Manhunt for Philippine rebels under way

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: November 30, 2007

MANILA: The Philippine authorities conducted a manhunt Friday for military officers who participated in a standoff in a luxury Manila hotel the day before, in a bizarre uprising that many in the country called a tragedy and a farce.

Officials said they had identified at least four officers, one of them seen wearing a ill-fitting wig during the standoff in the Peninsula Manila Hotel. The authorities named Captain Nicanor Faeldon of the Philippine Marines as the highest-ranking officer to have managed to evade arrest after troops and police officers ended the siege.

“We are looking for him. The manhunt is on,” General Hermogenes Esperon Jr., chief of staff of the Philippine armed forces, told reporters Friday. He said that Faeldon, who was among those standing trial Thursday for a mutiny in 2003, was capable of doing “foolish things.”

Avelino Razon, the national police chief, said that several groups were behind the failed plot to use the hotel as a base to kick-start another “people power” revolt of the kind seen in 1986 and 2001. Several businessmen and politicians were also involved in the uprising, said Norberto Gonzales, national security adviser to the Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

The incident Thursday began after Senator Antonio Trillanes 4th, a former naval officer on trial for leading the 2003 mutiny, led a group of defendants out of a courtroom and marched, along with more than two dozen armed soldiers, many of whom had been assigned as his military escorts, to the nearby Peninsula Manila Hotel. They fortified the premises and held a news briefing where they demanded the ouster of Arroyo and asked for public support.

When it became clear that the revolt leaders had failed to attract a protective crowd around the hotel, the security forces moved in, lobbing tear gas through the windows and crashing an armored personnel carrier into the hotel’s front lobby.

More than a hundred people were arrested, including Trillanes - who won his Senate seat from prison - a general, a former vice president, a Catholic bishop and dozens of journalists who were covering the event. The journalists were released Friday.

The police said Friday that Trillanes and his backers had hoped that an anti-Arroyo demonstration scheduled for Friday, National Heroes’ Day, would be diverted to the vicinity of the Peninsula. Razon, the police chief, told reporters that “some destabilization action” had been planned along with the protests.

In the end, only a few hundred people showed up at the rally. Media analysis of the revolt in Makati, the financial district of Manila, was almost universally dismissive.

“This armed undertaking had failure written all over it,” The Philippine Daily Inquirer said in an editorial Friday. “The idea that a commander-in-chief can be forced out of office by taking over a secluded building in Makati was ridiculous in 2003; it is only pathetic now,” it said, referring to the 2003 siege by Trillanes and his men.

“Comedy, yes, because we all know nothing will happen,” wrote a columnist, Emil Jurado, in The Manila Standard Today. “Tragic in the sense that while the economy is turning around we have characters who can’t wait for 2010 for President Arroyo to step down.”

Ana Marie Pamintuan, a Philippine Star columnist, compared the rebels to cats. “These men keep jumping into the headlights, testing how many lives they have left.”

Philippine police quell mutiny at a luxury hotel

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: November 29, 2007

MANILA: Philippine SWAT teams stormed a five-star hotel occupied by dissident army officers on Thursday, arresting a senator, a former vice president, a Catholic bishop and several journalists.

A seven-hour standoff began when about 30 officers and soldiers on trial for staging coup attempts in 2003 and 2006 walked out of the courtroom and commandeered the nearby Peninsula Manila Hotel, demanding the ouster of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and calling for an uprising against the government.

About an hour after a deadline for the men to surrender elapsed, the police fired tear gas into the hotel lobby, then rammed an armored personnel carrier through the front entrance, transforming one of the country’s most opulent hotels into a war zone. Shots were fired, although it remained unclear by whom.

At least two people were injured, the police said. Most of the hotel guests and staff had been evacuated.

Antonio Trillanes 4th, the leader of dissident officers and the soldiers supporting them, said they had ended the standoff for fear that the violence would escalate and put the lives of civilians in danger.

“We cannot live with our conscience if one of you will get hurt or killed in the crossfire,” he said. “We’re getting out for the sake of the safety of everybody.”

