What’s in the Scabbard?

Acknowledging late in the day that her initiative to win the loyalty of Communist-led insurgents has failed, President Corazon C. Aquino has ordered the Philippines military to unsheath “the sword of war” and pursue its fight against the rebels to the fullest. That’s something that impatient officers say they have been waiting to hear. It’s one thing, though, to issue stirring marching orders. It’s another thing to have those orders carried out. The problem is that what now emerges from the scabbard may be far less effective than Aquino might think in suppressing the growing rebellion.

The military, though it has undoubtedly improved in the year since the end of Ferdinand E. Marcos’ long dictatorship, is still widely believed to lack the training, equipment and perhaps even the political will to wage the slow and costly battle that is needed to suppress its highly motivated and well-entrenched enemy.

The military’s fight is likely to be made all the harder by Aquino’s proclamation that the “answer to the terrorism of the left and the right is not social and economic reform, but police and military action.” That seems ominously to signal the suspension of what have sofar been wholly inadequate efforts to give the mass of impoverished Filipinos a stake in their society.

The major reasons for the appeal of the insurgency are the gross social inequities and the feudal concentration of wealth that divide the Philippines into a country of the very few rich and the very many poor. Of course the military effort against the insurgents must be pursued rigorously. But to ignore vital reforms while this goes on is to adopt Marcos-like tactics that can only prove self-defeating. To the extent that those tactics fail, reactionary pro-Marcos forces in the military and elsewhere will be able to press their claim to be a credible alternative to Aquino’s rule.

Last week some of those forces apparently planted a bomb that may have been intended to kill Aquino. That will not be the last effort, from either the right or the left, to destabilize democracy. Aquino now seems to take the view that suppressive force can be the only response. If that becomes the excuse for doing nothing to improve life for Filipinos, then the future of Aquino’s presidency and of democracy in the Philippines both must be seen as very much in doubt.