Archive for October, 2007
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: October 28, 2007
MANILA: For a man who sought and received a presidential pardon less than two months after being sentenced to prison for corruption, Joseph Estrada, the former Philippine president, has displayed a remarkable lack of contrition.
“I believe that history will vindicate not only this executive act but my innocence as well,” Estrada declared Friday after his release from house arrest. On the same day, looking ebullient as ever before a throng of supporters, the former movie star thanked President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for granting him executive clemency, referring to her, for the first time since his ouster in 2001, as “President Arroyo.”
Estrada, who after six years on trial was convicted last month of illegally amassing millions of dollars while president from 1998 to 2001, has always maintained that he did nothing wrong while in office.
Critics have bristled at the pardon; another former president, Fidel Ramos, went so far as to call it a “terrible calamity.” Estrada, critics say, must be the only Philippine convict to have received a pardon without having shown any sign of remorse or even guilt.
“It is odd,” said Vincent Lazatin, executive director of the anti-corruption group Transparency and Accountability Network. “A pardon only makes sense when there is not only an admission of guilt but also a genuine display of contrition.”
In the absence of both, Lazatin said, “it smells of a political decision.”
Estrada had been a problem for Arroyo, his former vice president, ever since she succeeded him in 2001 after joining the “people power” movement to oust him. Even while he was in detention during the trial, Estrada’s camp helped deal Arroyo her most daunting political difficulties.
Together with the Philippine left and a sprinkling of politicians allied neither with him nor Arroyo, Estrada and his allies in Congress hounded Arroyo over scandals that became so damaging that her popularity and trust ratings fell to unprecedented depths. No other Philippine president, for instance, has faced an impeachment complaint in Congress in each of three consecutive years.
Arroyo needed to neutralize Estrada politically, according to experts and analysts. Estrada was a “time bomb” that could have chosen “to explode at the most inconvenient time for Arroyo and the nation,” said Ramon Casiple, a political analyst at the Institute for Political and Economic Reforms, a Manila think tank.
Casiple said the pardon would split the political opposition, allowing Arroyo to buy time and perhaps build support for derailing the latest impeachment complaint against her in the House of Representatives, which is scheduled to be addressed next month.
“We must end through peaceful means the acrimony created by Edsa 1, Edsa 2 and what many call Edsa 3,” Arroyo said Saturday in a speech before a group of businessmen, referring to the “people power” uprisings that took place on a Manila highway called Edsa. In “Edsa 3″ in May 2001, a few months after Estrada’s ouster, a mob of his supporters tried to besiege the presidential palace.
Justice Secretary Agnes Devanadera said the pardon should allow “closure to a chapter in our nation’s history.” The Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry said that “it is time to heal the wounds of the nation.”
But many Filipinos doubt the country can move on so easily. In particular, some analysts see the pardon as a setback to the campaign against corruption in the Philippines. “Accountability in governance is the biggest casualty,” said Miriam Coronel-Ferrer, a political analyst who teaches at the University of the Philippines.
The Philippine press has been no less scathing. “Amid all the corruption scandals, the timing of the pardon has opened the administration to accusations of indecent haste in the name of political survival,” The Philippine Star said in an editorial Saturday.
“What are all corrupt public officials thinking? In this country, politics trumps justice anytime.”
Posted on October 29, 2007, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: October 26, 2007
MANILA: Clan violence has contributed greatly to bloodshed in the southern Philippines, with government forces and Islamic separatists often drawn into the violence unnecessarily, complicating the decade-long search for peace there, a new study shows.
The study released Wednesday by the Asia Foundation said that the peace process in Mindanao, the region in the southern Philippines where Islamic separatists have been fighting for self-determination since the 1970s, would have a better chance of succeeding if clan violence - called “rido” by Filipino Muslims - were addressed.
The study said “rido” is a “type of conflict characterized by sporadic outbursts of retaliatory violence between families and kinship groups as well as between communities. It can occur in areas where government or a central authority is weak and in areas where there is a perceived lack of justice and security.” Two common causes of this type of conflict are political disputes and quarrels over land.
The project’s researchers, which included Islamic scholars and anthropologists, found that, from the 1930s to 2005, there had been 1,266 cases of clan violence in Mindanao, in which 5,500 people were killed and thousands were displaced. Of these cases, 64 percent have not been solved, the perpetrators never identified nor brought to justice.
