ROTC Revival to Boost Anti-insurgency Drive?

The government’s revitalized anti-insurgency campaign will benefit from a bill that seeks to reinstate the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), with youth groups seeing it as a source of corruption for ROTC officials and a counter-insurgency arm for the military.

By Jhong dela Cruz
Bulatlat

The government’s revitalized anti-insurgency campaign will benefit from a bill that seeks to reinstate the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), with youth groups seeing it as “absurd” as ever for students.

The House and Senate versions are now in the pipeline, aimed at reinstating the ROTC course as mandatory for male students and voluntary for females, in all private and public colleges and universities.

House Bill 5460, if passed into law, would repeal Republic Act. No. 9163, or the National Service Training Program (NSTP) Act of 2001, created five years ago after ROTC cadets, led by militant youths, called for the ROTC abolition.

The bill’s author had said the ROTC restoration will prepare tertiary students for possible military and civil service. It would also reportedly give “importance on instilling in the youth values of patriotism, discipline and love for the country.”

But on the contrary, youth groups fear the program would only be a source of corruption for ROTC officials and a counter-insurgency arm for the military.

Intelligence arm

According to a youth human rights watchdog called Tanggulan Network, ROTC’s implementation before it was replaced by NSTP bore marks of counter-insurgency objectives right at the heart of campuses. This, it said, is proven by the installation of Student Intelligence Networks (SIN).

Tanggulan, an initiative of youth organizations, pointed out that in 2001, cadet officers begun recruiting SIN agents to monitor militant groups, fraternities, student councils and school publications. They were reportedly ordered to infiltrate progressive organizations especially those in known activist-hotbeds such as the University of the Philippines and Polytechnic University of the Philippines.

The Kabataan Party (youth party) warned the restoration of a compulsory ROTC would again mean stronger military presence in campuses, even reactivation of SIN as the military’s arm for surveillance and data gathering.

“Sentinels”

Recruitment and operation of “student intels” (student intelligence agents) or sentinels in campuses were first exposed in 2001, at the height of the campaign to abolish ROTC. Documentation by the College Editors Guild of the Philippines revealed recruitment into the SIN was directly supervised by ROTC officials and in turn, run by elements of the AFP.

This was apparent in the case of the University of the Philippines-Manila where so-called “Sentinels” carry out tasks in exchange for incentives such as exemptions in training and money.

But to be a sentinel, a recruit has to pay a membership fee of P3,000 (US $55.98 at $1=P53.59). They are also told that the SIN aims to thwart NPA threats inside the campus.

In Central Mindanao University, SIN had its headquarters right inside the campus in 2001 to easily monitor militant youth groups like Anakbayan, League of Filipino Students (LFS) and Karatula. Its operation, the groups reported, included drawing up a list of identified militants in the campus.

Boost to anti-insurgency

“We should require students to undergo compulsory ROTC as a requirement for their graduation…in this way, we prepare a generation of young people who are ready to defend the country in any eventuality,” Cebu Rep. Eduardo Gullas, the bill’s author, said.

Gullas maintains that restoring ROTC “will motivate, train, organize and mobilize students for national defense” and that in the event that the country needs to defend the state, “[people] will be prepared for the contingency to render personal, military or civil service.”

The measure, entitled “Mandatory Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) Act of 2006,” shall require students taking baccalaureate degree courses and two-year technical or vocational courses to finish ROTC curricula in order to graduate.

Kabataan Party vice chair Carl Ramota said reinstating the ROTC as mandatory would potentially expose student leaders to attacks by the military.  

“The proposal to reinstate ROTC and the allotment of P1 billion for counter-insurgency are part of the government's desperate effort to woo the military's support for the Arroyo administration and quell anti-Arroyo activities in known hotbeds of student activism,” he maintained.

UP Diliman student council chair Juan Paolo Alfonso told Bulatlat  in an interview that “The military is not only bent on recruiting students but ordinary employees and workers in the university…they engage janitors, taxi drivers and even teachers in watching over student leaders and their activities.”

At the height of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s declaration of Presidential Proclamation No. 1017, which placed the country under a weeklong state of emergency last February, a member of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP) walked in the office of the UP student council asking about the council’s activities, said Alfonso.

Suspected intelligence agents were suddenly visible during this period when militant students were planning big rallies and mobilizations against the proclamation, he said.

Tanggulan places the number of youth killed under Arroyo’s term at 10, including that of Cris Hugo, a student of the Bicol State University and a national council member of the LFS. The latest fatality was Pedro Angcon, himself a human rights worker for Karapatan, who was waylaid May 16 in Bgy. Hilaitan, Guihulngan town in Negros Oriental.

Fake patriotism

National Union of Students of the Philippines chair Marco delos Reyes noted that Macapagal-Arroyo as commander-in-chief would benefit from the bill because it would ensure replenishments for the army through the ROTC.

For his part, Kabataan Party chair Raymond Palatino scoffed at the military and their allies in Congress in pushing the bill. “It’s funny how the military and their allies in Congress keep on insisting that ROTC develops service, discipline and patriotism yet it operates in an environment where cadets are indoctrinated with the do-or-die mindset and are reduced to blind followers,” he said.

Palatino also said that ROTC had been reduced to “a fraudulent money-making scheme,” recalling the exposés made by UST cadet officer Mark Chua. Chua was killed after he divulged the corruption in the UST ROTC in 2001. Bulatlat

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