On July 27, 300 junior officers and soldiers staged a mutiny. They condemned conditions for troops in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and charged the government and military with corruption and state terrorism. Green Left Weekly's NICK SOUDAKOFF spoke with RAMANI DE SILVA, international officer of the Partido ng Mangaggawang Pilipino (PMP), about the rebellion.
The Philippines government is accusing former president Joseph Estrada and senator Gregorio Honasan of masterminding the rebellion. Do you think that the rebel soldiers are aligned to Estrada and Honasan?
They reflect a new generation of soldiers who are legitimately disgruntled with the conditions within the military. They are junior officers who graduated from the Philippines Military Academy in 1995, 1996 and 1997. They have been used very intensively in the unsuccessful war against the Moro people in Mindanao, which is having a big impact across the military.
While I think Honasan and Estrada would be talking to these soldiers, they are not acting on their behalf.
The soldiers were in communication with other political forces. They probably planned for a coup, but didn't get the support they expected from a number of generals, so they changed their plans. It was a coup strategy, they didn't call on the mass movement to intervene and such a strategy can easily be manipulated by others.
How would you describe the mutineers' political perspective?
They are motivated by a strong nationalist sentiment, but are new and raw politically. They certainly are not like Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, who led a coup attempt in Venezuela on a left-populist platform. They clearly don't see the need to involve the masses.
Did the arrest of the mutineers break the opposition within the military?
This mutiny shows that there are major differences within the military, especially between the rank and file and the high-ranking officers. While soldiers are paid very poorly and their families live in shanty towns next to the military camps, the generals are like small capitalists, making huge amounts of money from extortion, kidnappings and graft. There are also reports of resentment by Philippines soldiers over the presence of US troops in the war in Mindanao.
This disgruntlement won't easily be reconciled, I believe there will be more outbreaks of discontent from rank-and-file soldiers.
What was the Philippines left's response to the soldiers' mutiny?
On July 28, there was a joint rally organised by left-wing and militant groups in Manila to protest the president's state of the nation address. There were more than 5000 protesters there.
On July 29, there was another rally of 3000 workers organised by the socialist trade union centre, the Solidarity of Philippines Workers (BMP). Both rallies demanded that the Arroyo government answer the soldiers' charges, specifically that the terrorist bombings in Davao and Mindanao were organised by the government, and that the government was planning a coup and martial law. We have also called on the government to answer the charges of corruption in the AFP and improve the conditions for ordinary soldiers.
From Green Left Weekly, August 6, 2003.
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