Trillanes, former Vice President Teofisto Guingona and several journalists, including television cameramen and technicians, were handcuffed and shoved into a police bus. Police officials said the journalists were arrested to ensure that they were not mutineers in disguise.

Later, the government announced an overnight street curfew for Manila and two suburban areas.

The scene at the hotel Thursday was reminiscent of the same officers’ takeover of the nearby Oakwood hotel in July 2003.

In that incident, hundreds of soldiers took up arms against the Arroyo regime, complaining of corruption in the government and in the military.

This time, however, few supporters appeared at the Peninsula Manila, despite the officers’ attempts to foment a popular uprising through text messages and media releases.

Some member of the political opposition and the left, including Guingona, and a couple of Catholic bishops, rushed to the hotel to give their support to Trillanes and his companions, saying that this could be another “People Power” uprising similar to those in 1986 and 2001.

Brigadier General Danilo Lim, who is accused of leading a failed coup attempt in 2006, defended the takeover of the hotel, citing Arroyo’s “theft” of the presidency in the 2004 elections and the failure of impeachment proceedings in the legislature.

“Dissent without action is consent,” Lim said in a statement read during an impromptu news conference in the hotel.

“We have individually and collectively tried all means to resolve this legitimacy issue through the normal electoral, judicial and congressional processes but Mrs. Arroyo used naked power” to stop attempts to impeach her.

Trillanes - a former naval officer who led a mutiny in 2003, and who successfully ran for the Senate this year while behind bars - said he was forced to act because he had not been permitted take his seat in the Senate.

“The people voted for me so that I can stand up for their rights, but they didn’t allow me to serve,” he told reporters in the lobby of the hotel.

Trillanes, Lim and the soldiers walked out of their hearing Thursday morning while the court was on a break. They then marched toward the Peninsula Manila, overwhelmed the hotel security guards, held a news briefing and locked the premises down.

The hotel lobby quickly turned chaotic as dozens of uniformed soldiers with red armbands tied the glass doors with ropes. Hotel guests, many of them foreigners, were eventually allowed to leave.

Coup attempts and mutinies are not unusual in the Philippines, which has seen more than a dozen of them since the ouster of President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

Call for justice in the Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: November 28, 2007

MANILA: Philippine legislators and human-rights advocates on Wednesday demanded the firing, at least, of senior officials in the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, charging that they were responsible for a policy that authorized the murder, torture and disappearances of hundreds of political activists in the last six years.

They made the demand two days after Philip Alston, a United Nations special rapporteur, issued a report that laid out the Philippine armed forces’ role in a series of killings here. Rights groups assert that more than 900 Filipinos, mostly leftists, have been killed since 2001.

The report, released in New York on Monday, says that “the armed forces have followed a deliberate strategy of systematically hunting down the leaders of leftist organizations.”

Lieutenant Colonel Bartolome Bacarro, a military spokesman, said Wednesday that extrajudicial executions “are not the policy of the armed forces.” The military, he said, “will not trample on the rights of others.”

The army has long maintained that most of the killings were perpetrated by insurgents as part of an internal Communist “purge.” Although most of the victims were advocates who worked for legal organizations, the military has asserted that most of the groups were fronts for the Communists.

“The military’s argument that the leftist activists who have been killed are the victims of a ‘purge’ by the rebels is strikingly unconvincing and can only be viewed as a cynical attempt to displace responsibility,” said Alston, who investigated cases and talked with survivors and witnesses.

On Wednesday, five legislators with the leftist bloc in the House of Representatives called for the immediate dismissal of Arroyo’s national security adviser, Norberto Gonzales; her executive secretary, Eduardo Ermita; and the chief of the armed forces, General Hermogenes Esperon Jr. Those three, they said, were “primarily responsible for the counterinsurgency program” that Alston criticized in his report.

They also demanded the dismantling of a cabinet-level body, headed by Gonzales, that they said had facilitated the killings with a policy that equated many activists with armed insurgents in the countryside.

The armed forces should “once and for all get over their collective state of denial and start facing the problems squarely,” said Renato Reyes Jr., the leader of Bayan, a group that has lost dozens of its members to the killings.

