Left-Right pact born ’01; Pro-Arroyo senator aided Left-Right plot --Manila Standard Today Sept 25-26, 2006

Left-Right pact born ’01
By Joyce Pangco Pañares




September 25,2006


First of 2 parts

THE grand alliance to remove President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo from power took shape not in 2004 but as early as Jan. 20, 2001, when she was taking her oath at the Edsa Shrine in Mandaluyong City to replace deposed President Joseph Estrada, a former communist rebel says.

The military reports on the dates the cabal of communist rebels and junior military officers had plotted to oust Mrs. Arroyo are off by three years, according to Ka Rolan, a former member of the New People’s Army’s Sparrow unit, the communists’ assassination squad.

Ka Rolan (not his real name) says the communists started courting the Catholic Church first to make sure the transition government to be formed after Mrs. Arroyo was removed would have the support of the influential bishops.

“The talks did not delve much on the means that would be used to remove the President, although we assumed they [religious leaders] knew there would be force involved,” he says.

“It was more of an ideological discussion, that she [Mrs. Arroyo] was not the one most capable of leading the country, that under her administration things would become worse.”

Ka Rolan was still with the Sparrow unit in 2002 when the “courtship” began. Setting up an interview with him was easy—he is now a member of the Partido Demokratiko Sosyalista ng Pilipinas—but finding a secure place to talk had been difficult because there was, and is, a shoot-to-kill order on him by his former comrades.

He says the communists started talking to the military also in 2001, but not yet with the Magdalo group of mutineers, since the junior officers involved in the takeover of the Oakwood apartments in Makati in 2003 had not yet banded together.

“It was very easy to court the military, but it was not us in the armed movement who did the courting,” Ka Rolan says. “It was the members of our above-ground organizations—the militias who were sometimes armed but not considered NPA—who did the talking.”

Ka Frank, another former rebel, confirmed Ka Rolan’s statements. He was a member of a fishermen’s organization fronting for the NPA in Luzon when he left after the communists suspected him of being a military agent during the last wave of Kampanyang Ahos, a communist purge that left more than 1,000 suspected infiltrators dead.

“Some of the military officials shared the sentiment of the people; that there should be changes and that the biggest change of all was to have a new President installed,” Ka Frank says.

He says the “help” extended by the military came in various forms: “losing” guns and ammunition to the communists, allowing arrested rebels to escape after their capture, and ignoring tips of impending rebel attacks so the communists could take over a camp temporarily but quickly and then take whatever they wanted.

“At the end of the day these military men were also Filipinos, and the concerns raised by our militias were valid,” he says. “We may not have agreed on communism as an ideology, but perhaps it was their sense of patriotism that blinded them into forging an alliance with the NPA.”

And after the Oakwood Mutiny, the communists found a group of officers with whom they could discuss the series of operations to remove President Arroyo—a plot that eventually led to the coup attempt against the President in February that involved military and communist rebels, and which was fueled further by charges that Mrs. Arroyo had cheated in the 2004 elections.

In the video-documentary Conspiracy of Traitors it released on March 3, 2004, when it lifted its week-long state of emergency to crush the coup, Malacañang said the leftist-rightist alliance planned to place the nation under emergency rule, suspend both Chambers of Congress, declare the results of the 2004 elections void, and elect a junta to govern the country.

THE MILITARY traces the earliest meeting of the leftist-rightist alliance to June 2004 in Tarlac. It says this was followed by their March 2004 meeting in Makati City that included members of the Light Armor Brigade, an elite force trained by the United States Army; their September 2004 meeting led by former Senator Gregorio Honasan; and their May 2005 meeting in Makati City, where the plotters discussed springing the members of the Magdalo group from prison to join the coup. The plotters held their last meeting before the coup on Jan. 14 this year in Quezon City, where they discussed the details of Oplan Hackle.

“Maybe the official coup plan began in mid-2004, but as early as 2001 efforts to recruit both religious leaders and military officials had already begun,” Ka Rolan says.

Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita says Malacañang had been aware that efforts to unseat the President were going on, but it did not receive any intelligence reports on the communists’ attempts to ally with the military as early as 2001.

“There were no reports that recruitment within the military had started as early as that, but we always knew that efforts to topple the government was continuing; that the opposition would always try to unseat whoever was in power to put their own people in Malacañang,” he says.

After Malacañang released its video-documentary on the plot, it emerged that a man called “Nikki” was to be the ground commander of all the efforts to remove President Arroyo from Malacañang and take over all vital installations across the country. He was Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim of the elite Scout Rangers regiment. Lim had led one of the bloodiest coup attempts against President Corazon Aquino in 1989, when he commanded the Para sa Bayan group of elite forces backed by retired military generals.

The head of the Army at the time, Hermogenes Esperon Jr., said Para sa Bayan or PSB forged an alliance with Makabayang Kawal Pilipino or MKP, the new name of the Magdalo group that, by then, already had an understanding with the communists to remove Mrs. Arroyo.

The PSB-MKP-NPA alliance was supposed to issue three proclamations after they had seized power: Proclamation 001, which would place the country under emergency rule and suspend Congress; Proclamation 002, which would declare a new constitution in keeping with leftist-rightist ideals; and Proclamation 003, which would void the results of the 2004 polls and form a transition government.










Pro-Arroyo senator aided Left-Right plot
By Joyce Pangco Pañares




September 26,2006


Conclusion

THE communist-military plot to remove President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo from power started in 2001, on the day she took her oath to replace deposed President Joseph Estrada, and not in 2004 as most people believe and as reported by military intelligence.