While clan conflict is common in many societies around the world, “rido” is unique in that it has, according to the study, “wider implications for conflict in Mindanao, primarily because it tends to interact in unfortunate ways with separatist conflict and other forms of armed violence.”
The government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the main Islamic separatist group, have been engaged in peace negotiations since 1997 but no substantial agreement has been reached.
According to the study, half of the clan violence documented occurred between 2000 and 2004. During this period, the cease-fire between the government and the Islamic front was broken many times by fighting caused by clan feuds.
“Most of the hostilities during this period were complicated by ‘rido,’ ” said Teresita Quintos-Deles, who was President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s presidential adviser on the peace process from 2003 to 2005. In fact, Deles said Wednesday, fighting between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front decreased in 2004 and 2005 and most of the hostilities during that period were triggered by clan violence.
Typically, according to the study, two warring families would petition either the Islamic front or the military for help. In many instances, feuding families were also members of the front or had connections with the military.
“At times, local conflicts trigger large-scale armed confrontations between government and rebel forces,” said the study, which cited several incidents of such confrontations. “In these events, parties to localized conflicts are able to exploit, deliberately or not, the military resources of both forces.”
Clan violence in Mindanao, it said, has caused death and suffering, destroying of property, crippling the local economy, displacing communities, and sowing fear among communities.
Gutierrez Mangansakan 2nd, a Muslim Filipino film maker, knows only too well the impact of clan violence: his family battled another for years. He was only eight in 1985 when his family and the other clan began a conflict that lasted for more than two decades. He said he saw shootings in his village that triggered it, and the situation worsened, he said, until family was forced to leave.
The Asia Foundation intends to use its study to try to resolve more cases of clan violence and deal with it constructively.
“The Asia Foundation published this book to empower communities to break the cycle of violence,” said Wilfredo Torres, who coordinated the research and edited the book. In doing the study, he said, “we have already seen the positive results of fresh, constructive dialogue through a better understanding of ‘rido.’ “
Posted on October 27, 2007, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
Published: October 26, 2007
MANILA, Oct. 25 — President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines has pardoned former president Joseph Estrada, who was convicted last month of corruption charges, her spokesman said today.
Mrs. Arroyo’s decision to sign the pardon was made after taking into consideration that Mr. Estrada, who was sentenced by an anti-graft court to a maximum of 40 years in prison for taking bribes and kickbacks during his presidency, had already spent the past six and a half years under house arrest and that he had publicly pledged that he would “no longer seek any elective position or office, according to the spokesman, Ignacio Bunye.” The executive clemency, he said, is in line with the government’s policy to release inmates who are 70 or older. Mr. Estrada is 70.
The pardon restores Mr. Estrada’s civil and political rights, although the court’s orders that he forfeit a mansion and more than $15.5 million he stole while in office “remain in force and in full,” Mr. Bunye said.
Mr. Estrada, who has remained under house arrest at his villa in Rizal Province just outside Manila while appealing his conviction, could be released as early as noon Friday, the spokesman said.
Some critics of the government, particularly those who had been active in the mass protests that led to Mr. Estrada’s ouster in 2001 after his impeachment on corruption charges, lambasted the pardon as a possible attempt by the Arroyo administration to quell accusations of its own corruption.
“The motive for granting the pardon is utterly self-serving of Mrs. Arroyo,” said Renato Reyes, secretary general of the leftist group Bayan, which has led protests against both the Estrada and Arroyo governments.
Mr. Reyes noted that the pardon was announced only hours after a businessman, Jose de Venecia 3rd, testified at a Senate investigation that the president’s husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, would have made $70 million in kickbacks from a multimillion-dollar broadband contract between the government and the Chinese company ZTE.
Mr. Arroyo, in a statement today, vehemently denied the allegation, calling it part of Mr. de Venecia’s “defamation” campaign against him. Mr. de Venecia lost out in the bidding for the contract, which the president canceled in the wake of Mr. de Venecia’s charges.
The scandal has further damaged the president’s popularity, which has sunk to its lowest levels since she was accused of manipulating the 2004 elections. Mr. Estrada, a former movie actor, remains popular and is still considered a key leader of the opposition to Mrs. Arroyo, his former vice president. She joined in the movement to remove him from office in 2001.
In recent days, as speculation mounted that a pardon might be in the works, critics and analysts argued a pardon for Estrada could set back the country’s anti-corruption efforts. On Wednesday, Dennis Villa-Ignacio, the special prosecutor for the anti-graft court, told reporters that there would have to be “substantial incarceration” before any convict could be pardoned.
