‘Neutral’ Doctor Has Plenty of Work : Peace Chances Look Slim On War-Weary Mindanao

Dr. Frank Manzanares and his American wife, Mary Lou, were in the emergency room the other day, stitching up a road-accident victim, when they began to reflect on what life has been like for them in the last 10 years or so at Christ the King Hospital in this remote, war-torn provincial capital.

“They come in by the hundreds every week--bullet wounds, grenade blasts, blown-off arms and legs, you name it,” said Manzanares, a surgeon who earned his medical degree nearly 30 years ago in Cleveland.

“And then there are the guys with gangrene, pneumonia, tuberculosis--the casualties of a rebel’s life in the jungle. Seems like every day we end up playing God. ‘This one over here,’ you tell yourself, ‘has got a ripped-up liver and a punctured spleen and a bullet in his lung; he won’t make it. That guy’s only got some grenade shrapnel. We can save him.’ So we forget about the first guy and get to work on the second.

Just Like ‘M.A.S.H.’

“Yeah, we get ‘em all in here, the Communist rebels, the government soldiers and, mostly, the civilians who get it in the cross-fire. It’s just like that TV show ‘M.A.S.H.’ We’re a hospital in a war zone, and we’re sick and tired of it all.”

It has been like this during the long civil war for Manzanares and his Chicago-born wife, whom he met in medical school in Ohio. After graduation, he persuaded her to return with him to the troubled southern island of Mindanao.

With the backing of the Roman Catholic Church, the couple moved to Manzanares’ old home in central Mindanao, and 22 years ago they opened a hospital in this impoverished province, Davao del Norte. Their goal was to help heal the poor.

But a few years later, the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military arm, the New People’s Army, began their guerrilla war against the government of Ferdinand E. Marcos, the president who was driven from office last February. Soon after the war began, Davao del Norte became one of the the insurgents’ principal battlefields.

People in the Middle

“We’ve been smack in the middle of this thing for more than a decade--us, and the tens of thousands of other simple people who live around here,” Manzanares said, as he tied off the stitches on his patient’s arm. “And we are the ones who have had to pay the price.

“For us, it’s not a question any more of who’s right or who’s wrong. We’re just as willing to pull bullets out of the rebels as the military. We only want one thing right now. We want peace.”

If Manzanares’ emergency room that morning was any indication, his wish could be just around the corner. It was quiet, save for the two victims of an accident involving a speeding jeep that had flipped over on the battered highway that runs through town.

The doctor and other residents of Tagum said they believed that the relative peace was the result of cease-fire talks scheduled to begin this week between rebel leaders and two representatives of the government of President Corazon Aquino. She has vowed to find a peaceful solution to the civil war, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, most of them civilians in and around rural towns like Tagum.

Trip Raised Hopes

Each day, the newspapers and television newscasts contain optimistic rhetoric about a possible end to the fighting. Hopes were raised even higher over the weekend as Aquino traveled to Mindanao to meet with rebel fighters who had decided to come down from the hills and rejoin society.

But beneath the hopeful veneer, in the cities, towns and villages of central Mindanao, where most of the carnage has occurred, many doctors, lawyers, leftist leaders, military commanders and even local government officials seem to be more skeptical.

“This is just a lull,” Manzanares said. “The two sides are just too far apart. The rebels want a role in running the government, and Cory (President Aquino) won’t give it to them. The whole thing seems doomed to fail. So why get our hopes up?”

In Davao City, 35 miles south of Tagum, a half-dozen top aides of the new mayor, Zafiro Respicio, expressed similar doubts.

Leftists Now Officials

The aides, avowed leftists, were swept into the government when Aquino chose Respicio, a longtime leader of the leftist opposition party PDP-Laban, to replace the city’s pro-Marcos mayor soon after she took office in February.

“Just five months ago, we were the ones out there on the streets, marching around and denouncing U.S. imperialism and raising the red flag,” Respicio’s top aide, Cesar Decena, said over coffee, as about 1,000 demonstrators in the public square outside the City Hall shouted slogans against the two U.S. military bases in the Philippines.

Pointing to an office boy who was clearing away coffee cups, Decena added proudly: “You know, that boy was a member of the most deadly NPA Sparrow Unit in Davao. The Sparrows are the New People’s Army assassins, the ones who have killed all the policemen here (more than 150 of them in the last two years, according to military authorities).

“But there are a lot of forces out there working against these cease-fire talks. There are many in the hills who do not want this war to end until they have won. Cory deserves all the credit for trying, but peace, well, maybe not for a while.”

Police Chief Respected

The new government’s attempt to appease the rebels in Davao City, where an average of four to five people were killed every day last year, has gone further than Davao’s City Hall. Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, Aquino’s military chief of staff, appointed a new police chief, Lt. Col. Jesus Magno, who is a native of the city and respected by many for his tolerance.

