Kit Tatad ruminates the possibility of NOYNOY AQUINO staging a coup of his own to preempt moves to remove him from power. manilastandardtoday/2013/10/21/the-people-against-their-government/ President B. S. Aquino III traveled to South Korea last week while the pork barrel and impeachment bribery scandal crackled in the open fire, and the provinces of Bohol and Cebu lay prostrate from the 7.2 earthquake that struck on October 15. Despite the outcry against the poor timing of the two-day state visit, no angry street or airport crowds greeted Aquino upon his return. This has led some people to rule out any massive hostile reaction to the government’s unpunished crimes that could loosen Aquino’s hold on power. At the same time it has prompted those who would like to see him out of office to consider a more creative public response. Aquino was the first foreign head of state to visit Korea since President Park Geun-Hye came to power last February. She received him at the Blue House with genuine warmth. But her first words, expressing “deepest regret” over the loss of lives and destruction of property in earthquake-stricken Bohol and Cebu, seemed to give ample proof that she would have understood perfectly well if Aquino had invoked the human suffering of his own people and sought a short postponement of the visit. It would have been no different from US President Barack Obama cancelling his participation in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bali and in the East Asia Asean summit in Brunei as well as his visits to Kuala Lumpur and Manila because of the US government shutdown. Or US State Secretary John Kerry calling off his own visit to Manila, in place of Obama, because of stormy weather. With his trust rating plummeting to the basement, as public awareness of the pork barrel corruption and bribery scandal during the 2012 Corona impeachment and trial reached close to 100 percent , Aquino had no need to court further public disapproval by going to Seoul at this time. And yet, why did he? Why could he not have gone to Bohol or Cebu instead, in the same manner he stayed in Zamboanga City during the September standoff between the 11,000 government troops and the 400 or so forces of the Moro National Liberation Front? This question is being asked by the likes of PhilStar columnist Dick Pascual and so many others. Of course they are mistaken in one thing—they all seem thoroughly convinced that Aquino stayed in Zamboanga City during all of the nine days the conscript media were saying he was there. But it will be recalled that Aquino first made a public appearance in Zamboanga on the fifth day of the siege on Sept. 13, then disappeared, and appeared again only on Sept. 22 before taking his flight home. In-between those two dates, Aquino’s whereabouts remained a complete mystery, prompting all sorts of speculation even in Zamboanga itself. Some thought he had closeted himself inside the U.S. intelligence facility within the Western Mindanao Command “playing war games and drones.” Others said he had flown to Davao and Dakak for rest and recreation. No official data was available online to show where he was from Sept. 14 to 21. Malacañang has tried to underline the importance of the three agreements signed by Korean and Philippine Cabinet officials in the presence of the two presidents—an agreement on defense cooperation, flood mitigation and sports development—and the posthumous award conferred by the Korea Journalists Society and the Korea War Correspondents Association upon the President’s late father, the former senator Benigno Aquino Jr., for covering the 1950-53 Korean war as seventeen-year-old cub reporter for the old Manila Times. The Palace tried to put special emphasis on the “imminent acquisition” of 12 South Korean jet fighters to beef up the Philippine Air Force. But although the Korean and Philippine defense ministers signed a defense cooperation agreement, they did not sign a purchase order for the jet fighters. Some quarters even fear the actual purchase may yet have to contend with the Philippine defense establishment’s reputed bias against government-to-government military contracts, in favor of direct purchase from the private manufacturer or supplier, even when the financing is provided by the government of the country where the items are being acquired. Assuming the purchase order had been signed, and the planes were to be delivered the next morning, it still makes no sense to crow about it as though such acquisition would tilt the balance of maritime and air power in favor of the Philippines against all the other players in the Scarborough Shoal and the Spratlys who have hundreds of Sukhois, stealth aircraft, and submarines in their inventory. The public might have been less critical if Aquino had said he had gone to Korea to see for himself how nuclear energy, despite strong opposition from Greenpeace and environmentalists, had transformed that country into a great industrial power. Korea operates 23 nuclear power plants, and is not about to shut down any of them despite the decision of certain European countries (Germany and Italy, for example) to do so, after a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima I nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan on March 11, 2011, prompting the authorities to decommission Units 1 to 4 of the same plant in April 2013. In 2012, Korea hosted the Second Nuclear Summit in Seoul. Vice President Jejomar C. Binay represented Aquino in that summit and reported the summary of its proceedings to Malacañang. Despite the Fukushima disaster, the major participants in that conference said no alternative to nuclear energy has been discovered to provide the world with cheap and dependable energy supply. Although Aquino had openly declared vehement opposition to the use of nuclear energy, his Korean visit may have opened a small window for the nuclear energy option. Before flying to Seoul, he was reported to have ordered the restoration of the P50-million budget to maintain