Lessons from EDSA or Egypt - political reforms!

By now, I’m sure our readers have seen or are seeing history in the making played via the worldwide TV networks, CNN, BBC or Al-Jazeera on the recent People Power uprisings in Tunisia when its 23-year-old authoritarian ruler Pres. Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled his country in a huff three weeks ago after a month-long street protests for a self-imposed exile in Saudi Arabia. This was the first time ever that a sitting Arab leader was overthrown by a popular People Power Revolt.

Last week, street demonstrations erupted in Sana, the Capital City of Yemen where hundreds of thousands of Yemenis marched to the capital demanding the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh after a 32-year corruption-ridden rule. These demonstrations have now spread like wildfire to the major cities in Egypt where more than a hundred people have already died and hundreds injured.

To appease the crowd, Egyptian Pres. Hosni Mubarak came out on nationwide TV asking his government to tender its resignation and come up with a government that can address the needs of the Egyptian people. But the major, major problem that Pres. Mubarak is facing is that the ordinary Egyptian wants him to step down.

While we can proudly say that these People Power uprisings had its beginnings 24 years ago when we successfully ousted the Marcos Dictatorship in Feb. 1986, the major difference with these uprisings in Egypt, Yemen or in Tunisia is the fact that it is a leaderless revolution. They don’t have a Jaime Cardinal Sin or a grieving widow, an Imam or an opposition figure exhorting the people to rise against their autocratic rulers.

Usually, there is always a charismatic leader that an indignant angry mob would look up to who often gets arrested by the security apparatus of these autocratic rulers in order to quell the uprising. But since there is none, the security apparatus of Mubarak couldn’t arrest anyone in order to stop the uprising or else they would ran out of prisons. So what the Egyptian authorities did was to stop all Internet and celphone services. But it hasn’t stopped the mass actions in many cities in Egypt. It now has a life of its own.

How these street uprisings would end, we just may know it this week. What we are seeing here is that the Egyptian people have finally had enough of the Egyptian type of democracy, which is supported by the United States and Israel. Mubarak has been in power since the assassination of then Pres. Anwar Sadat in October 1981. Egypt has only seen three Presidents since 1970 when Pres. Gamal Abdel Nasser died and Sadat became President.

Enter the problem of the United States, the world’s number one promoter of Democracy. More often than not, the US government end up supporting even autocratic rulers at the expense of true democracy and this is exactly what happened to us in the Philippines when then US President Ronald Reagan supported then Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos who morphed from a democratic President into a full-blown Dictator.

Pres. Reagan is known as a “Great Communicator” and loved to tell jokes. During the Martial Law years, this joke was spread by word of mouth (the celphone and text technology was not even in the minds of its developers) “Pres. Marcos is a sonofabitch, but then Pres. Reagan said, “He is our sonofabitch!” This joke struck deep into the conscience of the opposition against Marcos before the EDSA Revolt of 1986. This is why the opposition boycotted elections done under the Marcos regime, for as long as his pal Pres. Reagan supported Marcos, until the EDSA Revolt ousted him.

But I don’t want to douse cold water on the snowballing Egyptian mass demonstrations against Pres. Hosni Mubarak which we hope can be the beginnings of a genuine political reform in Egypt. We Filipinos can proudly say that the Egyptians got the People’s Power Revolt from us. However we must caution them that EDSA 1 or EDSA II did not necessarily result in a genuine reform in our country, hence despite our up and coming 25th anniversary for the EDSA Revolt, justice is still seriously wanting in this country.

There are lessons that we Filipinos ought to learn from what’s happening in the Mideast these days and the keyword is political reforms. If you ask me, it is too late for Pres. Mubarak to introduce reforms. While he is offering reforms now, he is also the big part of the problem. The Aquino administration should now seriously look at the events in Egypt and introduce genuine reforms that have been denied the Filipino people in the last 24 years. By this I mean, Charter changes (Cha-cha) which Malacanang never embraced. But this country needed Cha-cha yesterday and we Filipinos want a genuine change in our system of governance before it is too late in the hour.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected] or [email protected]. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.

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