But opinion surveys conducted by the Manila pollster Social Weather Stations found the public overwhelmingly in favor of Mr. Estrada’s pardon. The same surveys indicated that Mr. Estrada was decidedly more popular and credible than Arroyo.
“The executive clemency granted is a clear sign, not of mercifulness on her part, but of weakness in her rule, and it smacks of political pragmatism, a survival instinct for her dying regime,” said Prestoline Suyat, spokesman of the May First Movement, a labor group that was a key player in the anti-Estrada protests.
Rufus Rodriguez, a congressman who is also a spokesman for Mr. Estrada’s political party, denied that Mr. Estrada had reached a deal with Arroyo.
“I believe these groups are putting their personal interests above those of the country’s and this is not the time for politics of personalities,” he said in a statement Thursday, before the pardon was announced. “We have to do what we can to unite our people, and we believe the grant of executive pardon to president Estrada will bring genuine peace and reconciliation to our country.”
Ferdinand Ramos, a spokesman for Mr. Estrada, said this afternoon that the first thing Mr. Estrada would do once free is to visit San Juan City, where he first entered politics as mayor, and see his ailing mother.
Posted on October 25, 2007, and filed under Stories, The New York Times |
By CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
International Herald Tribune
Published: October 20, 2007
MANILA, Oct.19 — Eight people were killed and as many as 130 others wounded Friday when a powerful explosion ripped through a shopping mall in Makati City, the Philippine capital’s financial district.
“This was a bomb,” the country’s police chief, Avelino Razon, said at the scene. “But we can’t say anything else yet because we are still investigating.”
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, in a statement late today, gave assurances of a swift and full-blown investigation. She said the police and the military were “on their highest alert” and that 2,000 more security officers had been deployed to secure public places.
“I warn those who seek to destabilize our government not to exploit this incident for their selfish political motives,” Mrs. Arroyo added, apparently referring to her political opponents, who have been calling for her ouster because of accusations of corruption. “This is the time for all of us to unite. We urge all sectors to remain vigilant as the government steps up security measures to protect our people.”
An initial police report attributed the destruction to the explosion of a tank of liquefied petroleum gas in a restaurant, but that theory was soon discounted. “It appears that this was caused by a bomb,” Mrs. Arroyo said.
The explosion occurred at 1:30 p.m. on the ground floor of Glorietta 2, a mall popular with young professionals and other affluent Manila residents, the police said. It destroyed a portion of the mall’s roof and damaged several shops. Debris littered the street, some of it damaging cars parked near the complex. Eyewitnesses said it left a crater at the foot an escalator, near one of the mall’s entrances.
Among the wounded are two South Koreans and one Chinese, officials said.
Icy Marinas, a shopper, told the radio station DZMM that she had been only 15 meters, or 50 feet, from the explosion, which she described as being like an “intense earthquake.” Ms. Marinas said she saw a pregnant woman crying and others rushing for the exits.
A taxi driver told The Associated Press that the blast slammed two women who had just gotten out of his cab back against it, killing both of them.
Filipino blogs and message boards were abuzz Friday afternoon with accounts of the explosion. One blogger who calls himself Disney posted more than 30 pictures of the explosion less than two hours after it happened.
“I’m still shaking,” he wrote. “I saw debris falling down when it exploded and people were screaming and running coming out of the smoke.”
Angeliz105 posted on a message board : “I have never expected myself to be an eyewitness to such a tragedy. Man staring blankly at his bloodied hand, women hysterically screaming, unconscious woman lying lifeless near the blast, frantic sirens and alarms, broken glass and debris everywhere.”
The Philippines is home to Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group linked with Jemaah Islamiyah, the terrorist network based in Indonesia that is suspected to have ties to Al Qaeda. According to the police, the two groups are responsible for some of the worst attacks in the country.
Terrorist attacks and bombings in the Philippines have occurred mostly in the troubled island of Mindanao, in the south, where Abu Sayyaf and the Jemaah Islamiyah are most active.
Posted on October 20, 2007, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories, The New York Times |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: October 17, 2007
MANILA: President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has ordered an investigation of an alleged attempt to bribe members of the House of Representatives and provincial governors with cash in exchange for blocking her impeachment, her spokesman said Wednesday.
According to Eddie Panlilio, a Roman Catholic priest who is governor of the president’s home province of Pampanga, he and other politicians were given bags containing up to 500,000 pesos, or $11,300, last week by Arroyo administration officials inside the presidential palace. The president herself was not present, he said at a news conference Monday.