He called for an investigation of military officials who have been accused of violating human rights and a closer scrutiny by Congress of the military’s budget. “Anything less will be construed as a refusal of the regime to reverse the national policy of killings,” Reyes said.

Foreign governments - particularly the European Union - and international human-rights groups have called on Arroyo to bring the military to account for the killings. Last month, the U.S. Senate urged the Bush administration to require Manila to prosecute human-rights violators before it delivers any more U.S. military aid.

Lawmaker targeted in deadly bombing, Philippine police say

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: November 14, 2007

MANILA: Philippine officials said Wednesday that the congressman killed in a bombing outside the House of Representatives had once been a member of Abu Sayyaf, the Qaeda-linked insurgents fighting for a separate Muslim state in the southern Philippines, before he switched loyalties and began supporting the government in Manila.

Representative Wahab Akbar died soon after the explosion late Tuesday, which also claimed the lives of a lawmaker’s driver and a congressional staffer.

The police said Akbar was apparently the target of the blast, which occurred a few minutes after Congress adjourned around 8 p.m. Tuesday.

“We already found parts of the bomb, and it was detonated by a cellphone,” Geary Barias, the Manila police chief, told reporters Wednesday. He said the phone and the bomb may have been attached to a motorcycle parked near the entrance of the building.

Among the 11 people wounded in the attack were Representative Pryde Henry Teves, who remained in critical condition Wednesday, and Representative Luzviminda Ilagan, whose injuries were not life-threatening.

Akbar was a member of Abu Sayyaf in the 1990s before playing a significant role in a U.S.-supported campaign to eradicate them, Barias told reporters. As a lawmaker, Akbar had denied ever being an Abu Sayyaf member and had frequently called the group un-Islamic.

The interior secretary, Ronaldo Puno, told reporters that initial clues were “pointing away from a terrorist attack and more of a directed assault on a certain individual.”

“There were threats on the life of Akbar,” he said. “The indications are that that was the case both in terms of location of the bomb and the manner it was set off.”

Akbar and his family have long dominated the politics of Basilan, a poor island province in the south where he served as governor before becoming a congressman. He made many enemies, not least of them Abu Sayyaf members whom he helped drive from his island with the help of the U.S. military, said Jose Torres Jr., an expert on Abu Sayyaf and author of “Into the Mountain: Hostaged by the Abu Sayyaf.”

The bombing, the first in the history of the Philippine Congress, came on the eve of a congressional committee’s deliberation on an impeachment complaint against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. On Wednesday, the committee threw out the complaint, thus shielding Arroyo from impeachment for the next 12 months.

Arroyo condemned the attack Wednesday. “Justice must be served and the law upheld,” she said in a statement.

She offered a reward of 5 million pesos, or about $116,000, for information on the bombers.

3 Dead in Blast at Philippine Congress

By Carlos H. Conde
The New York Times
International Herald Tribune
Published: November 14, 2007

MANILA, Nov. 13 — An explosion on Tuesday evening in the Philippine House of Representatives killed three people, one of them a lawmaker, and wounded several others.

The blast, which occurred around 8:15 p.m. at the south lobby of the main building of the House of Representatives, killed Wahab Akbar, a congressman. Also killed was Marcial Talbo, the driver of Representative Luz Ilagan. The Associated Press also reported that a congressional staff member died in the attack.

Ms. Ilagan was wounded in her right leg and back, and another congressman, Henry Teves, was in critical condition at the hospital, officials said.

At least eight people, some of them congressional staff members, were also hurt in the explosion, according to the police, who have declared a full alert in the capital.

The House speaker, José de Venecia Jr., confirmed Mr. Akbar’s death and called the explosion “an act of terrorism.”

“I don’t want to be frightened by these terrorists and destabilizers, so I have ordered the sessions to resume tomorrow,” Mr. de Venecia said in a phone interview. He said the police were going to sweep the Congress premises the rest of the night for other possible explosives.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has ordered the country’s police chief, Avelino Razon, to lead the investigation of the blast, her spokesman said.

The police said Mr. Akbar might have been the target of an assassination attack. “From what we saw, it looks like Congressman Akbar was the target of the attack,” Geary Barias, the police chief of the Manila, told local radio reporters.

