Asia, too, feels the pain

By Keith Bradsher
The New York Times
Published: October 10, 2008

Choe Sang-Hun in Seoul, Carlos H. Conde in Manila, Thomas Fuller in Bangkok, Anand Giridharadas in Mumbai and Hilda Wang in Hong Kong also contributed reporting.

HONG KONG: Can a region like Asia - with more than $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, high savings rates, mostly well-capitalized banks and minimal exposure to American mortgage-backed securities - run into trouble during a global financial crisis?

The answer Friday was a resounding yes.

Stock markets plunged from Tokyo to Mumbai. Real estate prices are tumbling from Seoul to New Delhi. The economy in Singapore has tipped into recession, and there is growing evidence of a recession in Japan, where an unlisted insurer and a real estate investment trust filed for bankruptcy Friday.

From UBS to Morgan Stanley, investment banks have been warning in the past week of a global economic downturn. For Asia, that sounds uncomfortably like a forecast that economic slowdowns in the United States and Europe will cripple demand for Asia’s exports and pull the region down into recession as well.

What went wrong? As the biggest beneficiary of the rise in global trade, Asia depends heavily on exports to the West. Everything from corporate earnings to real estate prices depends on a steady inflow of dollars and euros.

Growth in exports has slowed to a crawl or started declining across most of the region when calculated in local currency terms and adjusted for inflation. And that is even before Western stores have had a chance to cut back their orders in response to the sort of steep declines in sales that American retailers announced on Wednesday.

India announced Friday that industrial production in August was 1.3 percent higher than a year earlier. That was a drastic deceleration from July, when the growth rate was 7.4 percent.

In Korea, exporters are suddenly struggling.

“The problem is the global recession - people don’t buy consumer electronics, this means less exports and fewer dollars for us,” said Choi Hae Pyong, an electronics parts manufacturer south of Seoul. “It’s like walking in a thick fog.”

As long as the region kept exporting and kept saving the proceeds, investors bid up real estate and share prices that now seem to have a long way to fall.

Matthew Au, a luxury real estate broker in Hong Kong, said that this past week had been even worse than the days after the Tiananmen Square killings on June 4, 1989, which briefly shattered business confidence here.

“I’ve been through June 4th, the 1997 financial crises and SARS, but this time around, the decline in housing prices has been the most abrupt,” he said. “Sellers of properties are now more willing to consider offers which come in 20 to 30 percent below their asking prices.”

As global financial markets increasingly look to each other for direction, lack of confidence in financial institutions and housing markets in the West has also proved contagious in Asia. The Asian news media, often focused on economics instead of potentially touchy political issues, have been full of reports in the past three weeks about failing banks and falling real estate prices, and that has fed through into local markets.

An outflow of Western investment has also played a role in Asia’s decline now, although foreign investment has become less important in much of the region as Asia has become a formidable saver in its own right.

In Malaysia, foreign investors held nearly a third of Malaysia’s national debt until they started selling this summer to raise money so as to cover losses in other markets.

In Korea, foreign investors sold $29 billion in the first nine months of this year. This was an important reason why the country’s foreign exchange reserves have slipped to a still formidable $239.7 billion last month from $264.2 billion in March.

Many in Asia now despair of help from the West, and are looking to Beijing.

“The United States is beyond saving - our only hope rests with China,” said Dick Chen, a middle-aged manager in a pin striped blue shirt and carrying an ultraslim modern mobile phone who watched the markets with dismay after lunch in a trading room of Tai Fook Securities in Hong Kong.

Can China save Asia? For the past six years, the Chinese economy has been like an enormously powerful hound that has charged ahead despite every obstacle. Worried that the economy may overheat and accelerate inflation, Beijing officials have run a budget surplus, repeatedly raised interest rates and even required banks to deposit a remarkable one-sixth of their entire assets as reserves at the central bank to slow lending.

Now Beijing is trying to loosen the leash it has had on the economy by cutting interest rates and taxes and lowering reserve requirements. But the government is finding the economy already looks a little out of breath as exports slow.

Economists see annual growth slowing from 12 percent a year ago to 8 or 9 percent this winter. That is still respectable by most countries’ standards, but a shock for many Chinese, particularly workers losing their jobs in factories producing mainly for export markets.

For Asia, this is the crisis that was never supposed to happen again.

The region was deeply scarred by the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998.

Dozens of banks failed after lending too much with too little capital, while profligate governments found that they had borrowed too much overseas and could not repay their debts.

That led to a rapid contraction of credit that bankrupted many industrial companies and caused a steep decline in economic output and a surge in unemployment - the same fate that may now await the United States and Europe, many economists and investors fear.

Southeast Asian economies have never entirely recovered. After a drop of nearly 10 percent on Friday, the main index of the Thai stock market closed at 452, a quarter of its high in 1994.

Most of Asia emerged from that crisis with more cautious banks, stricter financial regulation, a tighter rein on government spending and a strong determination to accumulate. But while Asia broke its dependence on capital flows from the West, the dependence on exports remained.

Yet Asia’s frugality over the past decade has given the region a lot more room to maneuver than most Western countries.

South Korea and India are often cited by economists as the two most vulnerable economies in Asia.

South Korea is drawing attention because its trade deficit, by the broadest measure possible, was $4.7 billion in August, after mostly surpluses before that. Korean exports of manufactured goods have slumped even as the cost of its oil-dominated imports have surged - although falling oil prices now will help.

The South Korean won showed the steepest decline of any Asian currency against the dollar on Friday morning, falling more than 3 percent.

But the won soared on Friday afternoon, with a gain for the day of 6.3 percent. The reason? Widespread rumors that the government would start spending part of the country’s huge foreign exchange reserves to prop up the won.

The South Korean government only owes $334 million in foreign debt repayments by the end of next year, or 0.14 percent of foreign exchange reserves, according to a recent study of emerging market debt by ING. Big Korean exporters like Samsung, hobbled for lack of foreign currency reserves in 1997, have hoarded formidable reserves of dollars.

