Political component

In her State of the Nation Address, President Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo promised to get to the bottom of the Oakwood Affair – including its political component.

Political component seems to be the currently fashionable term to use in place of the more traditional conspiracy. Everybody seems hesitant to call this disastrous affair a coup attempt, with its concomitant coup conspiracy. Admitting it to be such would magnify the already disastrous consequences the Oakwood Affair had on adverse perceptions of our political stability and business environment.

It will be difficult to quantify the final damage this event inflicted on our economy.

One stock market analyst estimates that this 22-hour crisis set back our recovery by a year and a half. Our economic managers, obviously trying to minimize the sense that a calamity has happened, assure us that the growth targets set for this year will be met – if not marginally exceeded. What we lost in last Sunday’s mutiny, they say, was the potentially much higher growth we were capable of turning in before our quirky politics took another eccentric turn.

It is the effort to stalk down the scale of the economic disaster a few naïve young officers caused that encourages use of the term political component to describe the non-military participants in last Sunday’s queer orgy. That makes this phrase a euphemism.

I have problems with euphemisms like this.

Unless we put this queer orgy in the context of a coup conspiracy, the action of that lost command at the Oakwood last Sunday simply does not make sense.

Granted, the fashionably dressed mutineers did not have the political sophistication to match their military competence. Granted, they put thousands of lives in peril and torpedoed the credibility of our nation in order to make the incoherent statements they offered us. Granted, there is reason for their grievance.

Still, they would not have been so stupid as to initiate that act of mutiny without expectation of parallel action undertaken by other conspirators. If these young officers did what they did without expectation of support from other quarters, then it would be just to dismiss them as totally stupid.

But, despite the conspiratorial silence maintained by the five key officers responsible for this mutiny, there are indications knowledge of the mutiny was shared by a curious circle of political players.

RAM leader Proceso Maligalig says that Senator Gregorio Honasan convened a "coordination meeting" of the Guardians fraternity Friday last week and requested support for mobilizing protest actions in the streets during the weekend. That statement is supported by the fact that a handful of marchers identified with the Honasan-led National Recovery Movement began massing in the vicinity of Ayala Avenue hours after the mutineers occupied Oakwood.

Pro-Estrada protestors likewise began massing in the vicinity of the Edsa Shrine, only to be shooed away by the police.

Policemen raided two houses used as staging areas for the mutiny. One is said to be owned by a mistress of former president Estrada. The other is the home of Estrada’s deputy executive secretary Ramon "Eki" Cardenas.

ISAFP chief Gen. Victor Corpus offers a broader scenario. He says the occupation of Oakwood was the first step towards securing a base from which the existing government could be challenged. The action was supposed to be accompanied by a military strike to free Estrada from the Veterans Memorial Medical Center, bring him to Oakwood and declare an alternative government.

It was this scenario that prompted the military’s decision to momentarily take out Estrada from the Veterans hospital and confine him at Camp Aguinaldo for a few hours.

It is a scenario that makes sense.

It is also a daring scenario that may entertained by conspirators only if several assumptions are made.

It will have to be assumed that some semblance of popular support for the action can be generated from the streets. But the persons tasked with delivering this component appear to have failed.

It will have to be assumed that a wider circle of military officers should have been appraised of the plan. If they were unready to support it, their commitment to doing nothing ought to have been solicited.

It will have to be assumed that the government in place would have very little legitimacy, very little control of the military and very little credibility to react to the mutiny in a coherent way. That would give the conspirators enough time to generate a snowball for the action.

This particular element raises suspicion that the al-Ghozi escape was precisely perpetrated by conspirators in this coup attempt to undermine the credibility of the current military and police leadership, put the Arroyo administration to the defensive and generate confusion and demoralization in the ranks.

The wild charges raised by Trillanes appear to be intended precisely to create that confusion and demoralization.

It is reasonable to expect that the junior officers accepted compartmentalization of the conspiracy. They accepted the need-to-know basis on which they were allowed information about the other components of the conspiracy. But they would do so only if they trusted whoever it was who assured them that the other components would deliver their part of the operation.

They invested trust flamboyantly and naively. The other component parts did not deliver, leaving the young brazen officers hanging in a lurch.

There is much more we need to know about the political component of this affair. The tactical interrogations now going on in earnest should bring more enlightenment the next few days.

But I am nearly sure that the more we find out about it, the more easily it will be for us to return to the traditional concept of a coup conspiracy – no matter how mad it might be – to describe this absurd misadventure.

At the end of this, we should look forward to unmasking the truly ambitious and the truly pernicious characters who dared toy around with our nation’s fate and our people’s well-being.