‘Middleman’ Role Suits Ramos : Military Chief Key in Resolving Aquino-Enrile Rift

Gen. Fidel V. Ramos didn’t flinch when the nurse stuck the needle into his arm Friday morning.

He seemed to barely notice as his blood was drawn into a plastic donor’s bag. The general lay calmly on a cot and chatted about war injuries, armed readiness and the past week’s political blood-letting that nearly tore his government apart.

After all, Ramos, leader of the Philippine armed forces, is an expert on “blood-letting,” as he calls donating blood. He has donated nearly two gallons to the Red Cross in the 32 years since he said he discovered that giving blood is “a process of renewal.”

By donating, he told soldiers gathered around him for Friday’s donation ceremony, “you are really discarding some of that old stuff that you have been keeping in your body--something new in the body is better than something old.”

Key Player in Rift

On Friday, though, the donation process seemed even more meaningful for the 59-year-old career soldier, whose loyalties as President Corazon Aquino’s military chief of staff have made him a key player in the rift between the president and her controversial defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile.

It came after a week in which Ramos did something similar for his country--”a transfusion of ideas,” one government official called it. And as Aquino’s toughest week in office ended, Ramos’ donation to the Red Cross was a symbol of personal sacrifice and commitment to a government still shaken by internal disagreements.

When Friday’s ceremony was over, an American reporter asked Ramos which of the two leaders he would support if it came to a showdown between Aquino and Enrile.

Ramos clenched the ever-present cigar between his teeth and smiled. “It sounds like the bottom-line question. Let’s just say I’m everybody’s friend. I am a friend to everybody, OK?”

Friday’s scene was vintage Ramos. He has now placed himself, in his words, “squarely in the middle” of a political crisis that is likely to shift many of Aquino’s policies toward the righ1948279150Cabinet in coming weeks.

Dubbed ‘Steady Eddie’

His friends have called Ramos “Steady Eddie” and “the Peacemaker General.” Now, he has been labeled “the Man in the Middle,” “The Fulcrum,” and “the Key to the Future.”

It was Ramos who quietly intervened to produce a cease-fire of rhetoric in the confrontation between the inexperienced Aquino, still feeling her way through the Byzantine world of Philippine politics, and the tough, veteran leader Enrile, skilled in political manipulation and the art of attracting military support to himself.

In the end, it was Ramos who gained the most from the affair, according to many political and military analysts in Manila.

Since the day that Aquino, Enrile and Ramos formed a new, coalition government after their civilian-military uprising toppled President Ferdinand E. Marcos in February, Ramos--like Enrile, but far more quietly--has been impatient with the civilian government.

He, too, has called for a tougher policy against the 17-year-old Communist insurgency. And on Wednesday, he got it at a meeting that was set up for reconciliation talks between Enrile and Aquino.

Since May, Ramos has been privately urging Aquino to review the list of local officials that her aides named to run provincial and local governments throughout the country. Some were corrupt; others lazy, and all were falling short of Ramos’ vision of a civilian government that serves its people. On Wednesday, Ramos got that, too.

Guards Military’s Powers

Since July, Ramos has been hinting to Aquino that her civilian advisers in the presidential palace were usurping too many powers traditionally held by the military, a process that had contributed heavily to the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship, and Ramos had asked the president to vest more powers in him. This week, Ramos got that, as well.

Moreover, Ramos will be the official who will now set the deadline that Aquino publicly promised she will impose on her government’s peace talks with the Communist rebel leaders; after that, she has promised, the military will be in charge. And Ramos will recommend a list of local government appointees who should be replaced.

Asked by The Times in a Friday interview if he sees himself as the real winner of the week’s crisis, Ramos was modest.

“This doesn’t mean that we have additional political power,” he said of the military. “And I think we must give the president at least a little bit of credit for this.”

Like Aquino, Ramos denied that the president’s new hard line on the insurgency was a policy shift.

“What has happened is that it has speeded up the process,” he said.

Enrile’s ‘Recommendations’

He referred to a list of demands that Enrile brought with him to Wednesday’s reconciliation session as “recommendations, not demands.” And he said that the three leaders managed only to settle “the more easily solved recommendations” that night--those relating to the insurgency and to local officials.

Although he has refused to choose sides in the conflict between Aquino and Enrile, which intensified two weeks ago when Enrile publicly challenged Aquino’s mandate to rule and her lack of a comprehensive counterinsurgency policy, Ramos seemed during the interview to agree with many of Enrile’s other “recommendations.”

The main demand not resolved Wednesday was a major change in Aquino’s Cabinet--specifically the removal of Aquino’s trusted executive secretary, Joker Arroyo, who has been nicknamed “the Little President” and who is also unpopular among some of Aquino’s civilian Cabinet ministers.

“I do not see it as a conflict between the minister of defense and the president,” Ramos said, “but as a difference of opinion between ministers in the Cabinet.”

Military Cool to Arroyo

Ramos refused to comment on such presidential aides as Arroyo. But, privately, senior military commanders said, the armed forces as a whole are unhappy with the executive secretary. Sources in the presidential palace said it was Arroyo who advised the president to interview many colonels to ascertain their loyalties before she promoted them to generals last week. A similar practice was common under Gen. Fabian C. Ver, Marcos’ chief of staff, whom Ramos often criticized for ignoring proper military procedures.

