‘We cannot afford another military intervention’ — Trillanes

IN the aftermath of the July 2003 Oakwood mutiny of junior officers he led, Senator Antonio Fuentes Trillanes IV, then a Navy senior-grade lieutenant, wrote an analysis about the problem of military interventions, how these affect our country’s economic and political stability, and international image, and how government policies are faring in preventing them from recurring.

Military interventions, wrote Trillanes in 2004, have debilitating effects on our economic and political stability. “More than this, lives are often caught in the crossfire,” he said. “Simply put, we cannot afford another one.”

Read Trillanes’s paper, “Preventing Military Interventions.”

Last Thursday though, Trillanes apparently disregarded his very own counsel. Along with Brigadier General Danilo Lim and his co-accused Magdalo soldiers, he embarked on another failed exercise in military intervention. They walked out of the Makati regional trial court hearing their coup d’etat case and occupied the Manila Peninsula hotel for almost six hours, declaring the Arroyo government “illegitimate” and calling on “patriotic” members of the armed forces and the police, and the public, to join them in ousting her and in forming an alternative government.

Last year, the government also thwarted a supposed plot to withdraw support from the Arroyo administration led by Gen. Lim during a protest march commemorating the 20th anniversary of the first people power revolt that toppled the Marcos dictatorship.

What could have driven Trillanes to resort to another military intervention that he himself said should be prevented from occurring in the future? Some have speculated more on his desperation and frustration with the justice system, which has continued to try him and the other Magdalo soldiers unjustly, as they perceive, as well as prevented him from serving his term as incumbent senator despite a mandate of more than 11 million votes.

Whatever their intentions, the fact that another attempt occurred to summon the military to intervene can only point to the continuing failure to address the underlying causes of military restiveness. Yes, despite the findings and recommendations of two fact-finding commissions, the first chaired by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. that looked into the bloody December 1989 coup attempt, and the second headed by former SC Justice Florentino Feliciano that probed the Oakwood mutiny.

With their recent Manila Peninsula caper, Trillanes, Lim et al. may have proven themselves “recidivist putschists” — for which the full force of the law, as Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared the other day, must be rightly brought upon them. But it would also be unwise to dismiss them and their actions outright on just that basis.

Besides the Davide and Feliciano fact-finding commission reports, Trillanes’s paper should also be an insightful read into why the government has been unable to prevent military interventions, given its assessment that the present policies have been unresponsive to the underlying causes of the Oakwood incident.

As Trillanes himself wrote, “no soldier in the AFP (the Armed Forces of the Philippines) entered the service to become a rebel, much less a troublemaker who would want to drag his own country down.” The motivation to break away from the system, he said, is nurtured in the course of a soldier’s career based on what he has witnessed or experienced.

To be sure, military interventions are set off by underlying causes within the organization (AFP), government and society in general. And the only way to prevent their occurrence is to address these underlying causes.

Trillanes’s paper identified these causes — internal and external — based on the nine major military interventions that the country had so far experienced at the time. Internal causes, or those attributable to or directly affecting the military organization, were: 1) corruption in the AFP; 2) inept AFP leadership; 3) political patronage in promotions; 4) lack of logistical support for men in the field; 5) low pay; and 6) poor medical/health services.

On the other hand, causes attributable to factors external to the military were: 1) corruption in government; 2) incompetent leaders in the administration; 3) failure of the administration to deliver basic services; 4) widespread poverty; 5) state-sponsored terrorism; and 6) electoral fraud by the administration.

For the 2003 Oakwood mutiny, Trillanes identified the following internal causes based on interviews with the mutiny participants:

• Graft and corruption in the AFP
• Selling of arms and ammunition by the AFP to the enemies of the state resulting in the never-ending war with the insurgents and secessionists at the cost of thousands of lives of civilians and AFP personnel
• Complicity of Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes and Gen. Diomedio Villanueva in the “escape” of Abu Sayyaf members through the military cordon during the so-called Lamitan Siege in June 2001
• “Revolving door” policy of choosing the AFP Chief of Staff, which resulted to having six unproductive Chiefs of Staff in the three years of the Arroyo administration
• Political patronage or “bata-bata” system in the promotions of senior military commanders (committed particularly by Secretary Reyes)
• Incompetent AFP Commanders resulting in the lack of strategic direction of the AFP
• Incompetence and political motivation of then Defense Secretary Reyes
• Incompetence and political motivation of then ISAFP Chief Gen. Victor Corpus
• Lack of logistical support for the officers and men in the field
• Issuance of arms and ammunition by AFP commanders to politicians
• Turnover of captured MILF camps back to the MILF
• Abuse and misappropriation of AFP resources by its commanders
• Misuse of the AFP by politicians against the interests of the people.
• Bankruptcy of the Retirement Separation Benefit System (RSBS)
• Very poor medical and health services
• Low pay of AFP personnel
• Lack of housing facilities for AFP personnel
• Lacking or deteriorating military equipment
• Increase of the number of generals, which will further reduce the resources at the front lines

