DEMOCRACY
MANILA, DECEMBER 29, 2011 (MANILA
TIMES) PNOY is a democratically elected president, not a
revolutionary one.
He must act as one. He is presiding over a deeply divided country, in a time
of troubled peace, amid so many natural and man-made calamities and other
worries. He should show the world he has the will and the skill to unite his
people and to mitigate the humanitarian disasters no man is able to prevent.
Senator Joker Arroyo, Cory's former Executive Secretary and hardly an
adversary, chides PNoy for assuming control of all the three branches of
government without proclaiming martial law, and without any of the conditions
obtaining which could otherwise justify such a proclamation. Many agree with
Senator Arroyo.
In 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law all over the
country, in response to the communist rebellion that threatened to take over the
government. It was a legitimate response to an actual emergency. By contrast,
many see PNoy's rush into one-man rule as an attempt to conduct the presidency
as a kind of video game, of which he is reputedly a master.
But neither life nor government is a game. Not anywhere, least of all in a
constitutional democracy. Would Ninoy Aquino, PNoy's father, have approved of
it, were he alive today? It is not unfair to ask that question, since PNoy ran
on his parents' record, lacking one of his own. The best answer that comes to
mind is— maybe yes, maybe no, no one can say.
Passionate advocate of ML Filipinos remember Ninoy as the opposition leader
whom Marcos jailed during martial law and who was eventually assassinated in
1983 at the Manila international airport while coming home from his medical
furlough in Boston. But what most Filipinos do not know is that Ninoy was a most
passionate advocate of martial law.
Ninoy liked to tell his friends in the press that should he ever become
president, and many thought that would happen one day, the first thing he would
do was to declare martial law, exactly as Park Chung Hee did in Korea, to
consolidate power and accelerate the country's economic development. But Marcos
beat him to the draw.
Now PNoy has fulfilled, or is about to fulfill, his late father's dream
without formally proclaiming martial law or national emergency. Is PNoy simply
trying to follow his father's vision, or is he being egged on by some power or
principality?
In its Dec. 23, 2011 issue, the US-based Executive Intelligence Review
reports that Ninoy has become a frontline supporter of US President Barack
Obama's "Ring around China" policy, along with Japan's Nobuteru Ishihara,
governor of Tokyo and secretary general of LDP. EIR is not the least passionate
when writing about Mr. Obama, but it was light years ahead of everybody else in
predicting the collapse of the US housing bubble and the euro, and the
continuing meltdown of the trans-Atlantic economies.
EIR says that during Obama's recent Asia tour, PNoy insisted that the US
denounce China as an aggressor in the South China Sea. EIR then cites PNoy's
recent speech calling on the Armed Forces to prepare for external challenges,
not just internal ones. At the same time it sees more US warships being
dispatched to the area close to the Spratlys.
Is President Obama the cartilege that has stiffened PNoy's back and made him
believe he could take over the entire government without provoking resistance or
hostility? Supported by the US, PNoy could be tempted to believe he could do
anything without risking his office. After all, the Filipino poor have remained
docile until now, the remnants of the communist left that were a threat to
Marcos are now his allies, the elite look only after their own, and the
Americans will go after any dictator anywhere, except when he is their own.
Still history is full of strongmen whom the US had coddled for years and then
dumped as soon as they were no longer useful to them. PNoy would do well to
learn from their experience, including from his own father's. Ninoy himself may
have narrated his own story to his wife and children.
In 1957, during the so-called Permesta revolt in Indonesia, Ninoy undertook
secret operations for the CIA, according to the book "Subversion as Foreign
Policy" by Audrey Kahin and George Mc T Kahin, quoting the late Senator Jose
Wright Diokno as its source.
According to that story, Ninoy set up a clandestine radio station in
Indonesia for the rebels, shipped them guns from a third country, and opened up
Hacienda Luisita as a training ground for the rebel pilots. But when the
Americans saw they could not topple President Sukarno, they promptly pulled out
without telling Ninoy, leaving him in the dark and holding the proverbial empty
bag.
It is not known how that affected Ninoy's relations with the CIA. But in
1978, when Ninoy ran from his detention cell for the interim Batasang Pambansa,
then Defense Secretary (now Senate president) Juan Ponce Enrile accused him of
being a CIA agent. He did not deny it. His only reply was that he worked "with
the CIA", but "not for the CIA." And nothing more was heard about it.
Twenty-eight years after Ninoy's assassination, and no mastermind has been
identified, conspiracy theorists have started saying that NInoy was terminally
ill when he came home from Boston in 1983, and had agreed to be sacrificed in a
foreign intelligence operation specifically intended to bring down Marcos, make
Cory president, and restore the primacy of US interests in the Philippines.
I do not buy that theory. But others may. PNoy has to intervene. He has to
unlock the mystery about his father's death, to end all speculation, once and
for all. But he must, at the outset, make an irrevocable commitment to our
constitutional democracy, respect the separation of powers, act more the
statesman he is supposed to be, and make his countrymen, not any power or
principality, the sovereign masters in their own country.
Chief News Editor: Sol Jose Vanzi
© Copyright, 2011 by PHILIPPINE
HEADLINE NEWS ONLINE
All rights reserved
PHILIPPINE HEADLINE NEWS
ONLINE [PHNO] WEBSITE
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