the mothballed 620-megawatt Bataan nuclear power plant, which constitutes a departure from his officially declared policy. If this assumption is correct, there may be some hope in reversing the country’s unhappy energy situation. Begun in 1976 and completed in 1984, the $2.8 billion BNPP could have become the first nuclear power plant in Southeast Asia, had it been allowed to operate. It could have prevented the country’s recurring power outages, and the high energy costs, which have driven to astronomic heights the cost of doing business in the Philippines. But after Marcos fell in 1986, President Corazon Aquino, the incumbent’s late mother, ordered the BNPP mothballed on the ground that Herminio Disini, the agent who had facilitated the sales contract, allegedly received a fat commission from Westinghouse. This turned out to be the “standard legal commission,” according to industry sources, rather than a bribe or an overprice. But Cory was determined to kill the project, because it carried the imprimatur of Marcos, even though its technical and scientific specifications were said to be solid. The plant’s mothballing came together with Cory’s decision to abolish the Department of Energy and the entire energy program, again because they carried the name of Marcos. The government took years to pay the entire $2.8 billion, without getting a single spark of electricity from it. Against this background, Aquino could have predicated his Korean visit on a desire to learn from the Korean nuclear energy experience and correct his late mother’s unfortunate mistake. But just as he would never apologize to the Hong Kong government for the death of eight Hong Kong tourists at the 2010 hostage-taking at Manila’s Rizal Park, it appears he would not like the world to see him acknowledge his mother’s monumental mistake. Unmentioned as a possible motive for Aquino’s going to Seoul was his desire to establish strong personal ties with the Korean president. His father Ninoy Aquino had been a lifelong devoted admirer of Park Chung Hee, President Park Geun-Hye’s late father who ruled Korea as a strongman from 1961 until his assassination in 1979. This admiration was well known to foreign correspondents who covered Ninoy Aquino as an opposition senator before Marcos proclaimed martial law and imprisoned him in 1972. Ninoy used to tell his media friends that should he ever become president after Marcos, his first act would be to do a Park Chung Hee and imitate what he did in Korea. But he never had the chance; Marcos declared martial law in 1972 in response to the communist insurgency, and jailed Ninoy along with other members of the opposition. However there is no sign that Ninoy’s admiration for Park even after his death ever waned; it may have in fact rubbed off on his wife Cory and only son, the incumbent president. Thus, after Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in 1983, Cory Aquino had no problem declaring a revolutionary government with herself as revolutionary president after the military, with open American support, ousted the long-serving Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. And PNoy himself has had no difficulty acting like a revolutionary president after he was “machine-elected” in the country’s first indisputably flawed automated elections in 2010. PNoy and Geun-Hye , as second-generation leaders, share much in common, which makes them natural political allies. It may be precisely because of this natural political kinship with Park Chung Hee’s president-daughter that the president-son of Ninoy Aquino flew to Seoul at a time when his countrymen wanted him to stay at home to condole with the calamity victims in Cebu and Bohol and at the same time roast in the open fire of the pork barrel and bribery scandal. As that scandal threatens to sweep him away from the seat of power, Aquino has obviously decided to dig in. In particular, as large congressional forces on Capitol Hill threaten to make him accountable for bribery and corruption, and consequently marginalize his old support in official Washington, Aquino has decided to expand his search for allies among America’s friends. Korea, like Japan, is one such friend. With each passing day, a new element seems to alter the Philippine political scene. While an irrelevant Senate seems determined to pursue its irrelevancy by summoning Janet Lim Napoles to be investigated by investigators who should be the first ones to be investigated, plunder and bribery charges have been filed with the Ombudsman against Senate President Franklin Drilon, Budget Secretary Butch Abad and other Cabinet members. Retired Chief Justice Reynato Puno and others have begun pushing for a people’s initiative to prohibit all forms of “pork barrel,” as though the beast could be killed while keeping alive the presidential system. Several other groups are calling for a system change that would establish a more responsible parliamentary/federal system—all premised on Aquino’s immediate removal or resignation. Some are calling for the voluntary organization of a National Transformation Council as a vehicle for a thorough-going constitutional reform and moral and cultural revolution that would address the root of our common disease, of which the pork barrel state is but one nasty symptom. Aquino sees this all. But he is no patsy and he has decided to fight back. He will not fire the most corrupt of his Cabinet members, nor will he allow them to resign. He himself will not resign. Nor will he restore the rule of law and due process. To prevent being ousted in a coup, he might engineer his own coup and preempt his adversaries before they get a chance to get organized and put their plan into action. The contest is now between the people and all the corrupt politicians in government. From today, the people must be prepared to say, “We are all running against our corrupt and crime-ridden government.”
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 03:17:43 +0000
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