A witness, Sandra Cam, told radio station DZBB that Mr. Akbar was talking on his cellphone and was on his way to his sport utility vehicle when the explosion occurred.

Cris Puno, a spokesman for Mr. Akbar, told reporters that the attack was directed at the congressman and may have been planned by his political rivals. Mr. Akbar and his family have for decades ruled Basilan, an island in the south notorious for being a sanctuary of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group. His first wife is the current governor while another wife is the mayor of Isabela, the provincial capital. Mr. Akbar, a Muslim, was a former governor of the province and was an important figure in the American-supported campaign to stamp out the Abu Sayyaf in his province.

The police, meanwhile, said that it was a “coordinated attack” and that the bomb may have been remotely detonated, according to Chief Barias. “We’re still trying to find out what happened, where the explosion actually took place,” he told reporters at the scene.

Police officers, emergency workers and firefighters were still arriving on the scene around 8:30 p.m. The explosion set off a fire in the south wing of the building, ABS-CBN television reported. The network broadcast images of damage to the lobby ceiling.

A member of Ms. Ilagan’s staff said the blast, which took place a few minutes after the session on Tuesday evening, damaged the congresswoman’s van as well as Mr. Akbar’s vehicle. The police said that they did not know what type of explosive, if any, had been used.

Mr. de Venecia said he had just left the compound when the explosion took place and immediately rushed back.

Representative Joel Villanueva, in an interview with radio station DZBB, said he heard a “very loud explosion” and saw at least four wounded people. The wounded were taken to the House clinic as well as to a nearby hospital.

The explosion at the Congress, the first such incident in its history, came a few weeks after an explosion in a shopping mall killed 11 people and injured dozens of others. The authorities said the blast could have been an accident, although they were not ruling out terrorism.

The legislators are deliberating whether to impeach Mrs. Arroyo, who is being accused of corruption and human rights violations.

The Philippines is home to several terrorist groups, including the Abu Sayyaf, which is responsible for the worst attacks in the country. Western countries led by the United States have offered millions of dollars in aid and security assistance to help the Philippine government fight Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah, the terrorist network in Indonesia that is accused of having ties to Al Qaeda.

Arroyo faces new impeachment effort in Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: November 12, 2007

MANILA: Opponents of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo filed a new impeachment complaint against her Monday, alleging corruption and illegal policies that have resulted in the deaths, torture and disappearance of hundreds of government critics.

The complaint, the second against Arroyo this year, alleged several cases of abuse committed by state security forces. It also implicated her in a corruption scandal arising from a contract between the government and the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE.

Arroyo did not react directly to the new impeachment effort, although in a speech before health professionals Monday, she called on legislators “to stop political wrangling and concentrate on legislating.”

Arroyo’s political party dominates the House of Representatives, and most analysts believe impeachment efforts are unlikely to succeed. On Sunday, Representative Matias Defensor, an Arroyo ally who heads the House Justice Committee, told reporters that his committee would not accept any more complaints against Arroyo.

But Renato Reyes, secretary general of the leftist group Bayan, one of the signatories of the new complaint, said prospects for a successful impeachment had improved because of a rift between Arroyo and the speaker of the House, Jose de Venecia Jr., whose son publicly accused Arroyo of abetting bribery to facilitate the $330 million broadband contract with ZTE.

The success of the complaint, Reyes said, “depends on the pressure outside Congress,” referring to street protests, “and on the cracks in the administration coalition.”

Representative Teodoro Casiño, who endorsed the complaint, said that if Congress rejected impeachment, the drafters would “go to the Supreme Court and ultimately to the people, who will pass judgment on this.”

Arroyo has faced an impeachment complaint every year since she won a disputed victory in the 2004 presidential elections. On Monday, the House Justice Committee threw out a “supplemental complaint” that was intended to strengthen an earlier impeachment complaint filed by a lawyer.

The new complaint was signed by 21 groups and individuals, among them Arroyo’s former vice president, Teofisto Guingona.

The complaint alleged that a couple had committed suicide because of daily harassment and torture by soldiers who suspected them of being communist guerrillas.

