Philippines Deserves Help Against Estrada

The political explosion here this week, which includes the resignation of the prosecution team in the impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada, presents the incoming U.S. foreign policy team with its first small crisis. The Clinton administration position that America would be “neutral” in the impeachment is no longer tenable. Democracy’s survival in the Philippines is at issue; an illegitimate martial law, to be proclaimed on the basis of the chaos in the streets, is imminent.

Our longtime ally, ex-colony and special friend, strategically located near Taiwan and China, is facing its greatest crisis of governance since Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972, or since the great People Power revolution overthrew him in 1986. Alas, there may be all too many similarities today. Only the United States can avert the crisis. Our preventing martial law would undo some of the damage caused by our shameful encouragement to Marcos in 1972.

From police barracks in Manila to small houses in provincial villages, the whole country has watched the incontrovertible evidence of corruption and an orgiastic presidential lifestyle. Stock market manipulation, gambling payoffs, obstruction of justice and bribes by the returning cronies of Marcos are in plain view; the strong smell of drug-trafficking at Malacanang Palace is frightening. The December bombings at public places in Manila were attributed to Muslim extremists with too much facility for comfort; it was a matter thereafter merely of rounding up the usual suspects.

The Estrada administration looks and is all the worse for succeeding the least corrupt and most reform-minded administration the Philippines has enjoyed. Fidel V. Ramos in six years, until 1998, got his country on track with rapid growth and liberalization of the whole economy. Two weeks ago, Estrada appeared to have had the votes for acquittal: It would only take eight, but his close friends in interviews claimed 11 and everyone knew why. The payoffs were presumptively enormous (and admitted as such by presidential friends). They were proved right. On the Senate floor, 11 voted to prevent the opening of his bank accounts, which would have revealed so vast a treasure trove of dirty money that none could have voted for acquittal and remained politically viable. In outrage, the entire prosecution team from the House of Representatives and the Senate president resigned.

Assuming he survives the present crisis, Estrada will not be able to govern. The economy is in shambles: The peso is down almost a third, no foreign investment has come in and the democratic and commercial establishment, including Cardinal Jaime Sin, the country’s most powerful person, oppose Estrada’s continuation in office. There will be mass demonstrations.

That is why Estrada wants to declare at least a limited martial law in collaboration with elements of the armed forces with whom he is close. Surveillance of opposition figures has been ominously growing. Some of his enemies have mysteriously disappeared in broad daylight. Threats to witnesses against him abound. His all-but-official mistresses fled the country to avoid testimony.

Marcos locked up thousands of his opponents and began a long dark night that lasted 14 years. Filipinos make clear they’ve learned. This time a would-be dictator won’t get away with it. The nascent middle class has too much to lose.

It is not clear that Estrada has made a firm and final decision for martial law. It is also not evident that it would work. There are too many forces ready to oppose, from Cardinal Sin to the ever-present nongovernmental organizations, to elements of the armed forces. There would be much blood shed in the struggle to restore decency to the Philippines. And thus more economic chaos.

The United States has, in the Philippines, a strategically located ally and a historic relationship. Thus we cannot stand by idly. For better or worse, an American mantra still exists in Manila. A powerful Filipino senator said privately last week, for example, that what the military would do would depend on “what America says.”

Alas, there is no American ambassador in Manila; a U.S. senator put a hold on the appointment of a gay foreign service officer early last year. In 1989, Colin Powell played a key role in the “persuasion flights” of U.S. Air Force Phantom fighters flying over Manila that saved democracy from a long-running coup attempt. Now Powell, as the new secretary of State, must send an envoy to tell Estrada in no uncertain terms that there is no threat to democracy, save from Estrada’s own misrule; and if the Philippines wants to be in our good graces, there had better be no martial law and no aborting of the constitutional process. The right message from the new U.S. team would dissuade Estrada from declaring martial law and allow the impeachment trial to resume.

If Estrada can’t govern--and he can’t--he has the honorable choice of resignation. It is not too late to clean up his mess and return the Philippines to the path of democratic reform and economic progress. This is a crisis for Washington that can easily be solved. Our old friends in the archipelago, and our stand for democracy, deserve no less.