Military, Police on Red Alert : Philippines Ready for New Congress, Trouble

Police anti-terrorist squads were mobilized throughout this capital Saturday as legislators prepared to usher in a new era of democracy in the Philippines with the convening Monday of the nation’s first independent Congress in 15 years.

In the face of intelligence reports that radical leftists and ultra-rightists plan bombings and other violence to try to disrupt Monday’s installation ceremony, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, the armed forces chief of staff, ordered that all military bases and police stations in metropolitan Manila be put on red alert. All military leaves were canceled, and the men were confined to their posts.

Ramos described the installation of the new Congress as one of the most important steps toward Philippine stability since President Corazon Aquino came to power 17 months ago, and it is clearly that and more.

Reform-Minded Body

The reform-minded Congress, which will meet for the first time Monday afternoon in a modern hall in suburban Quezon City, will chart the nation’s course for the next six years as it acts to erase the vestiges of deposed President Ferdinand E. Marcos’ nearly 20 years of dictatorship and open an new era of enlightenment for the nation’s 57 million people.

Twenty-three senators and 189 representatives are scheduled to take their seats when the Congress convenes. A 24th Senate seat and 11 more lower house seats will be filled when all legal challenges to the results of May 11’s legislative elections are resolved.

When Congress convenes, Aquino will lose her little-used power to rule by legislative decree for the first time since she took power in February, 1986, and dissolved the pro-Marcos, unicameral National Assembly.

Welcomes Loss of Authority

Aquino has said she welcomes the loss of authority to a Congress that will be more powerful under this country’s new constitution than any before it in Philippine history.

“The transfer of legislative function from me to Congress is not an emasculation of the presidency,” Aquino said recently. “It is a purification of the presidency’s role as sword of the nation and guarantor that its laws are faithfully executed.”

In the hands of the new legislators will be decisions on such key issues as land reform, counterinsurgency strategies, rural development, restoration of the nation’s economic health and the future of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, the two large U.S. military bases in the Philippines.

Under the constitution, the more powerful House of Representatives will decide on all government appropriations, while a key function of the Senate will be to rule on all international treaties, among them a new U.S. bases agreement that must be negotiated before the current accord expires in 1991.

Must Resist Tradition

The legislators will be faced with resisting the country’s tradition of political corruption, a tradition that Aquino’s aides accuse Marcos and his associates of following to amass personal fortunes by stealing from the national treasury.

They also will have to fight predictions by critics that the many well-off, traditional politicians who have been elected to the new Congress will spend most of the next six years pork-barreling and maneuvering to enhance their own political futures for the post-Aquino era. Her term as president expires in June, 1992.

That reputation of political selfishness was one of the reasons used by Marcos to justify dissolving the last democratically elected Congress when he proclaimed martial law in 1972. Marcos continued to rule by decree even after fraud-tainted elections in 1978 and 1984 picked new unicameral National Assemblies that were viewed as rubber stamps for Marcos.

Filipino political analysts fear that the new legislators, many of whom were members of the Congress that Marcos dissolved and who represent prominent, wealthy families, will go back to the old ways.

‘Tarnished Reputation’

“We are all keenly aware of the tarnished reputation of the old House and those who composed it,” said Ramon Mitra, Speaker of the new House and a former member of Aquino’s Cabinet. “Just about every one of us wants to see something done about improving its soiled stereotype.”

Mitra and Senate President Jovito Salonga are apt symbols of new-era members of Congress, most whom were jailed and punished financially by Marcos after he declared martial law. Both still carry shrapnel in their bodies from 1971, when an outdoor political meeting of their opposition Liberal Party was bombed by terrorists in an assault Filipinos blamed at the time on Marcos and his military leaders.

Aquino’s political coalition holds large majorities in both houses--22 of the 24 seats in the Senate and 135 of 200 in the House. Aquino is also permitted to appoint 25 additional House members from so-called “sectoral” groups, such as labor and the armed forces, something she has said she will do in the next several weeks.

6 Aquino Relatives

The new Congress includes six relatives of the president, among them her younger brother Jose Cojuangco, who is likely to be one of the most powerful behind-the-scenes forces in the House.

Mitra and Salonga have both loudly defended the legislature in the face of criticism that it will either become a rubber-stamp for Aquino or disintegrate into anarchy, paralyzed by factionalism.

As a symbol of a hoped-for new age, Mitra has named political neophyte Gerardo Roxas Jr., at 27 the youngest member of Congress, to lead Monday’s opening ceremony, breaking an 80-year-old tradition of giving that honor to the oldest member.

Checks and Balances Needed

“Our experience with strongman rule teaches us there can be no substitute for checks and balances between the executive and the legislature,” Mitra said. The Speaker has already indicated that Congress will probably rewrite Aquino’s vague land-reform proclamation of last week.

Such critics as peasant leader Jaime Tadeo have said that wealthy and vested interests in Congress--men like Mitra, who owns vast agricultural lands--lack the political will to undertake reforms benefiting the nation’s 2.5 million landless peasants.

“If left to Congress, there will be no land reform in this country,” Tadeo said Friday.

But Mitra and other congressmen, including the head of the House Land Reform Committee, have pledged to enact legislation far more radical than Aquino’s decree in spite of the fact that most analysts give such legislation little chance of passing.

Subordination of the Military

One of the most striking and least-obvious changes ushered in with the new legislature will be the subordination of the role of the powerful, 155,000-member armed forces for the first time since Marcos gave generals and colonels national leadership posts in 1972.

The military’s new place in society was illustrated Friday, when Chief of Staff Ramos and all of his senior military commanders put on a slick, four-hour “briefing and dialogue” for the media--a presentation Ramos said he had already given separately to the new members of Congress last week.

The military’s principal message was one justifying its request for a 40% increase in the armed forces budget, which must now be authorized by Congress. The message was underlined with fancy graphs and charts showing that Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia spend vastly more than the Philippines on defense.

“This is a good sign for democratic development,” political analyst Amando Doronila said. “The military is now playing by the rules of the political game. The armed forces are not arguing their case with guns or threats of a coup.”