Corporate debt repayments are a little larger, and also harder to calculate. But since all of Asia only owes $31 billion in debt repayments through the end of last year, South Korea’s share is tiny relative to its foreign reserves.

India was one of the few countries in Asia to escape the financial crisis a decade ago, because it was just starting to embrace international markets then. It did not adopt the same tight bank regulatory standards and tough fiscal policies as the rest of Asia after that crisis.

That has prompted some economists, like Ajay Kapur at Mirae Asset and Takahira Ogawa at Standard and Poor’s, to express particular concern about India’s preparedness for the current crisis. While India has $295.3 billion in foreign exchange reserves, it is running a large government budget deficit and a large trade deficit while its banks have lent very aggressively to a real estate sector that is now tumbling quickly.

With an election expected early next year, Indian leaders have been much more upbeat about their country’s prospects than most Asian leaders.

Policy makers in India have also subscribed to the idea that their economy has “decoupled” from Western economies, an idea that most economists and policy makers in Asia rejected many months ago.

“India is not from any other planet,” said a posting on an Indian web site this week. “This common logic is ignored by our policy makers.”

Fighting worsens in Philippines, displacing 300,000 on Mindanao

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: August 26, 2008

MANILA: Fighting in the southern Philippines between government troops and Islamic separatists is getting worse by the day, with the number of displaced people now reaching 300,000, officials and disaster volunteers said Tuesday.

Army officials estimated that 150 rebels from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the separatist group, were killed in the past five days and that government troops overran 15 rebel camps in one of the largest military offensives since peace negotiations began 11 years ago.

The military said the offensives, which have been taking place in several provinces in the southern region of Mindanao since last week, are specifically directed at three commands of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that were responsible for attacks this month in which 33 people were killed.

Relief officials said most of the displaced were from Muslim areas.

Volunteer groups who are helping the refugees in Mindanao called on the government Tuesday to stop the offensives because of the worsening humanitarian crisis in many Muslim areas.

“We are calling for a cease-fire, for both sides to talk rather than shoot each other,” said Rexall Kaalim, an officer of Bantay Ceasefire, a volunteer group in Mindanao. He said that casualties were increasing and that refugees were dying or getting sick in evacuation centers.

Several reports since Monday indicated heavy fighting in at least two provinces, with airstrikes being carried out by the military regularly.

On its Web site, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front claimed it killed 13 soldiers since last week and also reported the downing of a helicopter gunship - assertions that the military had denied.

Gilbert Teodoro, the defense secretary, said Monday that the offensives would not stop until the three front commanders were captured. Arroyo advisers also said the peace negotiations would only resume if the commanders were turned over to the authorities. The front’s leadership said that would not happen.

The attacks followed the signing of a peace deal on Aug. 5, aborted since, that many Filipinos opposed. The fighting has left the peace process in tatters, although President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has been trying to resuscitate it.

“There is no all-out war,” Arroyo said in a speech Monday. “What we are doing, we are doing to have all-out peace in Mindanao.”

Her administration, however, is exerting pressure on the 11,000-strong front, which has been fighting for Muslim self-rule since the 1970s. On Monday, Norberto Gonzales, the national security adviser, said that the front commanders responsible for the rampage this month had ties with Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terror network.

Separately, a C-130 transport plane from the Philippine Air Force carrying two pilots and seven crew members went missing Tuesday morning after taking off in Davao City.

Officials said they had recovered body parts and debris, including combat boots, from the waters of the Davao Gulf. The authorities are still verifying reports by fishermen in the area that they saw an aircraft plunging into the sea after it was hit by lightning.

Islamic separatists kill 28 in Philippines rampage

By Carlos H. Conde
The New York Times
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 18, 2008

MANILA: Islamic separatists attacked several towns and villages Monday in the troubled southern Philippine region of Mindanao, killing at least 28 people in a rampage that, officials said, included hacking several people with machetes and spraying bullets into buses.

The attacks came as tens of thousands of villagers in other areas of Mindanao were returning to their homes following the fighting last week between government troops and the Muslim rebels.

News reports from Mindanao said several of the victims had been hacked with machetes. The rebels, according to officials, also burned down houses. The police said that the fatalities were mostly civilians, mainly farmers, while an undetermined number were soldiers.

Officials said more than 200 rebels attacked at least four towns in two provinces in Mindanao.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo called the attacks “sneaky and treacherous” and ordered the military and the police “to defend every inch of Philippine territory” against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the main Islamic separatist group operating in Mindanao.

“I will crush any attempt to disturb peace and development in Mindanao,” the president said in a radio address.

The civilians were killed when the rebels withdrew, said Brigadier General Hilario Atendido, a military commander in the area. “They used them as human shields,” Atendido said, speaking on the radio station DZBB. “The rebels killed them on their way out.”

According to news reports, the rebels also took several residents as hostages. A bus driver told a radio station in Mindanao that the rebels, shouting “Kill them all!” fired on his bus. The driver did not say how many of his passengers were wounded or killed.

Mohamad Khalid Dimaporo, the governor of Lanao del Sur Province, said that the rebels were moving toward Christian-dominated towns in the coastal areas and that the military was directing its forces to protect those places.

“The military is doubling its forces,” he told ABS-CBN television. “The highest priority now is to secure the coastal towns.”

Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for the rebel front, said it was still checking reports that the attackers were rebels. He urged the public “not to jump to conclusions” as the front investigated the attacks.

But in case the rebels were front members, Kabalu urged them to stop the violence and to pull out of the province. He said the Moro Islamic Liberation Front did not issue any directive to carry out the attacks.

The violence this week, which began on Sunday in Lanao del Sur, where four soldiers and four military-supported militia members were killed, is certain to complicate the peace negotiations between the government and the front.

Two weeks ago, both sides had reached an agreement that they thought could end the fighting. But it was scuttled because of protests over the concessions that were to be given to the Muslim rebels. Government negotiators then said they were willing to abandon the peace agreement because of the backlash it caused in the Philippines. Analysts had said the breakdown of the talks could lead to more violence.

The new attacks, said the army chief, General Alexander Yano, were a “clear manifestation of the insincerity to the peace process of a significant portion” of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. This, he added, “is a virtual declaration of war against the duly constituted authority.”