The same sources said that civilian presidential advisers, not Ramos, were responsible for calling out troops and armored personnel carriers and throwing up barbed wire barricades to stop the march of 20,000 peasants on the presidential palace this week.

“This is the way Marcos reacted, and this is the last thing we want to have happen now,” one senior military commander said.

Officially, aside from the insurgency, Ramos would not discuss the five major complaints and demands made by Enrile during his showdown with the president.

The general said he stressed throughout the week that his sole purpose was to keep the military together, “to keep it neutral” and “to shield it from partisan politics . . . because any splintering, any reduction of our capabilities, will only work to the advantage of the armed groups out there--the other armies.”

Not a Private Agency

The military, he said, apparently referring to some tendencies within the presidential palace to promote personal loyalties to Aquino within the armed forces, “is not a private security agency for any official, not a bunch of bodyguards that must be a source of warm bodies and firearms to protect certain people. They must not be abused in the way Mr. Marcos and Mr. Ver did.”

Ramos, aware of his delicate position, would go no further.

“I see myself as squarely in the middle,” he said. “I see my role very clearly.” Asked whether he realizes what a crucial role it is, Ramos added, “I think I know it better than anyone else.”

Ramos described his relationship with Enrile as “wonderful” and his relations with Aquino as “extremely good.”

It is a role for which few could have been better cast.

He started in the army as an enlisted private more than three decades ago and worked his way up through the ranks. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in the top tenth of his class and holds a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois. A veteran of the Philippine units that fought in the Korean and Vietnam wars, he created and once commanded the Philippine Special Forces.

Feigned Loyalty to Marcos

Although he made the “psychological break” with Marcos several years ago, Ramos quietly feigned loyalty as Marcos’ deputy chief of staff until the day last February when he joined Enrile in leading the military side of the uprising that deposed the former president.

To Ramos, nothing ranks above the military, not even family. Ramos is Marcos’ first cousin, but he said during February’s rebellion that such kinship never affected his decision to help overthrow the president. He said he acted because Marcos had overstepped, interfering deeply in military affairs, putting personal loyalties above professional capabilities and allowing the Communist insurgency to grow by employing military forces to protect himself and his family ahead of the nation.

Ramos is a consummate soldier. He is rarely seen out of uniform. His decisions are quick and his orders brief. He likes beer and poker, and he spends every birthday parachuting from a C-130 with his men, often with a case of beer or a box of medicine for a rural village strapped to his chest.

During this week’s crisis, Ramos remained low-key. He brought Aquino and Enrile together for a five-minute chat Monday night that paved the way for their midnight peace talks Wednesday. When the drama was over, at least for the week, Ramos said Thursday he was “happy that my tension has been relieved.”

Explains His Role

During Friday’s interview, Ramos explained his role in averting a collapse of the coalition that has governed the country since Marcos fled into exile Feb. 25.

His principal contribution, he said, was to convince Aquino that a deadline for peace talks with the rebels is needed to speed up the negotiating process, and Ramos set up the framework for that deadline.

“I suggested . . . maybe the date should be set in this manner: First, you pick a date for them, and I will say that if you hit that date, or the next time they attack a town hall, assault a civilian group or involve civilians in an ambush . . . whichever is earlier, OK, fair enough,” he said.

“We talk about how we must have a cease-fire because the soldiers are suffering. Well, to me, as a soldier, we are ready to face accepted risks, casualties and losses. But my concern is the increasing losses on the part of the civilians who are not really a party to the physical conflicts. They are the victims of this.”

Ramos also suggested that the Communist New People’s Army be barred during any future cease-fire from enforcing its so-called “progressive taxation” system--the collection of “forced donations” from large corporations, businessmen, fishermen, farmers and shop owners.

Ramos’ strategy, military analysts said, would effectively keep the insurgents from pressing civilian officials and private businessmen to support their organization and at the same time give the military authority to end the peace talks virtually at will.

Army’s Strength Doubted

The analysts added, however, that a crucial remaining question is whether Ramos’ military machine, battered and rusty from years of mismanagement under Marcos, is well enough armed, equipped and trained to back up what Aquino promised last week would be an imminent “declaration of war” against the Communists if current talks fail.

Senior Defense Ministry sources said the armed forces, whose reported full strength is 200,000, have been reduced to 157,000 through the years. If Aquino declared war tomorrow, they said, only 70,000 troops would be available for combat against an insurgent force which American and Philippine military intelligence officials have estimated to number 20,000.

Ramos insisted that his forces are ready to fight, but he took pains to stress that neither he nor Enrile believes solely in a military solution.

“We are the first ones to know, we are the first ones to feel and to believe that military action alone will not solve this problem, because the insurgency itself is just a symptom of the basic problems of poverty,” Ramos said.

Bout ‘in Earlier Rounds’

“We are in a championship bout with a very, very strong opponent. So we say, please don’t make this a bout between the armed forces and the civilian government. This is a bout against the armed groups that are out there . . . and we are still in the earlier rounds.”

In statements critical of Aquino, Ramos also said that questions about the insurgency raised by Enrile “are vital questions that . . . have been pending for a long time. . . . I do not know why it took so long for this teamwork and development.”

But, when pressed by reporters, Ramos said quickly and sternly, “Please don’t try to put words in my mouth.

“I do not want to have any rift with Minister Enrile. Right now our relations are very good. The same is true with the president. I will not want any conflict of any kind which involves the two of them.”