Aquino Faces Challenge on Dissolving Assembly

Eighty members of the splintered political party of deposed President Ferdinand E. Marcos announced Monday that they will challenge the powers of President Corazon Aquino and reconvene the National Assembly she abolished last week.

The lawmakers, representing about two-thirds of the members of Marcos’ New Society Movement (KBL) in the defunct assembly, said they have formed a provisional committee to study unifying four KBL factions into a single party to oppose the new government.

The new party will have a new name and a reorganized leadership, the KBL officials said.

“I am waiting for the day when we will come back to power,” Lorenzo Teves, a former KBL member of the assembly, said during the meeting. “Unless we unite we shall never achieve this.”

A panel also was formed to study whether to mount a court challenge to the provisional constitution announced by Aquino last week that abolished the assembly and gave her powers at least as great as those of the deposed president.

Raucous 3-Hour Meeting

The actions were taken during a raucous three-hour meeting attended by the top leaders of the KBL, including former Prime Minister Cesar Virata, former Deputy Prime Minister Jose Rono, former Labor Minister Blas Ople and former Assembly Speaker Nicanor Yniguez.

The officials called for a reconvening of the assembly on April 14, the date set after the 200-member assembly proclaimed Marcos the winner of the fraud-marred Feb. 7 election and went into recess.

Ople said the KBL recognizes that Aquino, who assumed power Feb. 25, the day Marcos was forced to flee by a civilian and military rebellion, is the “effective president . . . by virtue of paramount force.”

But he added: “We want to assert our belief in the fact that the Batasang (the assembly) has not been abolished. We take the position that the constitution of 1973, under which the elections of Feb. 7 for president and vice president were held, cannot be really set aside.”

Marcos Denies Corruption

In Honolulu where he is living in exile, Marcos denied charges of corruption, said U.S. officials may have taken part in his ouster and indicated for the first time that he may try to return from exile.

“We must war again against the monster who imposes slavery,” the deposed president said in a telephone call taped Monday in Manila.

“Remain united so that we will see each other again,” Marcos also told supporters in his home region in a handwritten postscript to an eight-page letter dated March 21 and addressed to “my beloved Filipino countrymen.”

Both the tape of the telephone conversation and the letter were given to newsmen here by a source close to Marcos.

Marcos accused Aquino of striving for wealth and power, imposing a dictatorship and allowing her followers to loot his palace and wear his wife Imelda’s dresses.

‘Cry, My Beloved People’

“Today, you see the spectacle of looting by all kinds of groups, some wearing uniforms and the others in civilian clothes. . . ,” Marcos said in the taped message. “There was looting not only by the poor but by the rich and powerful. . . . The more outstanding ladies in the opposition started fitting and using the dresses of the First Lady.

“Cry, my beloved people. . . . There is trouble abroad in the land, trouble that reaches into every corner,” Marcos said in his telephone message.

He told reporters in Honolulu on Sunday that he still considers himself the Philippine president.

In the telephone message, Marcos said the “coup d’etat” that toppled him “was apparently helped by some of the elements of the American government,” but he did not mention names.

Marcos said charges that he owns property in the United States and has deposits in Swiss banks are “lies dreamed up by those who are scheming to get rich.”

“I intend to do legal battle with all the strength and resources at my command in order for truth and justice to prevail.”