130,000 Filipinos displaced as fighting escalates

By Carlos H. Conde
Interntional Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: August 11, 2008

MANILA: The number of Filipinos displaced from their homes since fighting began late last week between government forces and Islamic separatists in the southern Philippines reached 130,000 on Monday, officials said. The military and the police sent more troops to fight the rebels.

Social welfare officials warned of a potential humanitarian disaster as the fighting between troops and elements of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which had been confined to two provinces, threatened to spill over to other areas. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front is a separatist group that has been fighting for an Islamic state in the southern region of Mindanao for several decades.

Local media reported that thousands of residents, the majority of them Muslims, had been fleeing their homes since Friday, many in carts pulled by water buffaloes.

Thousands of refugees had been housed in more than 40 refugee centers, officials said, but most of them had chosen to leave their communities and seek shelter with relatives in other provinces.

As of Monday, officials said two soldiers and at least 15 rebels had been killed in the fighting, which erupted on Thursday after separatist forces refused to vacate nine villages in North Cotabato Province.

Two days earlier, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled in favor of a petition that prevented the government and the rebel group from signing an agreement that both sides had thought could help end the decades-old separatist war.

The petition was filed by officials of North Cotabato, who feared that the agreement would allow the rebel group to encroach into Christian territories, a charge that the group and the government denied.

The court is set to make a final decision later this month on whether to allow the agreement to be signed.

Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for the rebels, blamed government-backed civilian militias for the conflict. He said the front had wanted to “reposition its forces” but was attacked by militias opposed to the peace agreement.

The administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has been severely criticized for the way it handled the negotiations that led to the peace agreement. Many officials, including allies of the president as well as Filipino Muslims, have complained that they were not consulted and that details of the agreement were deliberately withheld from the public.

“The renewed fighting in North Cotabato goes to show that when the government bungles the peace negotiation, it is the citizens who suffer,” Risa Hontiveros, a congresswoman, said Monday. “The peace process is turning into a humanitarian mess.”

The renewed fighting coincided with elections on Monday in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which comprises seven predominantly Muslim provinces. Past elections have been violent but officials said the latest voting was largely peaceful, although there were reports of sporadic violence, including the bombing of electric towers in one province.

People escaping the violence fled along a major national highway that had been ordered closed to traffic on Sunday after separatists had commandeered a passenger bus.

“We are tired, but we have to move on,” Farida Dimalangan, a 47-year-old refugee, told MindaNews, a news agency in Mindanao.

Hundreds of refugees sought shelter in sheds and warehouses along the highway.

1,300 feared dead in wake of typhoon in the Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: June 26, 2008

MANILA: The death toll from Typhoon Fengshen, the storm that battered the Philippines last week, could go as high as 1,300 if the missing passengers and crew of a capsized ferry are included, officials said Thursday.

Rescue divers continued to search the overturned ferry Thursday but failed to retrieve any new survivors, raising the possibility that as many as 809 of the 865 passengers and crew had perished in the disaster.

Since the ship capsized Saturday near Sibuyan Island, only 56 survivors have been found. The Philippine Coast Guard said 124 bodies had either washed ashore on nearby islands or had been found floating in the sea.

Adding to the uncertainty of the situation was the way in which some of the recovered bodies were being handled. On some of the islands where bodies had washed up, television footage showed corpses being dumped from a truck into mass graves. Many of the bodies had not been examined by forensic experts for possible identification.

Officials on Thursday raised the overall death toll from the storm to 498, excluding those still missing.

Divers have had difficulty pulling corpses from inside the ship because of narrow passageways that are blocked by debris. Retrieval efforts, officials said, could last a month.

As hopes dimmed of finding more survivors, friends and relatives were becoming more desperate. At the offices of Sulpicio Lines, the company that owns the ferry, relatives have been pressing officials for answers.

During a Catholic Mass held on a tugboat near the wreckage of the ferry, emotions ran high, with relatives weeping and throwing flowers into the sea. Mark Anthony Barrozo, whose pregnant girlfriend was among those believed dead, exclaimed “forgive me” and then broke down, according to Reuters.

The National Disaster Coordinating Council said the typhoon affected more than 2.4 million Filipinos in 42 of the country’s 81 provinces. It estimated damage to property at more than 5.5 billion pesos, or about $125 million.

The coast guard’s Board of Marine Inquiry has initiated an investigation into the ferry disaster.

At a hearing Wednesday, lawyers for Sulpicio Lines stopped short of blaming the coast guard for the tragedy. Coast guard officials, on the other hand, insisted it had been the company’s fault.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said Wednesday that Sulpicio Lines should be held accountable for the tragedy. The hearings are scheduled to resume Friday.

Hopes fading for Philippine ferry survivors

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times

MANILA: Hopes faded Monday that more survivors would be found in what could be one of the worst Philippine sea disasters as rescuers failed to find signs of life inside a capsized ferry that had held more than 800 passengers and crew members when Typhoon Fengshen struck Saturday.

Rescue officials said only 38 people had been rescued, including 28 passengers and crew members who came ashore Monday after drifting at sea since Saturday. A total of 13 bodies believed to be from the ferry Princess of the Stars have been recovered, including 9 that washed ashore Monday.

The known dead from the ferry brought the death toll from the typhoon to at least 176, the Philippine National Red Cross said. Fengshen, packing winds of up to 195 kilometers per hour, or 120 miles per hour, struck the central and northern Philippines on Saturday, knocking down power lines, causing landslides, flooding rivers, and inundating entire communities.

Divers who beat against the hull of ferry Monday in search of survivors heard nothing that indicated life.

‘‘We just approached the hull of the ship, we got near and then banged, knocked in order for us to give a sign if ever there are still people inside,’’ Lieutenant Colonel Edgard Arevalo of the coast guard said Monday. ‘‘Unfortunately there was no response.’’

