Military Not Celebrating : Aquino Triumph Dimmed by Lack of Unity, Stability

Just a few feet from the most sophisticated and independent vote-counting operation in the Philippines, discotheque lights flashed, Mick Jagger hopped around on a giant rock-video screen and waiters in white coats served shrimp tempura, gourmet Spanish stew and beer into the early morning hours Tuesday as radio station DZRH celebrated the return of democracy to a nation that had lived 20 years under dictatorship.

Few knew better than the owner and staff of DZRH, Manila’s No. 1 station, that Monday’s landslide victory for President Corazon Aquino was a watershed in their nation’s troubled history--a fair, free and clean political exercise that now lays the foundation for a new era of freedom in a country that has known none of the above for decades.

Only a year earlier, the daughter of then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos telephoned station owner Fred Elizalde on election night and threatened to throw him in jail if he continued airing his independent results, which showed Marcos losing to Aquino in what became his last political stand.

Later, Marcos himself called and threatened to knock out Elizalde’s transmitters.

So on Monday night, as his station’s vast computer network churned out the fastest and most reliable returns in the crucial referendum on Aquino’s proposed new constitution, Elizalde threw a party to celebrate what he and most Filipinos hope will be the most significant result of Monday’s historic vote: a backbone of democratic law that gives Aquino’s revolutionary government legitimacy for the first time since Marcos was driven into exile last Feb. 25.

But Elizalde and most political analysts in Manila resisted the euphoria that filled Aquino’s presidential palace Tuesday. Although the unofficial 75% approval of Aquino’s 20,000-word document gave her government a legal standing that weakened her enemies overnight, it has not, as Aquino claims, brought stability for her government.

Nearly two-thirds of the armed forces voted against a constitution that sanctions Aquino’s presidency until 1992. And, in the wake of last week’s mutiny by about 500 soldiers, Aquino--a former housewife who rose to power in a military-led rebellion--and her military commanders must find a way to unify the military behind her.

Military ‘Politicized’

“The military took extreme effort to decide to rebel against Marcos,” said one senior officer who conceded that he “would love to see the government fall.”

“So the soldiers see they have a real stake in it,” the officer said. “The armed forces are overly politicized. And only through strong leadership can Mrs. Aquino get our support back.”

And the political left, led by the Communist Party and its armed wing, the New People’s Army, also will be working against Aquino.

Its forces in the south launched isolated attacks against the government Monday to disrupt the voting. As the 60-day cease-fire between the government and the estimated 23,200 rebels expires this weekend, Aquino faces the prospect of leading her impoverished government and divided armed forces back into a protracted, 18-year guerrilla war against an enemy that claims the support of one-fifth of the population.

Aquino, whose government has been virtually paralyzed in the past two weeks by crises and by the campaigning for the referendum, also faces the economic problems left by Marcos, a fertile breeding ground for Communist ideology. The Philippines still owes more than $26 billion to foreign banks; unemployment continues to soar, and the majority of the 54 million Filipinos live below the poverty line, 5 million of them as squatters in cardboard and plywood hovels.

Basic Services the Test

“The constitution is not a self-executing or self-implementing document,” said Aquino’s deputy foreign minister, Leticia Ramos-Shahani, who is considered one of the most astute and candid analysts in the government.

“It will remain for the government to deliver the basic services to the people. . . . This is where the credibility of the government will be tested and judged.”

As Aquino tries to answer critics who assert that her administration has been so obsessed in the past year with damage control that it has largely ignored the peoples’ needs, she faces another major obstacle to governing: a second round of elections in the coming months.

On May 11, elections are scheduled for a new bicameral legislature. Many of Aquino’s Cabinet ministers have said privately that they are running for the Senate or House of Representatives. Among them are such key ministers as those for land reform, budget and local government.

“You will see a lot of changes in the government after the referendum--primarily people resigning to run for office,” said Aquino’s brother-in-law and adviser, Agapito Aquino. And political analysts believe that government services are likely to suffer.

Another Vote in August

In August, elections are scheduled for local and regional offices, posts still occupied by “officers in charge” appointed by Aquino after she fired thousands of elected pro-Marcos politicians when she took power last year. The continuing political vacuum on the local level may further disrupt government services and lead to violence during the May voting.

