Games of generals
Number 591 Teresa sits on a narrow cobbled road lined with storefronts offering ID laminations, photocopying services and cheeseburgers available 24 hours a day. Down Teresa Road, over railway tracks that cut across the street, is the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.
Number 591, almost right where the road begins, is the barangay hall, a one-room wide, two-story building, unimposing in its smallness. The grills of its second-floor balcony are hung with the same tarps used to promote government officials. This time, they are hung backwards, clean white sides facing out. They are not there to advertise, but to hide the row of army fatigues and camouflage bags that are hung on the rails.
A lanky soldier in his 50s sits, filling out a form, and I ask who I can interview. He tells me to speak to 2nd Lieutenant Lim, and mumbles about IDs and permits, and finally goes up to call the lieutenant. Lim comes down the stairs, past a pair of soldiers playing poker on the landing. He slouches on the seat, legs spread in light blue shorts, and speaks out of the corner of his mouth. He makes side comments I cannot hear, and maybe it’s better that I don’t, because I’m a girl with a temper, who is alone in a military detachment. I ask for his full name, and he bristles: “You don’t know my first name?”
I ask if he’s aware people are unhappy about the military’s presence in the barangay, and he says there are no complaints. Talk to the community, he says, talk to the community.
The community Lim is talking about has much to say. Soldiers, the residents tell me, have been going door to door, offering rice and haircuts, and their opinions on the evils of activist party-list organizations. The students are also under threat. Last December, PUP ’s chief of security caught military men sneaking down the school fence, right across a military detachment and surrounding the student council office. Student council chair Sophia Prado claims that during one of their student forums, two men were taking videos of individual student speakers. The “photographers” were asked for IDs, and they refused to show any. The two men were taken to the school’s security office; their identification declared the two as active military personnel. The men, caught red-handed, claimed they were in campus to meet with the ROTC. Asked why they were at the forum, far from the ROTC office, taking videos, they said it was because of “curiosity.”
In a March 13 letter, Col. Ricardo Visaya, head of the Civil Military Operations Battalion of the Philippine Army, assured Rolando Almonguerra, father of Kabataan Party’s second nominee Enrico Almonguerra, that his department was one with all parents in hoping that someday, their children “would achieve all their ambitions, stand on their own feet, and become good citizens to help our motherland from hardship.”
“I am writing,” said Colonel Visaya, “about the situation of our children, with regards to their studies and their joining organizations that participate in leftist activities that are not right and could possibly ruin their education. This is an alarming state of affairs especially to their future, and we would like to give both attention and solution to avoid their fall into these dealings, to correct this problem immediately for the good of their education and the good of their future.”
The letter “invites” Mr. Almonguerra and his son to the Office of Civil Military Operations Battalion of the Philippine Army in Fort Bonifacio at 9 a.m. on March 22, so he can “better explain our goal of helping protect the future of our children.”
Such benevolence from the colonel. Unfortunately, he is unaware that Enrico Almonguerra already graduated in spite of his foray into “leftist activities.” It appears his future is of little concern to the colonel. This same letter has been sent to three other youth leaders, and smacks of the same arrogance that has led the military to arbitrarily send its personnel to 26 of the poorest barangays in Metro Manila.
In a forum among residents in Parola, Tondo, a rebel returnee, a woman with a military haircut and hoop earrings, rages about the terrible consequences of the youth joining party-list groups. These groups, she tells the resigned-looking parents in the audience, will inevitably cause their sons and daughters to take up arms against the government. A smiling Colonel Visaya sits behind a long table, and nods at her wisdom. Soldiers sit on benches in the graffitied basketball court. On that day, over 20 long firearms were in the vicinity.
The next speaker—a man whose words ring with the livid conviction of a fanatical preacher—damned all leftist groups, all of which, he claims, are fronts for the New People’s Army. He names them: Bayan Muna, Gabriela, KMU, KMP. All of them, he thunders, are in league with armed rebels. All who support these groups are in danger of damning themselves.
Colonel Visaya takes the mike, at last. “We are not here to campaign for any candidate or group. We are not here to campaign against any group.”
The difference between a leftist and an armed rebel is as different as that of, say, a Palestinian and an al-Qaida bomber, but it is a difference that the military systematically ignores. Maj. Gen. Benjamin Dolorfino, the commanding general of the NCR, claims that the role of the 26 military teams composed of 260 field personnel is to patrol and engage in anti-leftist information campaign. “We are not targeting certain people,” says Dolorfino. “We are targeting problems.”
He claims that all this is simply an awareness campaign on being responsible citizens. They are not electioneering; they do not carry long guns; they do not wear camouflage uniforms—they are simply there to provide community service.
In Barangay Commonwealth, Quezon City, a soldier wearing an officer’s attire, informs me happily that the soldiers are dressed formally because they have visitors. As to what they wear when making their rounds: “Of course, we wear camouflage, and the gun is as much part of the uniform.” According to residents, soldiers march around at all hours in threes, fours and fives, carrying M16s and wander even into the narrowest alleys.
In an overpass next to Barangay Commonwealth, the vendors explain why the military is there. They have asked the soldiers why, and the reason is the simplest and most logical among all the thousand contradictory and complicated statements issued by the military.
Mar 21, 2011
It’s onerous to search out knowledgeable folks on this topic, but you sound like you understand what you’re speaking about! Thanks