The gripes of wrath

It is gratifying to see photographs of our soldiers wearing newly-issued flak vests and kevlar helmets during the parade celebrating the 109th anniversary of the Philippine Army. For too long, our troops had to go into battle with defective vests or no chest protection at all. A procurement scandal involving a ranking Marine officer even exposed the fact that so many of our fighting men were being issued defective flak vests and kevlar helmets which couldn’t even deflect a bullet.

However, the question arises. How many men have been given such vests and helmets? Not very many, I’m afraid. Oh well. At least it is a beginning.

Yesterday, the Financial Times of London run a timely story headlined: "Manila boosts defence spending in attempt to end military unrest." The article by its correspondent Roel Landingin said that, "The Philippines is hastening the pace of defence reforms intended to counter restiveness in the military and dissuade troops from taking part in plots to unseat President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo."

That’s true enough. If you’ll recall, one of the main gripes expressed by the young officers who led the July 27, 2003 "Oakwood" mutiny was the fact that our soldiers had to go into battle with holes in their shoes, rips in their waterproof ponchos, and shoddy equipment owing to corruption in the procurement process as well as an inadequate budget. In addition, our soldiers had to fight with old and worn-out firearms unable to deliver a bullet over 500 yards. It’s good that at last some of the complaints of the Magdalo rebels are being belatedly addressed.

In fact, the FT reported that "Avelino Cruz, the defence secretary, said the government planned to spend up to P45 billion in the next 18 months to equip the 130,000 strong armed forces with two-way radios, firearms, ammunition and transport equipment. The aim was to boost its ability to deal a decisive blow against communist insurgents and other security threats."

Bravo, I can only say. The fact is that when he visited me a week and a half ago to discuss the military’s problems and his findings on the aborted February 24 coup plot, our friend Secretary Nonong Cruz had told me that the Palace and the presidential security committee was seriously considering the proposal I made in this corner that a one-time P100 billion budget be programmed to quickly modernize our ill-equipped armed forces giving the military the right kind of flak vests, helmets, weapons, and communications equipment –in short, state-of-the-art hardware – to enable our forces to crush the Communist New People’s Army and other insurgent movements, once and for all.

I had written out that our AFP stumbles along year after year on a measly P5 billion budget for basic equipment and operations which is just like trying to cure a major wound requiring surgery by the mere application of a band aid. The bold move of programming an instant P100 billion, I had pointed out, would boost the sagging morale of our troops, by enabling them to re-train, as well as beef up their aging ranks by the enlistment of younger recruits. In the shopping list I recommended were helicopter gunships, helicopters with night flying capability, and modern jet war planes which our Philippine Air force so sorely lacks. Not to be forgotten, our rust-bucket Navy has to be supplied with high-speed, low-draft patrol craft and landing craft so convenient in pursuing rebels, Abu Sayaff kidnappers and murderers, and spotting intruders such as poachers and pirates in our strategic waters.

Secretary Cruz has assured me that night flying helicopters had already been acquired. In yesterday’s article the FT quoted Nonong as saying that "our military was less than 50 percent combat ready because of lack of equipment." The original plan had been to acquire this equipment over a period of 5 years at the old rate of P5 billion a year between 2006 and 2010. But now this will be done with immediate dispatch.

I believed that the additional P55 billion will shortly be announced, but Cruz and his planners in the Department of National Defense are carefully studying how to apply such a substantial sum where the funds will be most effective. It’s important, as Nonong and this writer agreed during our meeting that any projected budget bonanza must not be misinterpreted by the generals and their staffers as another gravy train.

Where can P100 billion be found by our cash-strapped government? That’s when GMA and her defense and security people will have to imaginatively think out of the box. It can be done. If there’s a will, there’s a way.

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The report that the opposition wants an opportunity to go to military camps and conduct dialogues with our soldiers reveals that our politicians are up to mischief. It’s obvious that opposition politicians plan to conduct teach-ins and otherwise politicize our military. That Trojan Horse idea should never be considered and must be scrapped immediately.

