COMMENTARY
Is Arroyo Poised To Engage
Barely six months into the
presidency, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has her hands full dealing with a
host of problems and threats to her leadership. There’s the five-fold whammy
of oil, water, electricity, tuition and, soon, transport fare increases. The
pro-Estrada opposition in the new Congress is all set for a leadership showdown.
And now the sudden turn of events in its peace talks with the National
Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). In effect, the president suggests
she’s all geared for three war fronts—against the Abu Sayyaf bandits, the
Moro rebels and the New People’s Army. Are her Armed Forces ready?
The Arroyo government’s
recent declaration of an “indefinite recess” in the peace talks with the
National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) following the killing by the
New People’s Army (NPA) of notorious human rights violator and Cagayan Rep.
Rodolfo Aguinaldo is fraught with more dangers than it can imagine. By all
accounts, her administration is not yet consolidated as it purports to be and
therefore cannot afford to throw its weight around.
Indeed the opposite is true:
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s six-month-old administration is beleaguered on all
sides.
Hogging the headlines these
days is how the kidnap-for-ransom Abu Sayyaf gang thumbs its nose at the
diminutive Arroyo. The opposition Pwersa ng Masa and its guiding moral
light—deposed president Joseph Estrada—showed in the recently concluded
elections that they remain a political force to reckon with. The elections
certainly did not give the president the clear affirmation she had hoped for.
Talks with the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front (MILF), which is virtually intact despite Estrada’s “total
war” in Mindanao last year, are to resume soon in Tripoli, Libya. But the
fiercely pro-independence MILF is unlikely to be receptive to the
administration’s bull-headed insistence on the disastrous autonomy model as
negotiated with the moribund Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).
To top it all off, the
economy is in unrelenting decline. Foreign and local investments are dropping,
the precariousness of electronics-manufacturing-for-export has been shown up,
and unemployment is soaring in the cities and the countryside. The economy is
reeling from decades of a failed “globalization” policy and domestic
agriculture and industry are in shambles.
With battles raging on so
many fronts, one wonders if Arroyo can keep her fledgling administration on its
feet. As basically a technocrat more inclined and accustomed to working within
the bounds of a predictable environment, Arroyo may be surprised that the
presidency is far from this. She is faced with serious challenges and
challengers who will jab and feint as necessary while waiting for the
opportunity to deliver stinging body blows.
In the name of Aguinaldo
The peace talks with the
NDFP auspiciously restarted barely two months ago. It is of course hard to say
what the eventual outcome might be. But one thing the talks had going for both
the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and NDFP is that crucial
reforms aimed at addressing the social and economic roots of the on-going armed
conflict were being taken up.
To the extent that both
sides were serious in implementing real reforms, the talks could be said to be
going some way towards solving the most daunting challenge facing the country:
massive inequality and widespread poverty.
And now, this. With more
than a trace of self-righteousness, the Arroyo administration has used the
killing of Aguinaldo as the pretext for provoking a confrontation with the NDFP.
But infamous rapist,
torturer and killer ex-Philippine Constabulary Colonel Aguinaldo is the most
indefensible of reasons. His bloody career is a matter of public record
contained in the depositions of human rights victims of the Marcos dictatorship
and recognized even by international human rights watchdog Amnesty
International.
Why now?
The turnaround is a curious
one. Until now it looked like the administration was at least half-serious about
the painstaking work of the peace process. The NDFP, in turn, several times
tried to bear up with military atrocities in the countryside and adjusted to the
administration’s hardline posturing for the sake of keeping the talks moving.
There has been marked
progress in the implementation of the agreement on human rights and
international and humanitarian law and working sessions have been held on social
and economic reforms. After so much being done, why the sudden reversal by the
GRP?
A simple explanation would
be that former Justice Secretary Silvestre Bello III so detested his job as GRP
chief negotiator and just wanted to wrestle his way out of the negotiations in
order to pursue his political ambitions elsewhere. (He is now a congressman
courtesy of the Lakas-NUCD party that came out ninth in the May party-list
polls, drawing 2.25 percent of the votes.) But it is unlikely for that kind of
pull-out call to not have had the blessings of Malacañang.
Which raises the question of
why a monkey wrench was deliberately thrown into the peace process. Indeed the
haste with which the GRP called for a recess tends to indicate that they may
have just been waiting for an opportunity. The killing of Aguinaldo may not have
been the best of opportunities but it was a pretext nonetheless.
Especially strange that it
would happen now with the revolutionary Left so resurgent. Military intelligence
has noted a 20 percent increase in NPA strength over the past two years with
over 13,000 Red fighters nationwide. Tactical offensives have been increasingly
daring with attacks on military convoys as well as special operations in urban
areas against ranking government officials, of which Aguinaldo was only the most
recent.
Relatedly, the legal Left
has dramatically burst into the parliamentary scene with Bayan Muna topping the
party-list polls and gaining the maximum three seats in the House of
Representatives. In the streets, the mass movement remains agitated at
government’s chronic neglect of people’s issues.
But perhaps the disruption
in the talks is precisely because of the Left’s renewed strength and
calculated attempt to isolate it? Likewise, it is not far-fetched to imagine
that the United States “anti-terrorist” experts recently here may have had a
hand in the administration’s sudden about face.
Anyway, the GRP-NDFP talks
have been through these hiccups before. Whether termed “suspensions” or
“recesses,” they have lasted anywhere from a few months to a little over a
year. The recurring pattern, more or less, is that the GRP balks at the NDFP
asserting its revolutionary status while the NDFP takes the GRP to task for
violating agreements.
The GRP has especially tended towards blustery assertions of its “sovereignty.” Fortunately the NDFP, for its own political ends, has always kept the door to negotiations open if according to the terms laid out in previous agreements. It is a door the Arroyo administration should strongly consider stepping through. Bulatlat.com