Lugar Angered by Beatings, Missing Votes

All day Friday, as a gleaming white U.S. Navy helicopter ferried him from one troubled polling place to another, Sen. Richard G. Lugar struggled to give President Ferdinand E. Marcos the benefit of the doubt.

At one rural polling place in this sugar-producing region north of Manila, angry vote watchers complained that 4,000 blank ballots had mysteriously disappeared. At another, several of the election clerks were proudly wearing Marcos T-shirts. And at a third, a supporter of opposition candidate Corazon Aquino turned up bloodied and bandaged, the result, he said, of a beating by pro-Marcos people.

“It’s not all according to Hoyle,” said Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and of the official U.S. delegation to observe the election. Still, he added, “The thing is not that far out of kilter. . . . I felt that the voting proceeded smoothly.”

Mounting Doubts

But as the reports of abuses mounted, so did Lugar’s doubts--and his anger.

This morning, after a long night of waiting for returns that never came, Lugar--with an edge of bitterness--accused the Marcos regime of fraud. “The government has come upon a strategy of trying to shape the results,” he said. “ . . . The government is trying to determine, in what is a fairly close election, what is going to be required” to ensure a Marcos victory.

“The Manila vote has been held down by systematic harassment. It was simply much lower than we had expected,” he said. “My own political judgment is that the government concluded that the results from Manila would not be good.”

A Lugar aide said the senator was personally offended that his efforts to deter fraud by dispatching American observers on quick trips to the major islands of the Philippines had been so openly ignored by Marcos’ regime.

As early as Friday evening, Lugar had reversed field from his earlier, more charitable comments, saying that he had witnessed “a very long list of violations” at the polls.

“There’s a serious pattern, a very distinct pattern of influence,” he said as returns trickled in late Friday. “I plead with whoever is holding up the count to free it--let it go--so we can see what the will of the people is.”

Warning to Marcos

It was a warning clearly aimed at Marcos, but it was not certain that it hit the mark. The autocratic president had already announced on Philippine television that all foreign observers “were certainly convinced that the elections have been honest and clean.”

Lugar’s final assessment of the election will be crucial to the future role of the United States in the Philippines, a former U.S. commonwealth that is now a key anti-communist ally. If a reelected Marcos wants U.S. aid to maintain his military establishment and rebuild a deteriorating economy, he will need Lugar’s blessing to get it. And if Lugar, a conservative Republican, returns to Washington next week pronouncing Marcos a liability to the United States, that will become the focal point for policy debate over the Philippines.

“If Lugar says the election is no good, Congress is going to conclude that the election was no good,” a U.S. diplomat here said. “Lugar is the guy Marcos has to convince.”

In that, it seemed, Marcos has been unsuccessful--so unsuccessful that it appeared he had calculated that meeting U.S demands for a visibly fair election would be more trouble than it was worth.

Key to Fairness

The Marcos government’s decision to cripple the vote-counting work of the poll watchers, the National Movement for Free Elections, gave Lugar little choice. The senator had said repeatedly, in Washington and Manila, that the ability of the citizens’ group to monitor vote-counting was the key to a fair election.

In Concepcion, Aquino’s hometown, Lugar and aides were visibly affected by the pleas of the movement’s local director, Benito Cuengca, who said, “If this is the kind of democracy that Marcos is going to feed us, then I say to hell with democracy.”

Lugar and his staff had expected Marcos’ local political machine to be on its best behavior for their visit but encountered a dizzying series of electoral abuses.

At the De la Paz-North polling station just outside San Fernando, the Americans walked in past a phalanx of hard-eyed troops to find that some opposition poll watchers had been frightened away. They also found that several of the remaining poll workers were wearing Marcos campaign T-shirts.

“Isn’t that against the law?” Lugar asked.

Changed T-Shirts

A hurried consultation with the government’s local elections commissioner ensued. Finally the offending clerks were sent home to change their shirts--to a burst of quiet applause from the voters waiting outside.

“I am sorry, I cannot say anything,” one man who had applauded said when asked his opinion of the election’s fairness. “There are too many soldiers around.”

Lugar said he hoped his brief visits might serve to deter abuses of the election process, but the problems reportedly multiplied as soon as his helicopter disappeared over the horizon. A citizens’ movement poll watcher was severely beaten, apparently by Marcos supporters, only a few miles from Concepcion. Reporters who attempted to visit polling places in the area were stopped by soldiers and, in a few cases, roughed up.

Other official observers reported similar abuses. John Hume, a member of Britain’s Parliament who is here under sponsorship of the U.S. Democratic Party, said he had come across a polling place in Manila where armed men had expelled all citizens’ movement and opposition poll watchers, leaving the local head of Marcos’ party in control of the ballot boxes.