The Philippine government has approached other countries, particularly the United States, for help in the recovery operations. A U.S. Navy ship from Okinawa, Japan, was expected to arrive early Tuesday near Sibuyan Island south of Manila, where the ferry sank, said Jesus Dureza, press secretary of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Officials said helicopters on the U.S. ship could help survey the general area for survivors.

Eleandro Madrona, a congressman of Romblon Province, where the ferry sank, flew over the area Monday afternoon, but reported seeing only a tugboat near the ship’s wreckage.

‘‘I was thinking, where could these 700 people be?’’ Madrona said, according to The Associated Press.

Elsewhere, officials tried to assess the losses from the typhoon.

Iloilo, a central Philippine province, was the worst hit, with fatalities approaching 100 as of Monday, officials said. It was too early to determine damage to agriculture and infrastructure, but officials said it could run up to millions of dollars.

Another concern was the welfare of the nearly 70,000 people throughout the country who were displaced by the typhoon and are now living in evacuation centers. On Sunday, Arroyo ordered all government agencies to help in the relief operations, while private companies have begun campaigns to collect donations of food, clothing and bottled water.

The president also ordered tighter maritime regulations. ‘‘Pending a review of Philippine Coast Guard protocols, no vessel sails if it would pass a possible typhoon path,’’ Arroyo, who is on a visit in the United States, said in a video conference with her advisers on Monday.

The government has suspended the operation of all vessels of Sulpicio Lines, which owns the 24-ton ferry, which was certified to carry 1,992 people.

Distraught relatives of the ferry passengers have trooped to the Manila office of Sulpicio Lines since Sunday, many of them blaming the company for the disaster. An advocacy group for crime victims, Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, announced Monday that it was filing a class action suit against the company.

Officials of Sulpicio Lines, however, said that they had tried to set in motion a rescue operation as soon as they learned that the ship had encountered problems. But ‘‘severe weather condition delayed the rescue efforts both from the sea and on air,’’ Carlos Go, the Sulpicio chief executive, said in a statement Monday.

‘‘Our company also assures the families of all unfortunate passengers who perished in this incident that they will be properly compensated,‘‘ Go said.

Coast guard officials told reporters Monday that they had cleared the ferry to leave Manila for Cebu, a city in the central Philippines, on Friday night because the initial forecast for Fengshen showed that the storm would only hit the eastern part of the country, away from the ferry’s route.

But according to the government weather bureau, the typhoon changed direction Saturday, moving toward the center of the country, running right into the ferry’s path.

Coast guard officials said they had advised the ferry to seek shelter, but that the boat’s engine had failed after the ship was battered by strong winds and waves, thus leaving it even more vulnerable to the intensifying storm.

In a television interview, Senator Richard Gordon, who is also the chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross, quoted a survivor as he described what happened next. According to the survivor, ‘‘It was high noon but it was so dark, and there was too much rain and the waves were just too much for the ship,’’ Gordon quoted the survivor as having said.

Sulpicio Lines is one of the largest Philippine shipping companies, with 22 ships, both freight and passenger, plying the waters of the Philippine archipelago.

Its ships and ferries have figured in many of the worst maritime disasters in the Philippines. In December 1987, an overloaded Doña Paz collided with an oil tanker off Mindoro Island, killing 4,386 people.

A year later, in October 1988, another Sulpicio Lines ship, Doña Marilyn, sank near Leyte Province, killing 300 passengers and crew. In 1998, 200 died when the Princess of the Orient, also a Sulpicio liner, capsized near Manila during a storm.

Hundreds feared dead in Philippines storm

By Carlos Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: June 23, 2008

MANILA: The death toll from the powerful typhoon that killed more than 100 people in the Philippines last weekend could rise sharply after a ferry carrying more than 700 passengers and crew members capsized in the central part of the island chain , officials said.

The Red Cross reported that at least 137 people had been killed in the hurricane, not including those confirmed dead after the ferry sinking. Glenn Rabonza, executive director of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, said casualty figures were difficult to confirm because of extremely bad weather that was hampering search and recovery operations.

On Sunday, the coast guard said it had reached the spot near the island of Sibuyan where the passenger ferry, the Princess of the Stars, had capsized a day earlier.

Officials said they found no survivors apart from four passengers rescued earlier in the day.

Officials said the bodies of four passengers had also been recovered earlier in the day.

Nanette Tansingco, mayor of San Fernando, Sibuyan’s largest town, told DZMM radio on Sunday that witnesses had described “the boat upside down with a big hole in the hull.”

She said island villagers had reported seeing slippers and other belongings washing ashore, and other witnesses offered similar accounts.

One of the survivors, Jesus Gica, told a radio station that he saw passengers losing consciousness and children unable to wear their life vests. “Many of us jumped from the ship,” he said. “The waves were big.”

He also said elderly people, unable to escape, had been trapped underneath the sunken ferry.

Dozens of relatives of the passengers went to the ferry company’s office in Manila, demanding to know what happened to their loved ones.

“I’m very worried,” Felino Farionin told The Associated Press. “I need to know what happened to my family.” He said his wife, son and in-laws were on the ferry.

According to the government, the ferry was carrying 702 passengers, 45 of them children and infants, and 121 crew members.

The typhoon, Fengshen, made landfall on Saturday and battered several provinces. Its wind and rain knocked down power lines in the capital and elsewhere, caused landslides and capsized small boats.

Fengshen, its winds at more than 90 miles per hour, caused more destruction in the northern Philippines but was headed out of the country on Sunday afternoon, weather officials said.

The bad weather hampered efforts to locate the Princess of the Stars and its passengers, coast guard officials said.

“They haven’t seen anyone,” Lieutenant Senior Grade Arman Balilo, a spokesman for the coast guard, told The Associated Press. “They’re scouring the area. They’re studying the direction of the waves to determine where survivors may have drifted.”

Officials were checking reports that some people reached a nearby island and that a raft was spotted off another, said a coast guard spokesman, Commander Antonio Cuasito, The Associated Press reported. “We can only pray that there are many survivors so we can reduce the number of casualties,” he said.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is in the United States for a state visit, scolded coast guard officials during a teleconference on Sunday for allowing the ferry to sail despite warnings about the typhoon. She ordered government agencies to coordinate rescue and relief efforts.