Human rights groups and international agencies have accused the state security forces of implementing a counterinsurgency policy directed not only at insurgents but also at leftist groups that operate legally.

In “Tribu,” real-life Filipino gangs collaborate onscreen

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: November 1, 2007

MANILA: When Jim Libiran decided to make a movie about Manila’s youth gangs, he was determined to make it as realistic as possible. So he shot it in a neighborhood filled with gangs and cast actual gang members as actors.

He said he took this tack because it was difficult to separate his vision as a filmmaker from his longtime career as a journalist, particularly one with roots in this subject. “I grew up in the same neighborhood,” said Libiran, 41, in an interview. “As a journalist, gangs were my obsession.”

Six years ago, Libiran, one of the Philippines’s most respected television journalists, produced a television documentary on youth gangs. The gangs were still on his mind when he returned to school to study filmmaking, and he wrote the script that formed the basis of his debut movie, “Tribu.”

The film, a digital production that won several local and international awards this year, has contributed to the excitement in Manila over a recent explosion in independent filmmaking, which many here see as the best hope for reinvigorating the moribund Filipino film industry.

The movie depicts, in graphic detail, the gang culture of Tondo, a Manila slum notorious for its chaos, filth, poverty and violence. The story is told from the point of view of a 10-year-old boy who witnesses the violence as a gang avenges the death of one of its members. The gangs call themselves “tribes,” thus the title “Tribu.”

The main roles are played by actual gang members, who use the real names of their gangs in the movie, like O.G. Sacred, Young Cent and Raynoa. They communicate in so-called freestyle rap, which in Tagalog produces a crude but powerful street poetry.

Making a film with gang members on their competing turfs meant Libiran had to contend with the problem that some members of his cast were being hunted by rival gangs or the police. In fact, he said, production was interrupted every now and then by the news that one of his actors had been arrested or shot. During the acting workshop Libiran held for the cast, several of them showed up with weapons.

Perhaps because Libiran grew up in the neighborhood and knew it well, he managed to bring together members of six rival gangs to make the film. Libiran said they began collaborating on their rap music. They are now performing in shows in Manila and are considering cutting an album.

Libiran has promoted his film as a “tool for conflict resolution.”

In the film’s plot, as in real life, the youths of Tondo have few choices, Libiran said. The alternatives to joining a tribe are death or self-banishment.

There are more than a hundred such tribes in Tondo today, Libiran said, “each with their own set of codes of morality and honor.” Most of their members, he said, “are out-of-school youths whose poverty and lack of education almost assure most of them a not-so-bright future.”

In the opening sequence of the film, the 10-year-old boy explains the genesis of the tribes. They exist, he says, because the children are poor. They are poor because they or their parents lack jobs. In Tondo, the boy says, you have to be tough or you die. Even a child needs to be tough. But in the hell that is Tondo, he says, even a child can be God.

In Libiran’s view, the Tondo in “Tribu” could represent any urban center in the Philippines, a relatively poor country of more than 80 million people. In the cities, shanty towns are common, people live alongside open sewers, and women and children scrounge for food in garbage dumps. It is a dog-eat-dog world and an ideal breeding ground for crime and gangs.

What Libiran’s film does not explore is the authorities’ response to gangs and street crime. In many parts of the country, death squads roam the cities at night, hunting down suspected gang members, with tacit approval of the police. But the director has addressed this issue in his public appearances.

In a speech at Cinemalaya, the independent digital film festival here in August, where “Tribu” won the best picture award, Libiran appealed to the police and the Manila government. “There are other ways to stop the gang riots in Tondo and in other Tondos of the Philippines,” he said. “Please, have mercy. Don’t kill these children.”

Tondo has been featured in films before, notably in Lino Brocka’s 1976 masterpiece “Insiang,” the first Filipino film to be exhibited at Cannes. As in “Tribu,” the Tondo of “Insiang” is a cauldron of moral decay, hopelessness and, ultimately, desperation.

As Howie Severino, another television journalist, noted in a blog, “Tribu” is a bleak reminder of how little life in Tondo and other Philippine urban centers has changed in the last 30 years. “Dead ends then are dead ends today,” he wrote. “That’s the real tragedy.”