By Jocelyn Uy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
12/24/2008

MANILA, Philippines—A few days before Christmas, a detained Magdalo soldier gave his only son a fitting gift—a book he authored to answer questions left unspoken and share kernels of wisdom learned behind bars.

“I believe every father would like to be a hero to his son. It was once my dream. Now, I had to let go of that dream, for I wish I could be someone better,” former Navy Lt. Manuel Cabochan wrote in his book.

“I no longer would like to be the hero whom my son will only talk about. I dream to be the father whom my son will be so much willing to talk and be with.”

After six years in detention, it finally dawned on Cabochan that he needed to do something to make his 14-year-old son Myman understand him and salvage whatever ties remained between them.

“He could not explain it all in just one sitting. He thought he needed to explain it in a way our son can take … as to why he is still locked up and why he is enduring life in detention,” Myla, Cabochan’s wife, said in an interview with the Inquirer.

She burst into tears in apparent relief when her husband told her sometime in August of his plan to write Myman, initially, a letter, Myla recounted. But as the letter stretched from one page to another, he decided to turn it into a book instead.

Thus, the 144-page paperback, “A Father’s Confession—Chronicles of a Rebel Soldier,” exclusively for Myman’s eyes for now.

Myla said the book should be available on bookstore shelves once her husband walked free from prison.

It was handed to the boy by his school principal several days before Christmas Day.

Myman was 8 years old when soldiers calling themselves Magdalo took over Oakwood Premier hotel in Makati City in 2003, and his father was charged in connection with the mutiny.

Boy’s unanswered hopes

Just when Myman was expecting the release of his father four years later, Magdalo soldiers took over Peninsula Manila Hotel in November 2007 in a short-lived attempt to ignite a “people power” revolution.

Suddenly, dreams of a new life with his father vanished for the son.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines made sure that Cabochan, along with former Navy Lt. now Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim and 17 other officers, was tried for rebellion before a military tribunal on top of a pending coup d’etat case in the Makati Regional Trial Court.

Since the botched Peninsula takeover last year, Cabochan and his comrades have been locked up inside Camp Crame’s maximum security facility, where time with loved ones was always short.

Myman usually visited his father on weekends, an occasion he looked forward to. But following the latest caper, the boy started to get lower grades and appeared distant to his father whenever he dropped by at Camp Crame for a visit.

Two months after the Peninsula incident, father and son found themselves in a serious talk.

Time to understand

“I was surprised how much he has grown while I was away, while I was in detention. He is now asking questions … those that I was not able to explain clearly to his young mind when he was in grade 4, it is now time to make him understand,” Cabochan wrote.

He made sure that the book was not political and that it spoke directly to his son, lacing it with slices of humor, bits of fatherly advice and the inevitable nostalgia.

On weekdays when visitors were not allowed, his small iron-grilled cell turned into a fertile chamber for his writing, sparking occasional smiles and tears.

The daylong uprising at Peninsula was chronicled in the book—from the daring walkout during a court hearing to his first trip to his detention’s comfort room, where he brushed his teeth with a handkerchief sans toiletries.

Christmas at Camp Crame was always a “jumbled day of the year” ending too early at 5 p.m., he described. The family celebration always began with a simbang gabi (dawn Mass) at 10 a.m. and noche buena at noon.

“At 5 p.m., let me just see you off with my eyes … please do not look back … Merry Christmas,” Cabochan wrote.

‘Life is never easy’

“I must admit, life in a detention camp is never easy. It is full of hardships, disappointments and conflict. Do not ever try it,” he advised.

In a chapter labeled “On My Dark Side,” he recounted childhood memories that taught him important lessons like knowing how to give to others without discounts.

After coming home from school one day, he argued with a tricycle driver for letting him pay the full fare. His parents told him afterward that he was given his “baon” (allowance) in full, without discounts, so he can help others striving for their families, he recounted.

“If anything was intended for the services of other people, we learned to give what was due them … Be considerate of the plight of other people,” he wrote.

But life’s harder lessons came when he entered the Philippine Military Academy, where he discovered his passion to serve others.

In his freshman year when Baguio City was rocked by a killer earthquake, he crawled beneath the rubble of the collapsed Hyatt Terraces with seasoned miners and volunteers looking for trapped survivors.

“It was a privilege to do service for the people of Baguio,” he wrote.

A reason for rebellion

Cabochan carried with him this privilege and the values he learned from the PMA when he started serving in the AFP.

But as wars happened in Mindanao with comrades coming back home strangers to their families, maimed or scarred, he grew disappointed, he related.

Thus, the Oakwood mutiny, which he said attempted to rouse the government from its slumber and start solving age-old problems faced by the country’s weary soldiers.

“They called us coup plotters, putschists, messianic people, destabilizers and many more. It does not matter. People call you names because somehow you are relevant,” Cabochan wrote.

But there was one person who did not call him names, stayed with him and prayed fervently for him—his wife.

“For each of my failures, it was Myla who was suffering the most. But each time, she just prayed, asked Saint Jude for help, and waited for me to recover … ”

“She has learned to understand me, without me even saying a word. She was my best friend then and she still is today. I was her impossible dream and her worst nightmare, rolled into one and coming true,” he said.

Bedtime companion

Father and son have not had a lengthy conversation about the book yet, Myla said.

But the book was Myman’s company at bedtime. “It’s beside him when he sleeps,” she added.

To the boy, his father’s history made him “laugh, sad, depressed and excited.”

“It touched my heart,” Myman said.

It might still take time before he can fully comprehend the choices his father made, but he was getting there, Myla added. “He started joking with his father during our last visit.”

As for Cabochan, his son might be in the period of “teenage rebellion”—a life’s chapter of discovery, questions, doubts and choices. “[But] I believe he will make the right choice. He will be a better man than his father,” he said in the book.

Editorial

Philippine Daily Inquirer
12/22/2008

THE launch of the new Movement for Good Governance is both welcome and necessary, not least because it helps focus public attention on the 2010 elections. At a time when the ruling coalition is exploring every avenue for staying in power beyond 2010, the coalition of NGOs behind the movement will bring additional pressure to bear on the Arroyo administration to stick to the original election schedule.

But ensuring that the May 2010 elections will push through as scheduled is only half the battle; the other half is a strenuous contest to decide who should serve as the country’s next set of leaders.

The MGG is run by men and women of achievement, with a deserved reputation for reform work in elections and governance, such as former finance undersecretary Milwida Guevara of the Synergeia Foundation and former National Movement for Free Elections IT expert Gus Lagman of Transparent Election.org. But, in our view, it is two programs in particular that help raise the movement above the usual level of do-good work, and recommend it to men and women of good will.

The coalition—it remains to be seen whether the movement will act as a loose alliance of like-minded organizations and individuals or a more tightly organized structure, like Namfrel—seeks to mobilize 10 million voters under the banner of good governance, primarily by registering new or first-time voters.

This is an ambitious goal, but with both substantial and symbolic impact. In a crowded field of equal-strength presidential candidates, such as in 1992, a total of 10 million votes would be more than enough to win the presidency. Even in the lopsided presidential race of 1998, when the eventual winner was a clear front runner from start to finish, Joseph Estrada claimed victory with less than 11 million votes.

It will be difficult enough to draw millions of new registrants to the voting booth, but the real difficulty with the 10-million target is constituting the new or first-time voters as a constituency for good governance. We can expect millions to sign up simply as a statement against the Arroyo administration, its corruption scandals and its shamelessly obvious attempts to stay in power—in the same way that millions of voters elected both Alan Peter Cayetano and especially Antonio Trillanes IV into the Senate in 2007 as a protest against Malacañang. But there is the very real possibility that, as in 1992 and 1998, the presidential race in 2010 will draw a crowd of candidates. In that case, who will be the true candidate for reform?

It is thus incumbent on MGG and other such reform-oriented groups to engage also in voter education. Guevara says that while the coalition will not endorse any presidential candidate in particular, “it’s possible that via an organic process ahead of the elections, views may converge to endorse a set of leaders.” That process is key.

The other program that recommends the MGG’s plan of action to all Filipinos invested in clean and honest elections is its transparency initiative, which hopes to make election results throughout the country immediately available via mobile phones or the Internet.

“Everybody will have power of information at their fingertips and that makes 40 million of us poll watchers, far better than the half a million that Namfrel can put up,” said Guillermo Luz, formerly Namfrel executive director and a member of MGG.

Lagman says he has designed an “Open Election System” that can protect the ballot by publishing election results in real time. Again, proof of viability is required, but there should be no question that it can be done. Filipinos who trust the lotto system have long wondered why Philippine election technology works at the slowest possible pace. (The reason, of course, is that wholesale fraud happens in slow motion.)

Lagman’s call is simplicity itself. “Let’s use technology not only to prevent cheating but to make the elections more transparent.” Only those who have something to hide want the elections to remain opaque.

By Alejandro Lichauco
The Daily Tribune
12/18/2008

The fate of the GMA regime — whether it will meet the fate of Marcos and Erap or survive calls for its ouster — won’t be determined by the political opposition or even by the parliament of the streets. That fate will be determined by the outcome of the struggle between two ideologically opposed views raging within the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).

What are those views?

One is represented by AFP Chief Alexander Yano. And the other is represented by Gen. Danny Lim of the prestigious Scout Rangers and currently under arrest for his alleged complicity in a plot to politically pre-terminate the term of this government.

At the height of the Dec. 12 rally against Constituent Assembly (Con-ass), there was wide expectation that the AFP, through General Yano, will formally announce that the AFP was withdrawing its support for the regime. In brief, that Yano will do an Angelo Reyes when the latter, as then chief of staff under the Erap government, turned against the nation’s Commander-in-Chief at the height of a militant protest demanding Erap’s resignation.

The declaration of withdrawal just didn’t come about. Instead, General Yano issued a statement reiterating the AFP’s allegiance to the regime on grounds that the Constitution as well as the democratic process requires that the AFP’s allegiance to the incumbent regime be maintained.

The Yano statement, which was reported in the Star was an explicit repudiation of the view that the regime is illegitimate and corrupt and, being illegitimate and corrupt, doesn’t deserve the support of the AFP which is mandated by the Constitution to protect the people and the State.

In arguing his position, Yano implied that Edsa ll was a mistake. It was a pointed reference to Edsa ll, when an incumbent president was forced out of office by the AFP withdrawal of support. Yano claimed that the AFP “has a already matured,” and that it “won’t allow itself to be used as shortcut or a quick-fix solution to resolve political and social issues.”

Yano, of course, can’t be blamed for taking that position in light of the growing popular realization that the forcible ouster of the Erap government was, after all really a mistake. What Yano was in brief saying was that for all the sins attributed to the current regime, the lesson of Edsa ll shouldn’t be forgotten. If it was a mistake then for the AFP to withdraw support for the sitting government of Erap, the AFP shouldn’t commit that same mistake today by withdrawing support for an equally sitting government of GMA.

You will have to admit that the Yano position has an appeal of its own to common logic.

Yano’s position, of course, was bolstered by the fact that the Dec. 12 rally wasn’t a rally calling for GMA’s ouster. It was a rally protesting Con-ass.

Now, as to the opposite position. That position was stated by Gen. Danny Lim in a manifesto read for him by Bishops Tobias at a press conference two weeks ago.
Lim’s position was that GMA’s regime is illegitimate and that because of its corruption, the regime has “become the greatest continuing threat to the security, cooperative spirit, well being and sense of nationhood of the Filipino people.”
“A true leader,” Lim emphasized, — is a symbol of unity and a rallying figure especially in difficult times. A bogus leader is divisive and stays in power to the detriment of the good and the national interest.

Lim then proceeded to define the kind of leadership which he believes can save the nation. He called for a nationalist leadership that would challenge colonial masters and their local surrogates, abandon debt payments, push industrialization and sustainable agrarian reform.

‘There isn’t any question that is the Yano and Lim statements, respectively, issues have been joined. There isn’t any turning back and it remains to be seen which of the two opposed views and mindset will eventually command the support of the rank and file of the AFP, or at least those in positions of strategic command within the AFP.

There isn’t any question either that the opposing views of Yano and Lim represent a fundamental conflict between the traditional, conventional mindset of the military, on one hand, and the mindset of an emerging faction within the military resolved to bring about the fulfillment of Bonifacio’s unfinished revolution. It is a mindset reflected in the very name which that emerging faction has chosen to give itself: The Bagong Katipunan.

The fate of this regime will largely depend on the outcome of the ongoing struggle between the mindset represented by Yano and the mindset represented by Lim and the Bagong Katipunan. And the civilian sector will eventually have to make up its mind which faction and mindset to support.

In a sense, it can be said that the civil war which many have feared could eventually come about has actually started within the AFP.