We must keep our soldiers completely away from politics, otherwise we’ll reap the whirlwind. When it comes to our Armed Forces the old quip that "war is too important a matter to be left only to the generals, and politics is too important a question to be left to the politicians" is not true when it comes to our military. Our soldiers are warriors, pledged to defend our society and our Republic from all threats, not dabblers in political ideology or intrigue. They are under strict military discipline and must be ready to jump into action in response to orders sent down the chain of command. I’ve recently heard television commentators and guest panelists intoning that a soldier "must reject complying with an illegal command."

But who is to tell a soldier what is legal or illegal? Does this mean that he must first consult his lawyer before he shoots? I’ve been on several battlefields in the heat of combat. The soldier who hesitates to fire usually ends up a fatality. That’s why there is an old expression that after a battle there are only "the quick and the dead". If you’re not quick enough, you’re dead.

Our soldiers must be kept away from politics – and from politicians. The opposition will raise a howl at this juncture and angrily point out that La Presidenta goes to army camps and conducts talks with young military officers in informal circumstances. How can she be faulted for this? Under our Constitution, a President of the Republic is concurrently Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. This reinforces the concept that at all times the military must be under civilian control. So, sorry for the opposition. This is the way in which the order of battle has been proclaimed by our Organic Law.

It was the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, when he declared Martial Law in 1972, who brought our soldiers out of the barracks. When Ninoy Aquino and I were cellmates in Fort Bonifacio prison, he had an apt description of what Macoy had done. "Bringing our military out of the barracks," he said, "Is like squeezing toothpaste out of the tube. How can we squeeze that toothpaste back into the tube again?" That is precisely the question. Under Marcos our generals, and even our sergeants and corporals, tasted power. It is a heady brew. Generals and their wives discovered they could grow rich by utilizing this power in a corrupt manner and that disease continues to work its ill, alas, throughout our military establishment.

Moreover, a soldier who thinks politically begins to think of taking over the running of the country himself, either as a messiah or a tyrant. After all, he has a gun while our politicians have only saliva. Stop tampering with the military: Don’t let that Genie out of the bottle again!

* * *

Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez has finally spoken and apparently he wants the rape case against three of the four US Marines dropped, leaving only one US Marine to face the music in the Olongapo Court. I wish the DOJ Secretary had not been so precipitate. Let them all undergo trial and the three mentioned, if declared innocent by the judge, would be exonerated in due time.

It continues to be a jarring emotional factor that the four Marines where never delivered into Philippine police custody owing to the defective Visiting Forces Agreement our government so naively signed during the Erap administration. Since the Americans never submitted that VFA to their own Senate for ratification and, to use their terminology, the Senate’s "advise and consent," I think the VFA is not a real treaty and can be repudiated by our government out of hand.

Let’s learn from this sad case and correct the anomaly by negotiating a new and more decent arrangement which upholds our sovereignty and national dignity.

We need not brown-nose the Americans on this issue. If you ask me, with an increasingly powerful China asserting itself in this neck of the woods and, indeed, on the world stage, the Americans need us just as much as we may believe we need them. Perhaps even more.

In troubled Asia, with Taiwan and Japan already feeling the pinch, the Americans need all the friends they can get. Sure, America’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may believe that Indonesia which she just visited, is their best bet in Asia, but she must not forget that Indonesia remains 92 percent Muslim and many Indonesians simply hate America even when bearing gifts. In comparison, although GMA disgracefully abandoned the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, leaving the Americans, Brits, and their dwindling bunch of allies in the lurch in the desert, most Filipinos are still, ugh, Little Brown Brothers who like Americans, not just their hamburgers and "Starbucks" coffee or "Seattle’s Best". Betcha when the chips are down, we could even be the last ones left.