The coast guard said the Princess of the Stars was allowed to leave Manila on Friday evening for Cebu, a city in the central Philippines, because the storm had not yet made landfall.

Coast guard officials said the ferry should have been big enough to sail and that a warning issued earlier on Saturday barred only small boats from traveling.

In Iloilo Province, in the central Philippines, the governor, Neil Tupaz, reported that 59 people had died and that more than two dozen others were missing. “Iloilo is like an ocean,” Tupaz said in a radio interview.

Officials said tens of thousands of displaced residents were moved to evacuation centers. Flights were canceled and Monday classes suspended.

Each year, about 20 typhoons slam into the Philippines, an archipelago bordering the Pacitic in the path of the storm systems.

Militants free Philippine TV reporter and 2 others

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: June 18, 2008

MANILA: Abu Sayyaf militants have released members of a news team they abducted in the southern Philippines last week, among them one of the country’s best-known television journalists, officials said Wednesday.

The police said no ransom had been paid for the release Tuesday night of Ces Drilon, her cameraman and a guide. Drilon’s driver was released on June 12 after local officials paid the kidnappers 2 million pesos, or about $45,000, which officials refused to call a ransom.

Drilon and her crew were abducted June 8 on their way to interview members of Abu Sayyaf. In a news briefing Wednesday, Drilon said that someone had betrayed her group.

“There was betrayal involved, which was why we were kidnapped,” she said without elaborating.

ABS-CBN, the country’s largest network, where Drilon works as a senior reporter, had repeatedly said that it would not pay a ransom. The militants had demanded a payment of 15 million pesos by noon Tuesday.

Officials said the kidnappers had relented only when told that the network was adamant about its no-ransom policy and that, in lieu of a ransom, the kidnappers could get “a livelihood package.”

They did not explain what this might entail, but officials had said that the lagging economy in the Muslim areas of the south was a factor in the rise in kidnappings there. Alvarez Ishaji, the mayor of Indanan, said after the release that the package might involve promoting jobs in the region.

Avelino Razon Jr., the chief of the Philippine National Police, said Wednesday that the release mainly had been the result of negotiations between the kidnappers and officials of Sulu, an island province in the troubled south where Abu Sayyaf is active.

The police also credited a senator, Loren Legarda, a former colleague of Drilon’s at ABS-CBN, for the successful negotiations.

“We were treated well, in a perverse kind of way,” said Drilon, whose face bore marks of mosquito bites after spending nine days in the jungles of Jolo. But she said the kidnappers, at one point, had threatened to cut off her driver’s head.

Abu Sayyaf, a group mainly known for its banditry in the south, has been blamed for several of the more serious terrorist attacks in the Philippines in recent years. They have kidnapped, and sometimes decapitated, their victims, including several foreigners.

Television news crew believed kidnapped in Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: June 10, 2008

MANILA: A television news team from the Philippines’s largest network was believed to have been abducted by members of the militant group Abu Sayyaf, officials said Tuesday.

Ces Drilon, a senior reporter for ABS-CBN and one of the country’s best-known journalists, was with a cameraman and driver when they were intercepted Sunday by armed men in Sulu, a province in the south where the Abu Sayyaf and Islamic extremists are known to operate, the police said.

With the crew was Octavio Dinampo, a professor at Mindanao State University who, according to the police, accompanied the news team on their way to meet with members of Abu Sayyaf.

Abu Sayyaf, whose stated goal is a separate Islamic state, is notorious for its kidnap-for-ransom activities and has victimized Filipinos and foreigners. The group has been blamed for several major terrorist attacks across the Philippines in recent years and is the target of a sustained military campaign supported by the United States.

Although U.S. and Philippine officials say that the campaign has considerably weakened the group over the past five years, analysts say Abu Sayyaf remains a high security threat.

Chief Superintendent Joel Goltiao, chief of police in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, to which Sulu belongs, said Tuesday that the police had sent “feelers” to the Abu Sayyaf in the hope of a negotiation “but the abductors have not yet said anything,” he said, according to The Associated Press.

Goltiao told reporters Tuesday that the crew was abducted on the island of Jolo by a group led by Albader Parad, a known Abu Sayyaf leader.

“This can give a bad signal because Ms. Drilon is a very popular figure in the country,” said Lorelie Fajardo, a spokesperson for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She said the president had already ordered the police to do its best to locate the four abductees.

ABS-CBN, in a short statement made Tuesday, confirmed that its crew has been missing but stopped short of calling it a kidnapping. “All efforts are under way to find them and bring them home,” the network said.

The incident once again highlighted the security problems that Filipino journalists face. According to local and international media groups, the Philippines is among the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.

“It is great cause for concern that this volatile southern region of the Philippines remains insecure for the press, and we call on local authorities to work diligently to secure their safe and swift release,” said Bob Dietz of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is based in New York.

This would not be the first time that journalists pursuing a story on Abu Sayyaf had been kidnapped by their subjects. In 2000, Abu Sayyaf seized a group of 16 local and foreign journalists who were covering the kidnapping of 21 people from a Malaysian resort.

Philippines cracks down on illegal kidney trade

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: April 29, 2008

MANILA: The Philippines is banning kidney transplants for foreigners as part of a government crackdown on a growing, illicit trade in human organs bought from the poor, officials said Tuesday.

The ban is expected to take effect in May. Foreigners who violate it, as well as middlemen in the transaction, can be jailed for up to 20 years and fined as much as two million pesos, or more than $47,000, Health Secretary Francisco Duque said at a news conference Tuesday.

Foreigners who are related to Filipino citizens by blood are exempted from the ban, Duque said.

Although the sale of human organs has always been illegal in the Philippines, kidney transplants have become a lucrative underground business, with hospitals classifying the kidneys as donations to evade the law, according to Amihan Abueva, the regional director in Manila of Asia Acts Against Child Trafficking, a nongovernment group that lobbied for the ban.

According to Duque, kidney transplants to foreigners increased more than 60 percent between 2002 and 2006.

