way, the Magdalo group has even stolen some of President Arroyo’s thunder. Whatever accomplishments she had planned to announce in today’s State of the Nation Address will be eclipsed by the soldiers’ serious allegations—among them, that the administration orchestrated the Davao City bombings, sold munitions to rebel groups and is hatching a plan to declare martial law.
“Do you want a terrorist for a President?” With that pronouncement, Navy Lt. Antonio Trillanes deep-sixed his chances of career advancement in the military. On the other hand, he drew attention to government’s continuing failure to find peace in Mindanao and to nagging doubts about the integrity of the top brass.
The President’s own website (www.op.gov.ph/malacanang) declares that from 6,607 soldiers in July 2001, up to 8,693 were sent to Mindanao by December 2002. At least five projects, amounting to P1.094 billion, were approved to modernize the armed forces. Why, then, do supposedly ragtag bands of separatists and bandits continue to run circles around the armed forces in Mindanao?
Yet, while their grievances are legitimate and their allegations serious enough to merit an investigation, the Magdalo group has done the military severe damage. How so? It showed that a tendency to belittle civilian authority still persists within the military’s ranks. When soldiers surround themselves with enough bombs to shut down an entire district, all their this-is-not-a-coup assurances of sobriety lack conviction.
History’s lessons ought to be apparent to these bright boys of the armed forces. Military takeovers, even if attempted in the name of good governance and reform, always end up hurting the very persons the military is sworn to protect. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, there are enough doomed examples of military adventurism to make a superhighway.
History tells us civilians will not oppose, will perhaps even applaud, the military’s removal of a corrupt government. Thailand’s experience in 1991 and our own ouster of Joseph Estrada in 2001 attest to that. But civilian supremacy remains sacrosanct, as it should.
Here, then, is one more thing the Magdalo group accomplished. It gave President Arroyo, on the eve of her State of the Nation Address, a jarring reminder: that for as long as the civilian government fails to deliver on its promises and remains mired in corruption, the threat of military intervention remains. The men of Magdalo gave the country a clarion call. Too bad they had to do it at too high a cost.
(ida@sunstar.com.ph) |
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