In a recent interview, Magno began in an optimistic tone. “The situation is much, much better here now,” he said, citing statistics that showed only 32 killings for the month of June, less than a third of last year’s figure. “I beg to disagree now with the idea that this city is the laboratory of the New People’s Army or the ‘Killing Fields of the South,’ as many have called us.

“Sure, there are killings here, but it’s not as bad as it was or is pictured to be. And we have observed here in Davao City that many of these rebels now want to come down (surrender). I have been receiving feelers.”

He paused, then went on: “But of course this does not represent the majority; maybe only a small portion. In the meantime, all we can do is maximize our propaganda and hope for the best from the talks.”

Ramos, Enrile Skeptical Similarly, on the national level, Ramos and Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile have been deliberately skeptical in their public and private comments on the cease-fire negotiations. When Secretary of State George P. Shultz was in Manila recently, Enrile told a public forum that it would take a miracle for the talks to succeed, and Ramos has been instructing his regional and provincial commanders to prepare for rebel offensives before and after the talks.

So controversial are the coming peace talks that most of the military and civilian leaders who attempted a countercoup against Aquino’s government last Sunday cited Aquino’s stance on the Communists as their primary motivation in seizing the historic Manila Hotel as a new seat of a rebel government.

“Mrs. Aquino is being duped by the Communists,” said Gen. Jaime Echevarria, a respected military leader who joined the hotel occupation force. “The Communists are just going to use these negotiations to stab us in the back, to steal the government and rob us of democracy.”

Asked whether the negotiations might not bring peace to the long-suffering Philippine countryside, Echevarria, who battled the insurgents for nearly a decade as commanding general of central and eastern Mindanao said, “The only kind of peace they can bring is the kind of peace they now have in Vietnam.”

Rebels Sound Pessimistic

The rebel leaders, too, have sounded pessimistic in recent weeks. Antonio Zumel and Saturnino Ocampo, the self-styled rebel journalists chosen by the Communist Party and its political front group, the National Democratic Front, as negotiators at the talks, have said in recent interviews with Filipino journalists invited to their mountain hideaways that they are approaching the negotiations with cautious skepticism.

Ocampo said in an interview that he applauded Aquino’s desire to hold the talks as a sign that “she recognizes we are not mere outlaws.” He said it is not at all likely that she will take Communists into her government, although this is an “irrevocable” rebel demand.

“You cannot just join forces until you have found something in common,” Ocampo said.

Still, he sounded more optimistic than many residents of central Mindanao. “We know that we do not exactly see eye to eye, but there are areas where we can agree,” he said. “We want to give peace a chance, and we look at the talks as perhaps a better way to effect the changes we want.”

Rebel Exploitation Feared

It is this hint of potential for exploitation in the tone of recent Communist Party statements that has led men such as Decena, the Davao City mayor’s aide, and Dr. Manzanares to doubt that the much-heralded peace talks will succeed. They fear that the rebels will simply use the occasion to recruit new converts in the countryside while they are free of military pressure.

Decena and many others fear that the New People’s Army may be too fractured internally to sustain any peace agreement. Suspicions about such divisions appeared to be confirmed by the Philippine military, which announced Saturday that the Communist Party has undergone a drastic change in its hierarchy and command responsibility in the past week.

“Here in Davao, there is a dispute right now between the regional front of the party and the city unit--between the hard-liners and the leaders who are espousing the softer line,” said Rey Teves, a former leftist street marcher who has joined the new government as regional director of the Ministry of Information. “For the time being, the soft-liners are the ones carrying the ball, but who knows how long it will last.”

As an example of the internal divisions, Decena cited the assassination last month of Davao City’s deputy police chief, Col. Manuel Garcia, the highest-ranking policeman the rebels have killed in the city.

Splinter Group Theory

“Many believe the assassins were not the real NPA but sort of a splinter group of undisciplined rejects,” Decena said. “They call themselves the People’s Liberation Organization--the PLO--and it’s not clear that the regular party endorses their activities. If that’s really true, there’s hope, because Col. Garcia is the only policeman to be killed in the past month. But, again, no one really knows.”

No one knows for certain at Christ the King Hospital, either. Although it was far quieter than normal in the emergency room, Manzanares said that other recent mornings have not been at all quiet.

“Just the other day,” he said, “we had a whole bunch of them come in. Were they soldiers? Rebels? Who knows? They were in military fatigues. They had guns. They were hurt. So we sewed them up, and they left. That’s all I know. That’s all I want to know.

“When will there be peace, you ask? Well, here in Tagum, we ask the same thing every day.”