Abueva attributed that increase to hospitals exceeding the government-mandated cap on kidney transplants for foreigners. Under Health Department regulations, only 10 percent of a hospital’s kidney transplants may be performed for foreigners.

“These transplants are done openly in the best hospitals,” Abueva said.

A typical kidney transplant costs about $95,000, she said.

Organ transplants, including those for kidneys, are among the services hospitals offer under the government’s Philippine Medical Tourism Program, aimed at foreigners. Some of these hospitals, such as the National Kidney Institute, are government-owned.

As a result of the thriving trade in kidneys, many poor Filipinos have been willing to sell their kidneys for $2,000 to $10,000, a huge amount of money for an impoverished family.

According to Abueva’s group, kidney brokers scout for possible “donors” in the poorest slums in Manila and in the provinces. These brokers often are paid from $1,000 to $1,500 per transplant.

The Philippine media have produced numerous reports about donors dying because of complications.

There have also been reports of the brokers housing the donors for months in apartments in Manila and nearby areas until they can find foreign buyers, who are mostly from Europe, the Middle East and richer Asian countries like Japan and South Korea.

On April 21, the police raided such a house in a province just north of Manila and arrested three members of a gang that was selling kidneys to foreigners, the police said. They found nine donors in the house.

“I can barely provide for my wife and children,” one of them told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “I just wanted to earn some money and give it to them.” He said he was promised 120,000 pesos, or about $2,800, for his kidney.

The World Health Organization has identified China, Pakistan, Egypt, Colombia and the Philippines as the world’s leaders in the illegal sale of kidneys.

Officials have said that because some of these countries have tightened regulations on transplants, more foreigners seeking kidneys would come to the Philippines, unless preventive action was taken.

Duque, the health secretary, said the ban was meant to protect poor Filipinos. “The poor always end up as the ones being abused,” he said. “The sale of one’s body parts is condemnable and ethically improper. We have to stop it.”

Former President Aquino of the Philippines has colon cancer

By Carlos H. Conde

International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: March 24, 2008

MANILA: Corazon Aquino, the former Philippine leader who played a major role in the ouster of two of the country’s presidents, has been found to have colon cancer, her family announced Monday.

The ailment was discovered after Aquino, 75, underwent a series of medical tests because of hypertension and difficulty in breathing in December. Since then, her daughter Kristina Bernadette Aquino said at a news conference Monday, the former president had lost weight and suffered consistent coughing and a loss of appetite.

“The results showed that our mother is suffering cancer of the colon,” she said, adding that the former president decided to disclose her illness to the public because “our mother has always believed in being up-front.”

“It’s a very difficult time for our family, most especially for our mother,” she said. She did not provide other details of the medical findings. She called on Filipinos to pray for her mother.

The administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said it was saddened by the news.

“We are hoping for strength for her in the face of adversity,” said Ignacio Bunye, the press secretary.

Although Aquino stepped down from office when her term ended in 1992 - she had succeeded the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was deposed in the 1986 “people power” uprising that she had led - Aquino had remained in the political spotlight, playing a key part in the second “people power” movement that removed Joseph Estrada from the presidency in 2001.

More recently, Aquino participated in demonstrations calling for the resignation of Arroyo, whose government has been hounded by allegations of corruption and vote-rigging.

Educated in religious schools in Manila and in the United States, Aquino belongs to one of the richest landholding families in the Philippines.

She married Benigno Aquino Jr., a former journalist who became one of the youngest senators in the Philippines and the archrival of Marcos.

Benigno’s assassination in 1983 on his return from years of political exile in the United States provoked protests that ultimately led to Marcos’s fall from power. That event pushed Corazon, his widow, who was a homemaker at the time, to the country’s political center stage and a run for the presidency in 1986. When Marcos won by a slight margin in a vote widely regarded as fraudulent, a popular uprising swept him from power and into exile, and she was inaugurated.

She also began a movement to promote microenterprises and microfinancing in the Philippines, believing that empowering poor Filipinos by helping them start small businesses was a way to combat poverty.

Philippines on high alert over assassination plot

By Carlos H. Conde
The New York Times
International Herald Tribune
Published: February 14, 2008

MANILA: The Philippine authorities went on high alert Thursday after the discovery of a plot to assassinate President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, officials said.

The supposed plot was made public by the chief of the president’s security staff Thursday, one day before planned demonstrations here by groups accusing her of corruption and demanding her resignation.

According to Brigadier General Romeo Prestoza, head of the Presidential Security Group, the plot was hatched by the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group and by Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian extremist Islamic network that the authorities say has been operating in the southern Philippines.

“If they want to launch it, they can do it anytime,” Prestoza said Thursday, adding that the plot had forced Arroyo to cancel a trip to a northern city set for Friday.

General Hermogenes Esperon, the chief of the armed forces, confirmed the assassination plot, saying it was the reason why the Philippine military had been put on full alert. He also said the two terrorist groups were planning to attack “high-value targets” in the capital.

But critics of the president said the disclosure of the plot was intended to sabotage the demonstrations on Friday.

“This is a desperate scare tactic to discourage people from joining the protests,” said Renato Reyes Jr., secretary general of Bayan, one of the groups that organized the protests.

On Wednesday night, the military declared a “red alert” in the Manila metropolitan area following intelligence reports that the communist New People’s Army was planning to infiltrate the demonstrations Friday and possibly make violent attacks during the mass actions.

The declaration came a few hours after the New People’s Army issued a statement urging its cadres “to further intensify tactical offensives in the next few weeks and months to help further weaken the Arroyo regime and contribute significantly to its ouster.”

The Communists, with armed members numbering between 6,000 and 10,000, have been waging an insurgency for three decades in the largely impoverished Philippine countryside.

Adding to anxiety here was an advisory issued Thursday by the U.S. Embassy warning Americans to “exercise extreme caution” when in the Philippines. It discouraged travel to southern areas because of a high threat of terrorism.

But according to Reyes, the secretary general of Bayan, the police and the military “always do this sort of thing every time public protests against the government are scheduled.”

