Coup Chances Much Reduced : Aquino’s Support Grows in Once-Restive Military

From the same grandstand where her own military once tried to assassinate her, a stern President Corazon Aquino put her armed forces in their place last weekend.

“Policy,” Aquino declared at the graduation ceremony at the Philippine Military Academy here, “is the business of the civilian authority--the president and the Congress. Fighting the enemies marked out by that policy is your business. . . . Let us not confuse these roles.”

Her terse address over, the president received a standing ovation from the soldiers in the audience, from the lowliest cadet to the most senior general. Antonio Mendoza Jr., the head of the academy’s controversial graduating class of 1988, which had risen up in revolt against Aquino during another, nearly successful, military coup attempt last August, declared that the president’s commencement address was “the best speech I’ve ever heard.”

The response came less than a year after a bomb at the academy, apparently intended for Aquino, exploded prematurely, killing four and injuring 43, during a rehearsal for the 1987 graduation ceremony, and just seven months after the bloody military revolt that almost overthrew her 2-year-old regime. It corroborated the view of most analysts that Aquino has gained so strong a hold over her once-restive military that her government is now “coup-proof.”

“There has been a tremendous mellowing within the ranks (of the armed forces),” said Ramon Mitra, speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives, whose eldest son was among the 135 graduating cadets a week ago Saturday. “And that has been due largely to a greater emphasis on exposing our military officers to the civilian authorities.”

But human-rights workers and political critics have charged that, after successfully fighting off at least six coup attempts, Aquino has consolidated that military support mainly by giving in to virtually all the demands of the ideologically motivated officers who plotted and launched those attempts--concessions that the critics say have shifted the Aquino government radically to the right.

Aquino purged perceived leftists within her Cabinet within months of the August, 1987, coup attempt, which left at least 56 dead and hundreds wounded on the streets of Manila. She then unilaterally increased the pay of all ranks in the military. She has played down the issue of human-rights violations by her army, branding as “one-sided” an Amnesty International report that sharply criticized her government this month for widespread abuses.

And, in her speech to the academy, Aquino left no doubt that she is giving the military a free hand in defeating the country’s intractable Communist insurgency.

“The insurgency war cannot be fought by programs and speeches, nor by commissions and committees,” she declared. “It must be fought, and it will be won, only by you and the men you will lead. The solution is simple to formulate: military action. . . . It is your small victories in the field that will add up to a final victory in the war, even as our economic initiatives and social reforms should abolish its roots forever.”

Such saber-rattling has provoked articulate critics such as Petronila Daroy, a columnist for the prominent daily Manila Chronicle, to comment that Aquino’s frequent assertion that hers remains a centrist government is a “deception.”

“The Aquino administration was able to put up the deceptive but alluring propaganda of being in the center of two extremes, the so-called left and right,” Daroy commented this week. “Despite its accommodation of the military viewpoint and its assumption of rightist policies, it became possible for government to speak of itself as the ‘center’--maintaining that its views were different from those of the militarists even as it pursued a policy of total war.”

Whatever the cost, no one seriously questions that Aquino has lessened the likelihood of another coup.

Aquino’s loyal generals in the military arranged encounter sessions between the academy’s cadets and students at civilian universities in Manila. They also conducted intensive campaigns at the academy, the Philippines’ equivalent of America’s West Point, teaching the cadets what it means to be subordinate to the constitution and a civilian government.

When she finished her speech a week ago Saturday, Aquino dramatically pardoned the cadets of all pending charges or punishments against them from last summer’s uprising.

“Now, I think the situation, not just at the academy but throughout the armed forces, has improved considerably,” Mitra concluded at the ceremony.

With Aquino’s hold on her military at its strongest since the initial military coup that brought her to power in February, 1986, political discussion in Manila’s public forums and coffee shops has turned from coup rumors to hard questions about whether the undermanned and under-equipped, 155,000-strong Philippine Armed Forces are actually capable of using their new mandate to defeat the 19-year-old Communist insurgency that still causes an average of 11 Filipino deaths each day.

Analysts in the Pentagon, which is the Philippine military’s principal supplier and adviser, have been increasingly critical of the armed forces’ ability and performance here in recent weeks. And so have respected Filipino politicians.

Sen. Ernesto Maceda, who heads the Senate Committee on National Defense and Security, voiced the sentiments of many Filipinos who are increasingly concerned with their armed forces’ ability to protect them against an insurgent army now estimated at between 23,000 and 27,000 regulars.

“The security situation is something like the glass that’s either half empty or half full,” Maceda said during a recent luncheon forum, in which he was sharply critical of the military’s inadequate supply of uniforms, combat boots and ammunition to fight the Communist New People’s Army rebels.

“While the New People’s Army is not in a position to topple down the government,” he said, “they’re still growing in size and influence. It’s just a holding situation.”

Soldiers in Rubber Sandals

Maceda’s complaints have been graphically documented in the course of a recent tour he made of forward military base camps. After each visit, the Manila newspapers were filled with photographs of government troops going into combat carrying battered M-16 rifles and wearing rubber sandals--five full months after the U.S. government delivered 60,000 pairs of new combat boots.

During another recent forum, Gen. Renato de Villa, whom Aquino made armed forces chief of staff when she moved Gen. Fidel V. Ramos up to defense secretary, agreed that there were still problems of logistics and poor equipment in the military.

Calling his military “a poor man’s armed forces,” De Villa said: “Our shortage is very critical. We are not like Western armed forces, where you have what you need. . . . In our case, we don’t even have the minimum of what we need.”

De Villa brushed aside Pentagon criticisms that half of his military’s procurement requests were not related to the insurgency.

“We have asked for more 2 1/2-ton troop transport trucks, more jeeps, more light armored vehicles, tactical communications and light machine guns and rifles,” he said. “This is what we need to fight this insurgency.”

But he conceded that sweeping improvements are needed in getting combat equipment out of Manila and to the front-line troops fighting the war.

Aides to De Villa admit they are worried by the numbers: With just 69,000 government troops considered combat-ready and at least 15,000 of the regular rebel forces armed at any given time, the government’s advantage is, at most, 4 to 1, far less than the 10-to-1 ratio most Western analysts believe is needed to defeat a guerrilla army.

The Philippine Congress recently authorized the armed forces to recruit 6,000 more soldiers this year. It is the first recruiting drive in several years, but it presents another problem: Many military analysts here fear that it will draw in the wrong type of soldiers.

“Our biggest problem from the beginning has been that our soldiers are city boys who don’t know the mountains and jungles where the war is being fought,” said one former defense department official who asked not to be identified. “The New People’s Army . . . recruits the tribals, the peasants who have lived their whole lives in the jungle and can fight a war just with what they can carry on their backs.

“What’s needed in the armed forces today is a total purge. Then, we should replace the front-line troops by recruiting from the distant, mountain barrios.”

But as the commander called the roll of the graduating class and the president handed each new officer his diploma March 12, it was clear that such a transition is not taking place.

After each name, the commander read off the newly commissioned second lieutenant’s hometown. In each case, it was a neighborhood of metropolitan Manila or a provincial urban center.

“I’m not saying we’re going to lose this war,” the former defense department analyst said. “It’s just that, at the rate we’re going, we’re not going to win it either. Sometimes I think it’ll just go on forever--no one winning, no one losing, but a lot of Filipinos dying.”