The communists, who did not like Mrs. Arroyo, first sounded off sympathetic members of the Catholic Church for support, and later opened communication lines with disgruntled military men. They found their allies in the junior military officers who had been involved in the Oakwood Mutiny—their takeover of an apartment-hotel in 2003, in an attempt to remove Mrs. Arroyo from power—and later launched destabilization moves ending in their coup attempt against Malacañang in February.

The founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Jose Maria Sison, denied the Left-Right alliance. He claimed it was the “broad masses” supporting the communist ideals that “encouraged the military and police forces to side with the people and withdraw support from the regime.

“The claim of the Arroyo regime that there is a coup conspiracy between the CPP and the so-called military adventurists of the Right is a brazen lie,” Sison said from Utrecht, The Netherlands, where he is self-exiled and from were he has been directing the communist rebellion in the Philippines for 18 years.

“It is a canard, a pure psywar fabrication of a desperate and dying regime,” he said, but admitted “there is nothing wrong for any group of the military and police of the reactionary government to seek and have an alliance with all or any of the organized forces within the broad united front against the Arroyo regime.”

Still, the series of destabilization moves against President Arroyo could not have been possible without financing from private sources.

A former public official who had “a grudge to bear against the Arroyo administration” had released P100 million to finance the February coup attempt, National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales says.

“The 100 million was used to pay the Magdalo members and other military officers who would join the coup, and because that was their precondition: that their families would get the money in advance in case they died or were arrested.”

Brig. Gen Danilo Lim—the same man who led one of the bloodiest coup attempts against then President Corazon Aquino in 1989—received a substantial sum for his role as overall ground commander of the coup attempt, Gonzales says.

But the biggest surprise of the coup was the participation of an administration ally—a male senator who is said to have provided the communists with two laptops and a stash of M-16 and M-14 rifles.

“I don’t think his intention was to support the removal of the President,” says Ka Rolan, a former member of the communists’ Sparrow assassination squad—the same man who claims the plot against Mrs. Arroyo was hatched as early as 2001.

“He did it because he was being pressured by the NPA, and he succumbed to that pressure. But all things being equal, he cannot deny that he gave the laptops and the guns.”

That so-called pressure failed to impress Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita.

“People in government should not cooperate with the enemies of the state because these are people who undermine the duly elected authorities including himself,” he said. “I can understand that he was probably pressured, but he shouldn’t have given in.”

Another top coup financier is a ranking official of a telecommunications company who believes in Sison’s brand of communism, Ka Rolan says. He claims this official still provides the communists with “huge amounts of revolutionary taxes”—the main reason the communists have stopped bombing his company’s facilities in the provinces except for the first and last attack in 1997.

“This telecom official and Sison, as well as Luis Jalandoni [head of the National Democratic Front, the communists’ political wing] are good friends,” Ka Rolan says.

Another name that came up was that of Manuel Lopez, Estrada’s son-in-law and scion of the Lopez clan. Lopez, who is married to Estrada’s daughter Jackie, admitted to giving P2 million to the Magdalo group in December 2005, but denied the money was meant to finance the February coup. He insisted the money had been meant for the soldiers’ families and the lawyers defending them in court.

Former Ambassador Roy Señeres, who has admitted to having contacts with the Magdalo group, named five other people whom he claims supported a plan to put up a transition government after Mrs. Arroyo was ousted from power: businessman Iñigo Zobel, former Executive Secretary Oscar Orbos, former Defense Secretary Renato de Villa, businessman Antonio Cojuangco, and construction mogul Felipe Cruz Jr.

All five denied involvement in the plot. But Gonzales has stressed that just because the government has not pursued cases against them does not mean the charges against them are inaccurate.

“It’s just that we did not have witnesses against these people,” he says. “It does not mean they are innocent, and I certainly cannot say that they are not guilty.”

JUSTICE SECRETARY Raul Gonzalez has confirmed that at least 20 prominent businessmen had conspired to topple the Arroyo administration in the February coup attempt.

“Their names are already with the NBI for proper investigation,” he says, adding the businessmen were “misled” and that some of them had supported presidential candidates who were defeated in the last elections.

Ermita says that while the government has successfully quashed the coup attempt, it will now ensure that the military men involved are punished and the communist movement is crushed within the next two years.

“You can be sure that there will be no kid-glove treatment this time. We have had our lessons in the past, and we will follow the rule of law,” he says.

“All military officers, senior or junior, whether involved in the Oakwood mutiny in 2003 or in the February coup attempt, will be treated equally. We have started the court-martial proceedings, and nobody has been given amnesty.”

President Arroyo has also created a P1-billion war chest to boost the Armed Forces’ capacity to fight the communists, but Ka Rolan says the NPA leadership is already doing a good job of destroying the movement from within.

He says the NPA has a long history of ridding its ranks of suspected deep-penetration agents, including the Kampanyang Ahos in 1985 and Operations Missing Link and Olympia in Southern Tagalog in 1987, which resulted in the death of around 3,200 people.

The NPA leadership has never admitted the purges, but Ka Rolan puts the blame squarely on Sison. “He should make his denial to the families of the people whom he ordered killed, to people who once believed in him and were willing to kill for his cause,” he says.

“The purges, the abuses committed by some NPA commanders against women rebels, and the fact that CPP leaders Sison and Jalandoni are enjoying themselves in The Netherlands while their comrades here have to fight and die for them are better than military guns in destroying the NPA,” says Ka Rolan who lost his wife to his commander after he took a fancy to her.

Another former rebel, Ka Frank, says the communist purges are still going on because the communist leaders are not convinced that all inflators have been assassinated.

“The killings, tortures and summary executions continue,” he says. “They are so paranoid they cannot even trust their own people who are doing their dirty job for them.”









Copyright Manila Standard Today 2005-06