The political opposition, as well as leftist and civil society groups, planned the protests Friday in response to new testimony in the Senate that corroborated earlier allegations that the president’s husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, and a former elections commissioner, Benjamin Abalos, a critical Arroyo ally, were going to receive $130 million in kickbacks from a $329 million broadband project between the government and the Chinese company ZTE. The government later revoked the contract.

Filipino talks with separatists seriously set back

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: December 16, 2007

MANILA: Negotiations between the Philippine government and Islamic separatists suffered a serious setback during the weekend after the insurgents accused Manila of unilaterally changing the essence of the draft for a key agreement.

Officials for the rebel group said Sunday that the changes regarding ancestral homelands pushed the decade-old negotiations back to square one.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front’s negotiating panel refused to see government negotiators at their scheduled meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday.

“We decided not to meet them because the draft they prepared was objectionable,” said Michael Mastura, a negotiator for the front. “The government reneged on earlier agreements.”

Mohagher Iqbal, chairman of the rebel panel, said the government’s action was “like changing the rules in the middle of the game.” He said restarting the talks, which Malaysia has been facilitating since 2001, “is now entirely up to the government.”

“There have been differences in the proposed text on concepts of territory and resources, including elements of governance,” Rodolfo Garcia, the chief government negotiator, told The Associated Press in Kuala Lumpur.

Ancestral domain had been a sensitive issue since last year, and the failure by both sides to resolve it has dimmed the chances of a peace agreement anytime soon. Both sides earlier said they were hoping to sign an agreement by January, but Garcia said, “Realistically, given this present situation, it might be difficult to reach the target.”

Officials said the impasse was one of the most serious since talks began in 1997. According to Mastura, the government-prepared draft did away with some “substantive elements” both panels had agreed on since 2005.

“In the guise of editing the draft for styling purposes, they deleted references to ownership of ancestral domains,” Mastura said in an interview by phone from Kuala Lumpur. “But to us, ancestral domains is the meat and bones of the negotiations. By removing the ownership aspect of it from the draft, the government ignored a consensus point that had earlier been deliberated, agreed upon and signed by both sides.”

In February 2006, both sides issued a statement saying that they had reached a “joint determination of the scope” of the Muslim homeland and that Filipino Muslims have the “right to utilize and develop their ancestral domain and ancestral lands.”

Mastura said the government also inserted references to the Philippine Constitution in its draft. “We are not pleased with it. We do not recognize the Philippine Constitution. The consensus points never referred to the Constitution,” he said.

Jesus Dureza, the presidential adviser on the peace process, said Sunday that the government was “agonizing” over how to address the ancestral domain issue without violating the Constitution, which forbids the state from surrendering sovereign rights over territories like those being claimed by the rebels.

“The challenge now is to find creative means to address ancestral domain,” Dureza said. “I am sure we can go around the Constitution without violating it.”

He asked the rebels to be patient. “We cannot forge an agreement only to have it thrown away because of constitutional problems,” he said. “If we are going to sign something, it should be implementable. That’s the bottom line.”

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.”

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.

Clan feuds fuel separatist violence in Philippines, study shows

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.’ “

Filipino Ex-President Pardoned

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.

Blast kills at least 8 in Manila mall

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.

Arroyo may pardon Estrada

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: September 24, 2007

MANILA: A few hours after an anti-graft court convicted former President Joseph Estrada of plunder, officials of the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo were already talking about the possibility of a pardon.

The officials said a pardon for Estrada, who was sentenced Sept. 11 to a maximum of 40 years in prison for receiving payoffs and kickbacks before his ouster from office, could heal the nation. “Why not?” Sergio Apostol, Arroyo’s chief legal adviser, said of a pardon on the day of the verdict.

Over the weekend, Arroyo made it known through her advisers that she was indeed considering a pardon. “I’m hoping that we can do it before Christmas,” Ronaldo Puno, a political adviser to Arroyo, told reporters Sunday.

But not everyone in the Philippines welcomes the possibility of a pardon. Some are concerned that it could send the wrong signal and offset what was gained with Estrada’s conviction: a strong message that the Philippine justice system does catch up with powerful lawbreakers.

“What could ever justify granting amnesty or pardon to one who shamelessly feasted on power and greed?” 15 private lawyers who assisted in Estrada’s prosecution asked in a statement issued last week. “What message shall that send to those who wield power now and in the future?”

“Reconciliation without justice is meaningless,” the statement read. “Political accommodations in the name of unity and reconciliation are a sham.”

Estrada, a former movie actor who became president in 1998 and was driven out of power in a military-backed civilian uprising in 2001, is still hugely popular and remains a potent force within the political opposition.

The Arroyo administration hopes not only to stop Estrada from questioning Arroyo’s legitimacy but to prevent him and his supporters from capitalizing on the corruption scandals Arroyo is facing, said Benito Lim, a political scientist at Ateneo de Manila University. These scandals, Lim said, could become a serious threat to Arroyo’s presidency.

Apostol, Arroyo’s lawyer, told The Associated Press, “Hopefully, if this pardon is granted, it will remove one cause of political tensions.”

A pardon, Lim said, would be a politically astute move by Arroyo, who had been Estrada’s vice president and succeeded him when public outrage over the corruption charges, as well as allegations of womanizing and drinking, forced him to step down. “The guilty verdict legitimized her mandate,” he said. “She will become magnanimous once she pardons Estrada. It’s just a matter of time.”

The public seems to favor a pardon. In a survey by the Social Weather Stations, a Manila polling institute, respondents overwhelmingly said Arroyo should pardon Estrada.

Analysts say she has no choice but to try to heal old wounds, especially at a time when she seems particularly vulnerable from scandal. Last week, her husband, Jose Miguel Arroyo, was again thrust into the political limelight when testimony at a Senate hearing linked him to a contract the government had signed with the Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE.

A Filipino business owner testified that Jose Miguel Arroyo and Benjamin Abalos, an ally of the president who heads the election commission, had tried to get him to drop his bid for the contract, with Abalos offering him $10 million to do so. Arroyo, through his lawyer, denied any wrongdoing, while Abalos dismissed the charge as “ridiculous.”

