Post by Bozur on Mar 2, 2006 21:30:40 GMT -5
News Analysis
Political Turmoil Again Thwarts Progress in Philippines
By SETH MYDANS
Published: February 26, 2006
BANGKOK, Feb. 25 — Coup plotters arrested, troops in the streets, excited crowds calling for the president's ouster, soldiers and senators testing the wind and forming alliances.
Bullit Marques/Associated Press
In 1986, the "people power" movement lifted Corazon C. Aquino to the presidency of the Philippines, after Ferdinand E. Marcos was driven out.
The Philippines is at it again, and for foreign and local experts it is a discouraging spectacle of national futility.
On Friday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared a state of emergency, saying a coup plot had been foiled and banning demonstrations in the streets. The next day, the police raided a pro-opposition newspaper in Manila. Several people were hauled in for questioning, including a leftist congressman and a former police chief, and Reuters reported that senior military officials said about a dozen young officers were lining up to turn themselves in before they could be arrested.
It was the latest in a relentless procession of political disruptions that have crippled political and economic development for the last two decades.
Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the Philippines's shining moment, a foiled coup attempt followed by a huge popular uprising called "people power" that drove former President Ferdinand E. Marcos from power. Ever since, the country has obsessively tried to recreate that moment, assuring continued instability with seemingly unending coup rumors and coup attempts, and with repeated popular uprisings.
Now, a new catchphrase has entered the Philippine lexicon: people power fatigue. This nation of political romantics has sunk into a mood of weariness and disillusionment.
"I'm not getting emotionally involved anymore," Sheila S. Coronel, the country's leading investigative journalist, said last week. "It makes me too angry."
The genuine people power uprising, in 1986, was led by Corazon C. Aquino, who followed Mr. Marcos as president. She was out in the streets again this weekend, again in her yellow dress, again rallying a crowd to oust a president.
It is a paradox. The restoration of democracy, and the democratic transition to a new president, were Mrs. Aquino's prime legacies. Yet, she has led mass demonstrations against all three of her democratically elected successors.
She blocked the first one, Fidel V. Ramos, from changing the Constitution in 1998 to keep himself in power. She helped drive the second, Joseph Estrada, from office in 2001 in what became known as "people power 2."
Now she is challenging Mrs. Arroyo in the streets. The president is as unpopular as any leader since polling began during the Marcos administration. She is widely accused of rigging her election in 2004. Mrs. Aquino says Mrs. Arroyo should resign to restore legitimacy to the presidency, though it is not clear what would happen after that.
The net effect of the continuing demands for Mrs. Arroyo's resignation is to knock the country off balance once again.
Despite the president's lack of popularity, Mrs. Aquino has not rallied the huge wave of popular will that she did in the past. However hard she may try to recreate it, this is not 1986, when nuns knelt in the streets to block tanks and hundreds of thousands of people rose against a dictator.
A survey in January by the respected polling agency Pulse Asia found that only 36 percent of Filipinos now said they supported the 1986 ouster of Mr. Marcos. In December, the same agency found that nearly a quarter of Filipinos said they believed their country was "hopeless" and that one-third said they would emigrate if they could.
Just as the original people power was seen as a model of nonviolent resistance, the letdown now is an object lesson in the limits and even the destructive effects of a popular uprising.
The columnist Amado Doronila, who once celebrated people power, now calls it "a source of political instability that has undermined the strengthening of political institutions and democratic legal process."
The events of 1986 left Filipinos with two seemingly contradictory aspirations, said Manuel L. Quezon III, a political scientist: to have the power to elect a president and to have the power to remove a democratically elected president.
The result is a self-defeating notion of democracy.
"Elections are increasingly becoming a source of contestation rather than a source of legitimacy," said David G. Timberman, an American specialist in democracy building.
As it continues to chase the old elation of people power, the Philippines sometimes verges on self-parody.
In recent weeks, the debilitating political games have included talk of a bizarre alliance of the three former presidents — Mrs. Aquino, Mr. Ramos and Mr. Estrada — against Mrs. Arroyo.
The most recent coup attempts have degenerated into the comic, when a group of young officers seized a residential hotel in 2003, and then into mockery, when a retired general seized a social club last December and proclaimed himself head of a provisional government.
All this has diverted the country from the poverty, economic and social inequities, population pressures and violent insurgencies that continue to drag it down.
An intractable system of oligarchic control, left untouched in the 1986 transition from Mr. Marcos, has made fundamental change extremely hard. Far from the revolution that some people called it, the ouster of Mr. Marcos amounted in the end to a shuffling of power among long-established elites.
"For me the problem is not political," said Ms. Coronel, executive director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. "The problem is social inequality. There is a mass of people who depend on patronage, and that allows our feudal political system to survive. So we cannot reform the causes of mass poverty."
Real issues are drowned out by political gossip and street rallies; wordplay often substitutes for policy.
And so there is "no-el" for "no election" and "cha-cha" for charter change, the attempt to amend the Constitution. There is the acronym Young, for the latest round of military coup plotters, the Young Officers Union, New Generation.
And there is people power, an odd-sounding term that has helped Filipinos define themselves as an idealistic, righteous and democratic nation. After 20 years of disappointment, the term has lost its power to inspire and has become, to many here, an oxymoron.