The administration has denied any wrongdoing. The spokesman, Ignacio Bunye, said allegations of using public funds to buy the loyalty of officials were “totally absurd,” noting that Arroyo’s political party overwhelmingly dominates the House of Representatives.
He said the investigation, to be conducted by the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission, would “focus on who gave these supposed cash gifts to the congressmen and governors.”
“Nobody in Malacanang,” he said, referring to the presidential palace, “can just disburse or distribute any funds without the proper budgetary allocation and standard auditing procedures.”
Several congressmen have told local news media that they received the bags of money. At his news conference, Panlilio showed the bundles of cash given to him.
“Since the money came from Malacanang, I believe it is public money,” he said. “So I should be accountable for it and be transparent about it.”
The bribery allegations follow attempts by the political opposition to file an impeachment complaint against the president for her suspected role in the awarding of contract for a broadband project to the Chinese company ZTE Corp. Arroyo canceled the contract last month following accusations, first lodged by a company that lost in the bidding, of payoffs to Filipino officials.
Early this month, a lawyer filed an impeachment complaint with the House of Representatives against the president that the political opposition charged was deliberately “too weak” and intended to fail. If an impeachment complaint is voted down, under the Constitution the president becomes immune from impeachment for the next 12 months.
Arroyo has faced several impeachment complaints since she was accused of rigging the 2004 presidential elections, but each time her allies in Congress have blocked it.
The influential Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines issued a statement Tuesday decrying what it called the “moral bankruptcy disappointingly being shown by our leaders.” The Senate has also scheduled an investigation into the bribery allegations.
Posted on October 17, 2007, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: October 1, 2007
MANILA: The man at the center of a corruption scandal that threatens to reach President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo resigned Monday as chairman of the Philippine election commission and promised to sue his detractors.
Benjamin Abalos said he resigned to protect the Commission on Elections from damage caused by recent Senate testimony that he had offered a Filipino businessman and a member of Arroyo’s cabinet millions of dollars in bribes to help a Chinese firm, ZTE, win a $329 million contract to build a nationwide broadband network for the Philippine government.
Allegations that he had interceded on behalf of ZTE prompted a Senate investigation two weeks ago. The scandal, critics and analysts have said, poses a serious threat to Arroyo, as her political opponents seem determined to directly link her to the deal.
“I did this to spare the Comelec from the malicious attacks against my person,” Abalos said in an emotional press conference Monday, referring to the Commission on Elections. But, he added, “the fight is not yet over. I will continue to clear my name.”
Abalos, a political ally of Arroyo, has been hard-pressed to explain why he befriended officials of ZTE, dined and played golf with them in China and, by his own admission, introduced them to Filipino officials who later approved ZTE’s bid for the project over its competitors’.
In media interviews and during the Senate hearings, Abalos said he had done nothing improper and had merely tried to help promote the Philippines as an investment destination.
At the hearings, Jose de Venecia 3rd, chairman of Amsterdam Holdings, which lost to ZTE in the bidding, testified that Abalos had offered him $10 million to withdraw his bid. Romulo Neri, the commissioner for higher education, who was Arroyo’s socioeconomic planning secretary when the deal was approved early this year, testified last week that Abalos had offered him $4.4 million to approve ZTE’s bid. Abalos, who was sitting one seat away from Neri at that hearing, called Neri a liar.
Neri testified that he later told Arroyo about Abalos’s offer and that she told him not to accept it. When opponents of Arroyo in the Senate asked Neri what else the president had known about the project, which has since been suspended, Neri invoked executive privilege, leading to speculation that Arroyo had something to hide.
Arroyo’s opponents contend that she may have acted improperly in approving the project despite the alleged misconduct. Venecia, whose father is the speaker of the House of Representatives, testified that Arroyo’s husband, José Miguel Arroyo, had angrily told him to “back off” from bidding for the project.
Abalos’s lawyer, Gabriel Villareal, said Abalos would sue Neri and de Venecia. “People should not judge him,” he said. “It was an agonizing decision for him and his family,” he said of Abalos’s decision to resign.
Once a caddy at the same golf club where he allegedly offered the bribe to Neri, Abalos rose to become mayor of Mandaluyong, a Manila suburb. Arroyo’s father, the late president Diosdado Macapagal, later appointed him a judge. Arroyo named him chairman of the election commission in 2002.
Posted on October 2, 2007, and filed under International Herald Tribune, Stories |