The ZTE contract became so controversial that it has bumped Estrada’s conviction off the front pages of newspapers. On Saturday, Arroyo, in a move seen by her critics as an attempt to sabotage the Senate’s hearings on the scandal, ordered the deal suspended.

Military officials said Sunday that elements within the military were using the ZTE scandal to launch another “destabilization plot” against the government, which saw a coup attempt in 2003 and, according to the Arroyo administration, nipped another in the bud last year.

The scandal over the ZTE deal is only the latest in a series of corruption allegations against Arroyo’s administration to have been explored in Senate hearings in recent years, the most serious of which is the charge, backed by testimony and a widely circulated audio recording, that she rigged the 2004 elections. Arroyo’s opponents in Congress tried twice to impeach her over the charge but fell short of the necessary votes.

Attempts by the Senate to investigate that scandal and others were unsuccessful, largely because Arroyo, by executive order, prevented her officials from testifying in any congressional inquiry without her approval. Her Senate opponents tried to reopen the case this month, but her allies blocked the attempt.

The various scandals have taken a toll on Arroyo’s reputation; her trust ratings are dismal, far worse than Estrada’s. Analysts say that if Arroyo remains confrontational toward the Estrada camp, those sentiments could find expression in the streets.

Philippine ex-president guilty of plunder

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune

The New York Times
Published: September 12, 2007

MANILA: A Philippine anti-corruption court on Wednesday convicted Joseph Estrada, the former president, of illegally acquiring wealth while in office and sentenced him to a maximum of 40 years in prison.

The court, called the Sandiganbayan, found Estrada guilty of plunder but acquitted him on a perjury charge. Estrada’s son and co-accused, Senator Jose Estrada, was acquitted on both charges.

The court also ordered the confiscation of several properties, including mansions, that Estrada acquired while in power, as well as hundreds of millions of pesos in two bank accounts. The court also ruled that Estrada was permanently disqualified from seeking public office.

The plunder case stemmed from allegations that Estrada received more than $85 million in kickbacks from tobacco taxes, commissions from the purchase of shares by a government insurance fund, payoffs from illegal gambling operators, and for using a fictitious name in a bank account. The perjury case was for allegedly misstating his income and assets.

“I thought the rule of justice would prevail here, but it’s really a kangaroo court,” Estrada told reporters minutes after the verdict was read. “I have always expected that this will happen,” he added.

Estrada, 70, has been in detention for more than six years now. He was ousted in an uprising in 2001 that arose from allegations of corruption, as well as accusations of womanizing and heavy drinking in the presidential palace.

The charges deeply offended the Catholic Church, leading it to organize, along with so-called “civil society” groups and leftist organizations, massive demonstrations against Estrada. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who was Estrada’s vice president, took over the presidency in 2001 after the military withdrew support for him amid growing public protests dubbed People Power II. The original People Power revolt removed former President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Estrada had been in office for only two years.

Estrada, a former movie star who is hugely popular among the masses, has repeatedly denied the allegations against him, saying these were politically motivated. He accused the country’s elite, the Catholic Church, and civil society groups for conspiring against him. The uprising, he claimed, was a power grab.

Talking to reporters through a window at the courthouse after the verdict Wednesday, Estrada said he had hoped that, because an impeachment trial in Congress had been cut short by the “People Power” uprising, he could present his side at the Sandiganbayan. He said he had thought the court “was the only forum where I can ventilate myself and tell the people of my innocence.”

After his removal from power, the government created a special court in the Sandiganbayan to try Estrada. He suggested Wednesday that the court had been manipulated.

The verdict, Estrada said, was a “decision dictated by those people in power” as well as “a political decision.” He said he would appeal the decision within 15 days.

Estrada’s lawyer, Rene Saguisag, said the former president was ready to serve time at Muntinlupa, the country’s main prison facility in Manila, but the court said Estrada could continue to stay at his place of detention, which is actually his vacation house in a province just outside Manila.

Hundreds of his supporters marched near the Sandiganbayan on Wednesday while the police and military were on full alert. Security was tight, particularly near and around the presidential palace, apparently to make sure that a siege by Estrada’s followers, like the one that took place in May 2001, would not be repeated.

Indeed, the government carefully managed the events Wednesday. It suspended classes in dozens of schools near the Sandiganbayan. It initially banned live media coverage of the proceedings, but the Supreme Court overruled the decision. However, only the court’s cameras were allowed inside the courtroom, and it transmitted only the video of the clerk reading the verdict during proceedings lasting less than 15 minutes.

The court also read only the portion of the decision where the verdict was declared - not the whole decision itself. Estrada’s camp later theorized that this was probably meant to make sure that the proceedings were short, leaving no time for protests to develop.

The crime of plunder is punishable by death or “reclusion perpetua,” a life sentence which carries a penalty of a maximum of 40 years. The death penalty was abolished in the Philippines a few years ago. Estrada will only be eligible for parole after 30 years.

“We bow to the decision of the Sandiganbayan. We hope and pray that the rule of law will prevail,” Arroyo’s spokesman, Ignacio Bunye, said in a statement.

While Estrada’s supporters were saddened by the verdict, many Filipinos welcomed it, saying that the conviction was a sign of democracy at work.

“This is the last chance for the state to show that we can do it, that we can charge, prosecute and convict a public official regardless of his stature,” said Dennis Villaignacio, the special prosecutor in the case.

Joe Dizon, secretary general of PlunderWatch, a nongovernment group that monitored the trial, said Estrada’s conviction was a step toward more transparency and accountability in government.

A movie star for 40 years, Estrada’s life story is as dramatic as those of the characters he had portrayed in his films, which explains his immense popularity among the poor.

He was considered the black sheep of the Ejercito family, a moneyed and influential clan in Manila. He dropped out of high school and was promptly thrown out of the Ejercito home by his strict father.

Outraged, the young man, according to tales often repeated here, stopped using his real surname and picked Estrada out of a phone book.

To further spite his parents, Estrada entered show business. It was in the movies that Estrada excelled, garnering awards for his acting in some of the country’s most memorable films.