Philippine military

[OPINION | Newspoint] A go-along military

Vergel O. Santos

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[OPINION | Newspoint] A go-along military
'The armed forces could have stopped Marcos at any point of his authoritarian adventure on any higher moral principle than the chain of command, but they did not'

September may as well be declared Ferdinand Marcos Month, and not only because it was the month Marcos made himself dictator and put us under martial law (September 21, 1972); it was also the month he did the two things that bookended, thereby sealing, our fateful, traumatic, and closure-defying relationship to him.

First, by getting himself born, on September 11, 1917, he had gained the first guarantee to live his baleful life; then, by dying, on September 29, 1989, he had met the first requisite for the hero’s burial that rounded out, and yet compounding and perpetuating, the outrage he had caused us.

And so, we find ourselves dealing again with the ghost of Ferdinand Marcos, hopefully not in any spirit of mere ceremonial remembrance, but far more seriously.

The conditions do seem consolidating for a second coming of martial law. After all, President Duterte is himself a professed Marcos idolater and has openly, constantly espoused martial law or some variant of it. With a sycophantic Lower House and a more or less acquiescent Senate and Supreme Court, one institution is all that remains to be co-opted to complete the gang — the armed forces.

Only too obviously, the armed forces constitute the swing force in any coup. But their complicity with Marcos left them hung up on matters of constitutionality and even of conscience, such that they might think twice next time around. The wishful thinking goes that they already decidedly dealt with their own ghost of Marcos during People Power 1986, when, let loose from their barracks in full armor with orders from their Commander-in-Chief to put down a million-strong, unarmed citizen revolt, they ended up abandoning him, crossing over and proclaiming themselves Protector of the People, and helping boot him out.

The armed forces have remained untested for those avowals made more than a generation ago. How they might deal with Duterte as the risen Marcos cannot be known with any certainty, given the complex and shifting Philippine political culture. Anyway, history cannot but be instructive.     

Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law was not your usual coup; it was not the military taking over the civilian government. It was the sitting civilian President himself chucking the Constitution and subverting the democratic way of life established under it and the rights and freedoms sanctified by it, and proceeding to assume dictatorial powers. He definitely could not have managed that, or gone on managing all those 14 years, without military support.

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To be sure, the armed forces were no passive accessory to martial law, no mere conscripts made helpless by the principle of chain of command, as the stock excuse goes. They were in fact perfectly willing participants in the murder and profiteers from the plunder that went around, wildly — not a few his generals in fact followed Marcos to foreign exile with their own loot.

The armed forces could have stopped Marcos at any point of his authoritarian adventure on any higher moral principle than the chain of command, but they did not. They may have been only thankful that they had not been given the chance to develop such suitable predisposition as not uncommon among their counterparts in the region.

The Thai military has been into coups since the early 20th century; it mounted its last only in 2014. The South Korean and Indonesian plotters were busy in the sixties, although they seem to have settled down. The Cambodians have lived with the threat since their Prince was deposed, in the seventies. The Myanmarese and the Laotians rested from plotting only when they had secured a dominant position in electoral politics.

The Philippines did have its share of coups of the classic type, but these were evidently ad hoc. All 7 were mounted by the same fraternity (RAM) and against the same government (Cory Aquino’s), suggesting narrow motives, and at intervals so close they tend to reflect ignorant persistence rather than knowing deliberateness. All attempts failed, naturally. When a leader of the plotters was asked what made them quit, his answer betrayed the most ridiculous amateurishness: they realized they would not know what to do with the President if they captured her — after their seventh attempt!

As a rule, the Filipino soldier has known his place — it’s the barracks or the battleground, and under civilian authority. Thus, he has not had the opportunity to develop any pretensions to civil leadership or bureaucratic aptitude.

But President Duterte is changing all that, doubtless to suit his Marcosian plot. He is courting the military and the police with pay rises and perks. And, apparently investing in their residual influence on the men in uniform, he is recycling retired military and police generals for his Cabinet and other key positions — they have numbered 50 so far.

 “The backbone of my administration,” proclaims Duterte himself, “is the uniformed personnel.” 

No wonder, an air of instant self-belief fills their ranks, notwithstanding their lack of training in public administration, a most basic eligibility, let alone in the higher or specialist disciplines required for certain positions.

But truly troubling is their tendency to go along with the President even in his treasons, for instance, in the ceding of control over some of the nation’s resource-rich and strategic waters to China and lately the go-signal given a company with, again, Chinese partners for the installation right inside army camps of facilities vulnerable to eavesdropping spies. If none of our generals, active or recycled, had anything to say about that, how could they be trusted to keep their avowals of 1986? 

With the President reducing himself to a virtual presence and the pandemic providing perfect cover, my own fear is that a plot by his own design has been afoot. – Rappler.com

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