Just look at those funny anti-imperialist rallies staged in front of the US Embassy on Roxas Boulevard. There are only about 50 or 100 protesters and they begin furiously brandishing their placards and posters, and trampling on the pictured faces of George Bush and GMA, only when they see the television cameras being focused on them. After the cameras are switched off, the demonstrators usually pack up and go home.

Remember our firebrand Leftists of yesterday? Many of them afterwards applied for US visas. Many of them are now living in the USA, either as citizens or as TNT. I guess they subscribe to the old adage that "you must hold your enemy close." Close? Many of them are already sleeping with the enemy.

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By golly, there seems to be more turmoil in Thailand and in France than in our country. I say this not because misery loves company but to drive home the point that every nation has its troubles, and some of them are more turbulent than our own.

If Hinky Dinky Soliman insists, let her wear her T-shirt, what the heck. Even the protest rallies staged by the Leftists and Opposition are beginning to look like love-fests in comparison to those really violent demonstrations being hurled against the government in Paris and other cities in France. Or the anti-Thaksin marches being conducted in Bangkok.

Aside from having occupied the Sorbonne campus last week causing scores of millions of euros in damage, student protesters continue to rampage in the French capital as well as in dozens of other cities all over that country. Strikes and disruptions are occurring in almost half of France’s 84 universities. The students and other young demonstrators, who have been overturning and torching cars and vandalizing buildings, are heatedly protesting against a proposed law which would loosen the country’s rigid labor law with a more flexible employment contract which will enable employers to fire employees aged under 26.

This measure had been devised by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, ironically to encourage employers to hire younger workers since more than 22 per- cent of persons aged 18 to 25 are unemployed and seeking jobs. In sum, since employers cannot dismiss older employees who are protected by the powerful labor unions, poor Villepin had believed giving bosses more flexibility in the case of younger workers would stimulate a demand for their services.

The backlash over this increasingly unpopular labor reform has surely been horrifying to the Prime Minister, with his popularity slumping so disastrously that it damages his prospects of running for President in next year’s 2007 election. However, Villepin is bravely standing his ground. I admire him for this. He may fail, but he has exhibited the kind of leadership and back- bone that most of our leaders so badly lack.

By the same token, I’m disappointed in my idol, Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy who steadfastly in the recent past cracked down on the youthful mobs from the suburban areas in Paris who rampaged for 11 days and nights, attacking police, burning vehicles, and thrashing buildings. They were mostly unemployed African Muslim immigrants, some of them even second generation, who were angry that they had not been able to integrate themselves into the French national fabric and experience liberte, egalite, fraternite.

Sarkozy had called them scum, arrested hundreds, and finally squelched the fearsome riots not just in the capital but in other cities.

Sarkozy, leader of the Gaullist center-right UMP, had earlier publicly supported the labor reforms but now has fallen strangely silent. Perhaps he is secretly delighted at the sudden unpopularity of his rival for the Presidency (to succeed incumbent President Jacques Chirac) in next year’s polls. Peace and order is his responsibility, thus it’s important for Sarkozy to speak out and take action in this crisis. Aux armes, citoyen Sarkozy!

Worse, it seems, is still to come. Last Saturday, between 530,000 and 1.5 million were on the street. Last Tuesday, 400,000 protesters were again in the streets by police estimate (the unions claim the demonstrators came to 1 million people). French labor unions are threatening to escalate the confrontation. They are planning to launch a general strike in the next few days according to Bernard Thibault, head of the powerful CGT (Confederacion Generale du Travaile). If the unions stage a general strike, much of Paris itself may be paralyzed as has happened periodically over the past few years.

Oh well. I suppose the French expertise is going on strike. It has become a national habit. Which is why, sad to say, the lights go out occasionally in the fabled City of Light.

Do you think we got troubles here? Go to Paris. Frankly though, for all its turmoil and occasional upheavals, I love Paris. Sanamagan.