Aquino is still caught in the political tug of war between left and right. But even her opponents conceded Tuesday that the landslide victory of the constitution, billed as a key test of her popularity, has given the 54-year-old president new political armor.

“What the landslide shows is that the Filipino electorate is basically moderate in its political tendency,” said analyst Amando Doronila, who dubbed the referendum results “a second people power revolution.”

“Forces of the extreme right and the ultra-left rejected the constitution,” Doronila said, “but the huge ‘yes’ result indicated that the middle ground, where the moderates stood, is still the largest constituency and the mainstream of politics in this country.”

As the final unofficial returns poured in Tuesday from remote regions of the country, even Aquino’s enemies on the extreme left and right were forced to begin reassessing their political options.

Urges Reconciliation

“This is really a tremendous vote of confidence for the president,” said Rene Cayetano, who heads the right-wing Nacionalista Party associated with Aquino’s nemesis, ousted Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile. “I hope all of us will take this opportunity for a new beginning, a real reconciliation.”

Conceding defeat Tuesday afternoon, a somewhat humbled Enrile--who had campaigned strenuously nationwide against the constitution--told reporters: “I take great pride as a Filipino in the triumph of the democratic processes in our country. We accept the verdict of the people.”

Enrile had served in Aquino’s Cabinet as defense minister for nine months until he was fired in November amid still-unproven rumors that soldiers loyal to him were plotting a coup. Before Monday’s referendum, he had been planning to run for the 24-member Senate, whose members are elected at-large nationwide.

Now, said one Enrile aide, “I think the minister will be reassessing his options. He didn’t do as well as we thought, even in his home province.”

In his home Cagayan Valley region, where Enrile had expected a massive “no” vote, Aquino’s constitution received nearly 50% of the ballots.

Did Well in ‘Marcos Country’

Few observers doubted that Aquino’s landslide killed the last vestiges of the former regime. Although 97% of the voters in the capital of Marcos’ home province voted against the charter, in the province as a whole--which was still known as “Marcos country” before Monday’s balloting--Aquino polled nearly half the vote.

“Marcos is dead,” said one Marcos loyalist leader who asked not to be identified. “We’ll have to find another way.”

Petronilo Daroy, editor of the Manila Chronicle and considered one of the most independent analysts, agreed with Doronila’s assessment that the voting showed Philippine society to be politically moderate.

But Daroy said it showed another element protecting Aquino, even against attempts to force a postponement of the vote through a series of destabilizing attacks last week. It is the hunger of Filipinos of all classes to be left alone.

“The status quo, which consists of buying, gossiping, eating, dressing up for an occasion, traveling, is now beginning to reassert itself,” Daroy said.

Last week’s military siege at a Manila broadcast station, which transfixed the national and foreign media, was little more than “real-life theater” for the Filipino masses, Daroy said.

Joked About Siege

“In the evenings, the restaurants were crowded; if conversations referred to the day’s events at all, it was not so much in exasperation but to relate the funny incidents--two wives showing up to claim the beleaguered colonel holed up in Channel 7, and the lewd jokes about the ‘bold stars’ who defied the forces of law and order to be with the rebels inside the TV station,” Daroy said, the latter a reference to actors and other celebrities who lent their weight to the military revolt.

“In the discos, the dancers elbowed each other,” Daroy said. “Only the people from the media had their attention glued to the episode.”

Daroy and other analysts see Aquino as the consummate “symbol of this apoliticalism . . . a Joan of Arc without an army . . . a plain housewife without any politics and whose concern is stability, prosperity and peace.”

Similarly, during the DZRH vote-counting party to celebrate a referendum that also was heavily covered by television crews, newspapers and magazines from throughout the world, owner Elizalde noted that his guests were far more interested in the rock-videos and the dance floor than in a giant tally board on the wall.

Amid a discussion of Aquino’s piety and her strong support from the Roman Catholic Church, Elizalde sat down with the first computer printouts indicating that Aquino would, indeed, win by a landslide.

“Just who is this woman that she can do this?” one of Elizalde’s guests asked.

“She doesn’t exist,” Elizalde said. “She is a creation of the Catholic Church, that’s all. She’s a living image, a symbol of hope, a life force that makes miracles seem almost believable.

“The people have voted yes because, very simply, to reject that symbol is to die.”