Based on the same interviews, the external causes of the Oakwood mutiny were identified as follows:

• Graft and corruption in government
• State-sponsored terrorism as detailed in Trillanes’s paper entitled “The Greenbase Exposé” (2003)
• Failure of the Arroyo administration to deliver the promises made at Edsa II
• Widespread poverty
• Failing economy as manifested by the runaway budget deficit, rising level of unemployment, falling value of the peso, and the rising costs of commodities

Of the above-mentioned root causes, Trillanes pointed out that only the complaint about graft and corruption in the military (see also Trillanes’s studies on corruption in the Philippine Navy) was similarly identified in the Feliciano report. The Oakwood participants, he said, were never asked what motivated them into joining the mutiny, and that the commission relied more on the testimony of officers who were not even involved in the incident, delving on issues about the “spontaneity” of the exercise and the cost of the Magdalo armbands.

Failing to “extract the true causes of the incident,” the Feliciano Commission, Trillanes said, cannot therefore be expected to propose the right solutions. For the most part, he said the Commission’s recommendations were unresponsive in addressing the causes raised in the Oakwood Incident.

Trillanes, however, acknowledged that the commission came up with some detailed propositions addressing problems with regard to the RSBS, the AFP procurement system, and housing. The proposal to create an office under the Office of the President to oversee the implementation of policies, he added, could still be pursued.

By and large though, Trillanes considered both the Davide and Feliciano Commissions as reflective of the “research-based” executive policy making process in our country. Wrote Trillanes:

Every time a serious crisis occurs, the knee-jerk reaction by the President is to form a fact-finding body to evaluate the facts; to determine the cause; to make necessary recommendations; and, if necessary, to form a narrative of events. Usually, the nucleus of this body is composed of lawyers or retired justices. But the problem arises when the recommendations made by these fact-finding bodies are adopted automatically as national policies. This is not to undermine the competence of the members, but the recommendations made by fact-finding bodies are only meant to be starting points of further policy researches or definitive studies for the formulation of policy alternatives and should not be mistaken for the policy itself. These policy researches should only be conducted by qualified/trained policy analysts.

Trillanes’s paper also put forth alternatives to address the internal and external causes of military interventions. For internal causes, the eradication of corruption in the AFP was foremost on his list, but which he acknowledged to be a very complicated problem that required a separate policy research to identify possible solutions.

He also proposed the rehabilitation of the RSBS; strict application of meritocracy in the military’s promotions system; uplifting the standards of living of soldiers (through salary increases or non-monetary benefits, improved medical and health services, and mass housing); and streamlining the AFP bureaucracy (reduction of generals in the AFP Table of Organization, dissolving the General Headquarters and adopting the Joint Chiefs of Staff concept, among others). He agreed with the Feliciano Commission’s recommendation creating a cabinet-level agency (e.g. Presidential Adviser on Military Affairs) directly under the Office of the President.

Trillanes said the practice of good governance ensures the best interest of the country or the majority of the people, and hence addresses the major external causes — corruption, failure to deliver basic services, state-sponsored terrorism, poverty, and political and economic instability.

Finally, Trillanes placed the sole responsibility for the success or failure of the overall policy to prevent military interventions on the President. For good governance to thrive, he said the Chief Executive should be armed with moral integrity and political will, especially as he or she has to weather the collective resistance of the oligarchic elite, power-hungry politicians, and a corruption-ridden bureaucracy.

“Moral integrity is the guarantee that there will always be ‘purity of intent’ in every policy made. While, political will is the assurance that such a policy will be implemented,” he said.

“Any President, who will say that the practice of good governance is not politically feasible, does not deserve to rule this country.”