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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| The Revolution That Never Was By Antonio C. Abaya February 14, 2002 Comes now that time of year when the ideologically na�ve Philippine bourgeoisie crawl out of their air-conditioned enclaves to celebrate what they fatuously call the People Power Revolution of 1986. They recall, with no small amount of smug self-satisfaction, how they assembled in their hundreds of thousands along EDSA, around the military camps, and at key intersections leading to those camps, in order to prevent President Marcos� and General Fabian Ver�s Marine tank columns from approaching and attacking the beleaguered mutineers at Camp Aguinaldo. I am not belittling the heroic efforts of unarmed civilians in standing up to fully armed combat troops with nothing more than, literally, a flower and a prayer. During those four glorious days, my three then-teenaged children and I did our time at the barricades (my wife was stranded in San Francisco), at times at the EDSA-Ortigas area, at other times at the Morato-Timog intersection where we (foolishly) made our ageing Mercedes Benz part of the upscale barricade there. My son and I can even claim to have been among the first at Camp Aguinaldo. Early Friday evening, while Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and General Fidel Ramos were holding their press conference, we had driven my daughter to a party in Magallanes. Instead of going home, we decided to go to Fort Bonifacio and see what was going on there. The sentry would not let us in because, he said, they were on red alert. Like a good Filipino, I persisted, claiming that we just wanted to take a short cut to Forbes. He asked my name. I gave it. He asked if I was related to then-PC General Antonio Abaya. I lied that he was my cousin, whereupon, without even asking to see my driver�s license to confirm my identity, the sentry smartly saluted me and waved us in. What we saw in Boni were about two dozen trucks loaded with Marines in full battle gear plus some Jeeps armed with .50-cal machineguns, all ready, we thought, to attack the vastly outnumbered mutineers in Aguinaldo, to which we immediately (and foolishly) rushed, expecting some bang-bang action to liven up the evening. But when we got to Aguinaldo, there was absolutely no one there. At the Santolan Gate, the only one open, there were a few bored sentries. About a dozen guards and a Metrocom car blocked the Santolan Gate of Camp Crame. But that was all. We waited and waited until we got bored and went home. The 24 or so truckloads of Marines that we saw at Fort Bonifacio never materialized. We learned the next day that they had been sent to Malacanang instead, to bolster the defenses there. If those Marines had been ordered to attack Camp Aguinaldo, they would have overpowered its puny defenses, Enrile, Honasan and Ramos would have been killed or captured, and Ferdinand Marcos would have remained in power, succeeded at his death by either Imelda Marcos or Danding Cojuangco. That things turned out they way they did was not due to a miracle or divine intercession, as many of the burgis piously believe, but rather to the assertion of a general flaw in the Filipino character: his reluctance to confront a problem and grapple with it to its resolution, preferring instead to dance around it and joke about it, hoping that it will somehow quietly go away. The impasse also said much about the Philippine military: they have no stomach for close-quarter combat. ***** Was it a revolution? Most emphatically, no. Revolution, in the political sense, means a drastic change, not necessarily violent or bloody, in the way a nation is governed. The upheaval that de-communized Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1989-91 was revolutionary in every sense of the word even though hardly anyone got killed. So was the sudden shift that convulsed China starting in 1979, from an austere egalitarian society to one driven almost scandalously by the profit motive, even though the communist party has remained in power all throughout, has in fact managed, the convulsion. In the case of the Philippines in 1986, aside from the overthrow of an ailing dictator, nothing much actually changed. The ins, at least some of them, were kicked out, and the outs merely moved in. With some superficial exceptions, �democracy� under Marcos was practically indistinguishable from �democracy� under Cory Aquino. With all good intentions, the Aquino Government stumbled from one crisis to the next, challenged on the one hand by a resurgent communist insurgency, and on the other hand by macho military men intent on installing their mentor, Juan Ponce Enrile, in Malacanang. Strictly speaking, Cory Aquino was a revolutionary president. She was installed in office by a non-constitutional process and for seventeen months, from February 1986 to September 1987, she ruled by decree, the Marcos constitution having been rendered inoperative by events. But she did nothing revolutionary. Pulled to one side by her communist and pro-communist advisers, then pulled to the other by the macho military men whose mutiny against Marcos had helped put her in power, President Aquino, who had no hard ideological position of her own, ended up pleasing no one except the most innocent political naifs in her Prayer Brigade. No event epitomized the utter confusion of her government as the May Day parade on May 1, 1986. Seated between Joma Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and Augusto Sanchez, her radchic secretary of labor, President Aquino, gleefully and in total innocence, flashed the Laban sign of the ruling burgis party as phalanxes of KMU militants marched past the Quirino Grandstand singing the �Internationale� and waving styrofoam replicas of the hammer-and-sickle. And seated behind her sat the AFP Chief-of-Staff Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, chomping on his unlit cigar in stunned silence. ***** Not only na�ve, but wimpy to the core as well. In the first tragic-comic challenge to the Aquino Government, about a hundred Marcos loyalist soldiers staged a coup of sorts by taking over the Manila Hotel and announced their continuing support for the dethroned Marcos regime. As it happened, the hotel was preparing for a wedding reception that afternoon in its banquet hall. With nothing better to do, since no one had bothered to evict them from the premises, the loyalist soldiers started to consume the food and to drink the champagne. By evening, they were all in a drunken stupor and were easily overpowered the next day by government troops who could as well have been little old ladies in tennis shoes armed with umbrellas. In real countries, military mutinies are taken very seriously and their leaders are usually court-martialed and executed by firing squad. But in Disneyland, which is what foreign correspondents had started to call the Philippines in 1986-87, the leaders of the first coup were meted a curious punishment by no less than Gen. Fidel V. Ramos: 30 push-ups, admittedly a harsh one when one is in a besotted state. But is it any wonder that this was followed by a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh coup attempts? That was the revolution that never was. ***** This article appeared in the March 4, 2002 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |