Marcos left isolated in face of rising mass movement
HUNDREDS of thousands of people (the Paris daily Liberation estimated up to a million) rallied in the center of Manila on Sunday,
February 16, in response to "Cory" Aquino's call for a mass protest against Marcos' vote stealing. At of the General Staff, General Ver, PAUL PETITJEAN
Marcos has had himself proclaimed re-elected president by a National Assembly that he tightly controls. But the entire political operation he mounted abruptly, calling for early elections, has ended in disaster. He sought to give his personal power a new legitimacy nationally and internationally. He hoped to stabilize for some time a regime undermined by a more and more open crisis.
Now, the February 7 elections have bared, more than ever in the past, the dietatorial character of the existing regime. The wearing out of the political system imposed by martial law, the incompetence of the executive branch, the discredit of the regime - both in the islands themselves and in the western capitals - have never been so glaring.
Far from achieving a temporary stabilization of the situation, the offical re-election of Marcos has opened a period of great fluidity and conflict. Both the bourgeois opposition and the revolutionary opposition can profit from this situation.
At this writing, it is still impossible to draw a complete balance sheet of the recent events. The official recount has no weight. Everyone knows that the elections were shamefully rigged. There is no doubt about what the will of the people was. Corazon ("Cory") Aquino was the voters' choice.
Denied victory by an unprecedented fraud, Cory was not defeated. Instead of being resolved in the wake of the elections, the test of strength that began before the February 7 elections is continuing after the proclamation of the results.
Cory's moral legitimacy stands in opposition to the de facto power of Marcos. A new configuration of forces is taking form. It is still too early to try to analyze it in detail.
International Viewpoint 24 February 1986 the same time, the dictator's chief resigned. But a certain number of elements can already be discerned.
The elections have dramatically confirmed the extent of the crisis aftlicting the Marcos regime. The usual mechanisms of patronage, intimidation, and electoral fraud were not sufficient to keep the electoral process under control. After rigging the vote itself, it was necessary, on top of that, to rig the recount. However, despite all the regime's maneuvers and crimes, the verdict of the polls remained favourable to Cory.
Traditionally, the regime had managed to divide the opposition, smother its voice, and maintain a facade of respecting a minimum of democratic norms by silencing protests. This time it was unable to minimize the vastness of the fraud or camouflage it effectively.
The work of a movement such as Namfrel (1) is very revealing of the way the situation has developed. Of course, Namfrel could not stop the fraud. In many places, its activists were driven away from the polls at gunpoint. In that way, the president's agents got a free hand. Several members of Namfrel paid with their lives for their stubborn defense of the polls.
But this vast citizens' movement was able to limit the effects of the electoral fraud. Above all, it was able to expose the rigging at every stage in the voting procedure: massive vote buying, removal of opposition voters from the registers, fictitious voters, multiple voting for Marcos, ballot-box stuffing and replacement of ballot boxes.
The fraud was on such a scale that in some villages the official returns showed Marcos getting 100 percent of the votes, while many opponents of the regime in these
PHILIPPINES places were known to have voted for Cory.
Cornered by the pressure of the opposition, Marcos had to extend the fraud into the Metro-Manila region itself, where it could most easily be exposed. In addition, with 500,000 members and the support of the church, Namfrel managed to build its network in the countryside.
The international press, moreover, played a very active role in exposing the election rigging and the intimidation and terror carried out by a regime at bay.
The Namfrel network, which nearly covered the country, enabled it to thwart the regime's final maneuver, the falsification of the recount. Using its own system of tabulation, Namfrel was able to announce that Cory had won the election and to challenge the validity of the results announced by the regime's own body for overseeing the elections, the Comelec.
At the last minute, about thirty technicians charged with running the Comelec's computers took refuge in a church, explaining, floppy disks in hand, that the figures they fed in were not those announced by the agency.
Ferdinand Marcos' electoral operation was already totally discredited when the responsibility for announcing the results was shifted onto a rump National Assembly, two-thirds of whose members belong to the government party.
This failure, a politically very costly one, is not simply a conjunctural one. Marcos can still hold on to power. He still controls the military general staff, thanks to General Ver, and Washington has not withdrawn all support. But the dictator's logic seems to come down more and more to a "I am here, I am staying, after me the deluge."
The system of power set up with martial law in the 1970s is clearly breaking down. (2) The attitude of the Catholic hierary in this regard is particularly significant. The Catholic Church has just solemnly come out for Cory. After meeting for 48 hours, the Philippines Conference of Bishops issued a document on February 14 that denies any legitimacy to the existing regime.
"The people have expressed themselves, or at least they tried to," this document says, which is to be read in all the churches throughout the archipelago. "The government must respect the people's mandate, this is the precondition for any reconciliation."
1. National Citizens Movement for Free Elections.
Cf. "Election will not solve the crisis of the dictatorship," in 'International Viewpoint, No. 92, February 10, 1986.
3
"The February 7 elections were marked by unprecedented fraud -systematic denial of the right to vote, massive vote buying, deliberate manipulation of the results, intimidation, persecution, terrorism, and murder... These irregularities and many others reveal a criminal use of power in the attempt to oppose the sovereign will of the people. A government that holds onto power in this way no longer has any moral foundations ... It cannot claim the allegiance of citizens."
"The time has come to stand up and fight Evil." (3) [retranslation from French.]
Before the vote, Cardinal Sin, archbishop of the Philippines, had already described the electoral campaign as a struggle between the forces of light (Cory) and the forces of darkness (Marcos). Both members of religious orders and lay Catholics joined Namfrel in large numbers.
But the results of the Conference of Bishops goes beyond anything the Church did before. Well known for not mincing words, in the past Cardinal Sin alternately denounced and supported the regime without committing the hierarchy, which is divided between a progressive minority, an extreme right wing, and a conservative majority. This time the hierarchy itself, collectively, has gone over to the opposition to Marcos. Locked step toward confrontation
Regardless of what concrete steps the bishops take in the coming weeks, adopting such a position has a very great importance in an 85 percent Catholic country, in which the Church is the second material power (after the state apparatus) and the first moral power.
Moral legitimacy has been withdrawn from Marcos and given to Cory, who has called for a mass protest rally in the center of Manila on Sunday February 16.
One of the features of the presidential campaign is that Cory got personal support from the masses that sometimes took a semi-religious, semimystical turn. She became, at the same time as a moral alternative to the regime, a sort of "protecting Madonna."
If the Catholic hierarchy, the majority of which is conservative, committed itself in this way, it is because it knows that the stakes have become too great and that it senses the exasperation of the masses.
Since the assassination of Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino in 1983, Marcos has blocked by his intransigence the
BAN
WAMASAD A
BINET ARUINE
NA PE
ISTICE FOR NINOY, JUSTICE
OR ALL VICTIMS OF POLITICAL
SIR IF MILITE
Karles:
US. MARCY
LOGY GRADE
SHIP
Demonstration in support of 'Ninoy' Aquino, September 1983 (DR)
possibility for a gradual transition to a more democratic regime. Today, once again, he has responded to his electoral defeat by falsification of the results and by murder. Since the February 7 elections, several dozen oppositionists have been assassinated, including such an important personality as Ovelilo Javier, Cory's principal campaign manager, who was killed in the southern province of Antique.
Marcos' obstinacy, the underlying logic of a dictatorial and clientelist regime, the special interests of "relatives" and generals close to the administration, the blindness of the presidential team — the Marcos system in short — has blocked the "middle way" sought by the Church and Washington. That is, a controlled reform of the regime that would make possible democratic concessions and the reunification of the elites so that, under the aegis of Washington, they could fight more effectively against the revolutionary upsurge that is mounting throughout the archipelago.
This "middle road" is closed today. The Catholic hierarchy has drawn the conclusions from this. That is, it is necessary at all costs to bolster the credibility of a general bourgeois and pro-Western alternative to Marcos. Otherwise, the only alternative would be constituted by the revolutionary forces and the CPP guerrillas. So, the time has passed, as the bishops see it, for playing a waiting game.
Many eyes are turned to Washington. But the Reagan administration remains between its fear of seeing an uncontrollable mass upsurge if Marcos goes and its fear of a deteriorating situation if Marcos remains in the saddle. Reagan has tried to maintain, to the point of absurdity, the line that was reached through painful negotiations after the assassination of Ninoy in 1983, calling on Cory and Marcos to come to an understanding for forming a government.
This is what prompted New York congressman Stephen J. Solarz to say, "Here we have irrefutable proof that they're smoking hashish in the White
House." (4) [Retranslation from French.]
Marcos is holding on because Washington has not withdrawn its support, a fact that illustrates the role played by U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. But Washington has been unable to impose its policy and the compromises that it has made with Marcos and the opposition. This indicates the limitations in the maneuvering room of Washington in the face of such a deep political and social crisis, whose dynamic no one can control.
The moderate, bourgeois opposition has succeeded for the first time in these elections in offering a credible alternative to the Marcos regime, with the reinforcement of Unido (5) on the one hand, and on the other the focusing of the hopes of the masses around the personality of Cory.
However, now this bourgeois opposition has to continue its initiatives on another terrain - that of extra-parliamentary mobilization, where popular, revolutionary opposition is strongest. While they were pushed to the sidelines during the election campaign, the organized mass movement and the left forces can retake the initiative in the struggle against the Marcos regime.
The crisis of the regime has now become an open one. But the reaction of the army, the presidential palace, and Washington may be savage, as indicated by the murders perpetrated by government forces and the Pentagon's sending more Special Forces to the U.S. bases. The presence of such forces has already been revealed by the Philippine people's movement. (6)
International solidarity with the Philippine people's movement is needed more than ever now.
3. Cited in an article by Patrick Sabatier in the February 15-16 issue of the Paris daily 'Liberation.'
Cf. the article by Bernard in Le Monde of February 13.
5. United Nationalist Democratic Organization.
6. See the interview with Roland Simbulan in 'IV, No. 82, September 16, 1985. International Viewpoint 24 February 1986