Political Turmoil Again Thwarts Progress in Philippines
By SETH MYDANS
Published: February 26, 2006
BANGKOK, Feb. 25 — Coup plotters arrested, troops in the streets, excited crowds calling for the president's ouster, soldiers and senators testing the wind and forming alliances.
Bullit Marques/Associated Press
In 1986, the "people power" movement lifted Corazon C. Aquino to the presidency of the Philippines, after Ferdinand E. Marcos was driven out.
The Philippines is at it again, and for foreign and local experts it is a discouraging spectacle of national futility.
On Friday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared a state of emergency, saying a coup plot had been foiled and banning demonstrations in the streets. The next day, the police raided a pro-opposition newspaper in Manila. Several people were hauled in for questioning, including a leftist congressman and a former police chief, and Reuters reported that senior military officials said about a dozen young officers were lining up to turn themselves in before they could be arrested.
It was the latest in a relentless procession of political disruptions that have crippled political and economic development for the last two decades.
Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the Philippines's shining moment, a foiled coup attempt followed by a huge popular uprising called "people power" that drove former President Ferdinand E. Marcos from power. Ever since, the country has obsessively tried to recreate that moment, assuring continued instability with seemingly unending coup rumors and coup attempts, and with repeated popular uprisings.
Now, a new catchphrase has entered the Philippine lexicon: people power fatigue. This nation of political romantics has sunk into a mood of weariness and disillusionment.
"I'm not getting emotionally involved anymore," Sheila S. Coronel, the country's leading investigative journalist, said last week. "It makes me too angry."
The genuine people power uprising, in 1986, was led by Corazon C. Aquino, who followed Mr. Marcos as president. She was out in the streets again this weekend, again in her yellow dress, again rallying a crowd to oust a president.
It is a paradox. The restoration of democracy, and the democratic transition to a new president, were Mrs. Aquino's prime legacies. Yet, she has led mass demonstrations against all three of her democratically elected successors.
She blocked the first one, Fidel V. Ramos, from changing the Constitution in 1998 to keep himself in power. She helped drive the second, Joseph Estrada, from office in 2001 in what became known as "people power 2."
Now she is challenging Mrs. Arroyo in the streets. The president is as unpopular as any leader since polling began during the Marcos administration. She is widely accused of rigging her election in 2004. Mrs. Aquino says Mrs. Arroyo should resign to restore legitimacy to the presidency, though it is not clear what would happen after that.
The net effect of the continuing demands for Mrs. Arroyo's resignation is to knock the country off balance once again.
Despite the president's lack of popularity, Mrs. Aquino has not rallied the huge wave of popular will that she did in the past. However hard she may try to recreate it, this is not 1986, when nuns knelt in the streets to block tanks and hundreds of thousands of people rose against a dictator.
A survey in January by the respected polling agency Pulse Asia found that only 36 percent of Filipinos now said they supported the 1986 ouster of Mr. Marcos. In December, the same agency found that nearly a quarter of Filipinos said they believed their country was "hopeless" and that one-third said they would emigrate if they could.
Just as the original people power was seen as a model of nonviolent resistance, the letdown now is an object lesson in the limits and even the destructive effects of a popular uprising.
The columnist Amado Doronila, who once celebrated people power, now calls it "a source of political instability that has undermined the strengthening of political institutions and democratic legal process."
The events of 1986 left Filipinos with two seemingly contradictory aspirations, said Manuel L. Quezon III, a political scientist: to have the power to elect a president and to have the power to remove a democratically elected president.
The result is a self-defeating notion of democracy.
"Elections are increasingly becoming a source of contestation rather than a source of legitimacy," said David G. Timberman, an American specialist in democracy building.
As it continues to chase the old elation of people power, the Philippines sometimes verges on self-parody.
In recent weeks, the debilitating political games have included talk of a bizarre alliance of the three former presidents — Mrs. Aquino, Mr. Ramos and Mr. Estrada — against Mrs. Arroyo.
The most recent coup attempts have degenerated into the comic, when a group of young officers seized a residential hotel in 2003, and then into mockery, when a retired general seized a social club last December and proclaimed himself head of a provisional government.
All this has diverted the country from the poverty, economic and social inequities, population pressures and violent insurgencies that continue to drag it down.
An intractable system of oligarchic control, left untouched in the 1986 transition from Mr. Marcos, has made fundamental change extremely hard. Far from the revolution that some people called it, the ouster of Mr. Marcos amounted in the end to a shuffling of power among long-established elites.
"For me the problem is not political," said Ms. Coronel, executive director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. "The problem is social inequality. There is a mass of people who depend on patronage, and that allows our feudal political system to survive. So we cannot reform the causes of mass poverty."
Real issues are drowned out by political gossip and street rallies; wordplay often substitutes for policy.
And so there is "no-el" for "no election" and "cha-cha" for charter change, the attempt to amend the Constitution. There is the acronym Young, for the latest round of military coup plotters, the Young Officers Union, New Generation.
And there is people power, an odd-sounding term that has helped Filipinos define themselves as an idealistic, righteous and democratic nation. After 20 years of disappointment, the term has lost its power to inspire and has become, to many here, an oxymoron.