Philippine Military Under Fire From Critics for Ineffectiveness

SILANG, Philippines —  The hostage drama seemed all too real.

Two dozen commandos from the elite 1st Special Action Force Anti-Terrorist Company silently crept up to a makeshift house where two government officials were being held at gunpoint by Communist terrorists.

On cue, the team’s four expert snipers opened fire on the terrorist guard in the window as the commandos, wearing gas masks and armed with Uzi submachine guns, stormed the house with guns blazing. Seconds later, the commandos were out.

“Mission accomplished, sir,” the team leader announced.

Not quite.

The results of the demonstration of the anti-terrorist capabilities of the Philippine armed forces were discouraging. Both hostages had been killed and two of their five captors escaped unhurt.

Only Paper Targets

Fortunately, the principal actors in last Tuesday’s exercise were paper targets with watermelons for heads. But the drill at a remote military camp here was witnessed not only by Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, the armed forces chief of staff, but more than 60 national and foreign journalists as well.

And it came during a week in which President Corazon Aquino’s 200,000-member Philippine military was under attack, facing the strongest criticism of its effectiveness and incurring its highest casualty toll since Aquino came to power a year ago.

It has been just two weeks since Aquino “unsheathed the sword of war” and ordered her troops back into combat in the nation’s bloody, 18-year Communist insurgency.

But already, many military experts here say, the Philippine military has shown signs that it is no different now than it was under deposed President Ferdinand E. Marcos, whose two decades in power not only gave rise to the insurgency but saw the rebel force grow in size to its current strength of 23,200 armed regulars nationwide.

A Grim Performance

The military’s performance since a 60-day cease-fire with the Communist rebels ended Feb. 8 is grim, at best.

By the military’s own accounts, in the last two weeks alone at least 54 Filipinos have been killed, more than half of them civilians. What is worse, far more soldiers were killed than suspected rebels.

The insurgents have shown their ability to attack virtually any government target at will. Last Wednesday, a rebel force of about 100 attacked a troop train carrying 650 soldiers. The rebels blew up one of the cars with a remote-controlled mine. They then fired on the train for nearly 30 minutes before reinforcements arrived, leaving at least one soldier dead and five seriously wounded.

There are also renewed charges of military brutality, most of them focusing on a Feb. 10 massacre of 12 civilians that some leftist and independent analysts here have begun comparing to the My Lai incident in Vietnam, in which as many as 100 people were reported killed.

On Tuesday, the governor of the Nueva Ecija province delivered a stack of eyewitness affidavits to Aquino asserting that soldiers from the army’s 14th Infantry Battalion had opened fire on the civilians after their company commander was killed by rebels hiding in local homes.

The military later reported that the 12 civilians were killed, one hut was burned down and many others ransacked.

The same day, Ramos ordered all 85 officers and enlisted men in the battalion confined to barracks and opened a special, high-level investigation.

“There are so many things that have to be straightened up before any effective counterinsurgency effort can be done,” said retired Gen. Jesus Vargas, 82, who was military chief of staff in the 1950s when a similar Communist rebellion was defeated and who is now an outspoken critic of the military under Ramos.

“Gen. Ramos calls this the New Armed Forces of the Philippines, but I don’t see what’s new about it. The people in the countryside, they still hate the soldiers. They don’t trust the military. And if you do not have the confidence of the people, they will conceal the dissidents and the military will fail.”

Civilians Have Role

Ramos conceded last week that the Communist New People’s Army is effectively using sympathetic civilians as their armor, but he charged that it was an illustration of the rebels’ brutality rather than of the lack of popular support for the military.

“I think we should realize we are in a guerrilla war,” Ramos told reporters after the training exercise Tuesday. “Their (the rebels) tactics are foul. They use the people as their shields, and when they commit atrocities, the people who are the victims of those atrocities have no recourse.

“However, if it is the soldier (who is accused), there is a whole array of systems to bring charges.”

To Ramos and many senior military commanders increasingly challenging Aquino’s “talk-then-fight” counterinsurgency policy, such inequities have handicapped the armed forces in their effort to put down a rebellion that is quickly escalating into a full-blown civil war.

“The soldiers, especially our commanders, are now like boxers in a championship fight with one hand and one leg tied behind their back,” Ramos said angrily.

But to war veterans such as Vargas, who is among a group of retired yet highly respected senior officers urging Aquino to replace Ramos, such analogies are “foolish.”

“Why should he let a situation like that continue?” Vargas asked during an interview last week. “If I were still chief of staff, I would try my very best to persuade President Aquino to change her policy, and if I cannot, and if my hands and feet are tied, I would resign.

“Gen. Ramos is too indecisive. He should take action.”

Vargas and several other retired officers, who are close to Aquino’s top advisers and represent a significant lobbying group, were particularly critical of the killings in Nueva Ecija.

“Soldiers have no reason to kill those people just because Communists slept in their houses,” Vargas said. “What is needed now is a massive re-education and reorientation program for these soldiers.”

Credibility Damaged

The rift within the military’s ranks has hurt the counterinsurgency effort. As Vargas and a handful of active-duty officers who remained anonymous intensified their attacks on Ramos in the Philippine press last week, top commanders began to worry about the military’s credibility.

“For this country to survive, the armed forces has to be intact and in the middle,” said one senior commander in Ramos’ general headquarters. “The way most of us see it, Ramos has been most effective at just that. If he hadn’t been here, this organization may well have fallen apart six months ago--and the retired generals better realize fast that the Communists want nothing more than our collapse.”

But the so-called “dump-Ramos” campaign gained deeper support late last week when Aquino’s chief of civilian intelligence, retired Gen. Luis Villareal, joined the ranks publicly denouncing the 58-year-old chief of staff as “inept” and “ineffective” as a commander.

Diplomats Concerned

American diplomats responsible for monitoring the Philippine military here also were concerned about the splits, but they were far less critical of the chief of staff himself. They praised Ramos for an ongoing military re-education program that includes not only courses in discipline and public relations in the field but also Bible study.

“I think they’re on the right track now,” said one source, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified by name. “I’ve seen some improvements.”

Other diplomatic sources hinted that the reports on the Nueva Ecija incident are being exploited by the Communists political front groups, which are aware that the U.S. Congress will begin crucial hearings in March on next year’s military-aid appropriations to the Philippines.

“All those congressmen will have to see are reports about a My Lai massacre by the Philippine army and they’ll start cutting appropriations right and left like they did under Marcos,” the diplomatic source said.

“I still believe, though, that the solution to this insurgency does not lie with the military. The national will in the civilian sector is the key factor. The farmer and the political leader out there in the countryside has to be committed to defeating the insurgency, and I think that’s where the problem is.”

Ramos, too, has focused most of his efforts on trying to motivate the civilian leadership in the rural areas where the insurgency is strongest. He has likened local government to a basketball team in which the mayor or village chief is the center who must be the foundation of the defense and “the eyes and ears of the military.”

“We can only provide you with logistical support,” he told one mayors group in a remote province recently. “We cannot have a soldier in all 41,000 (villages). In the final analysis, you must protect yourselves by helping us protect you.”

Ramos and his senior regional commanders are also acutely aware of the damage done by each war casualty, not only civilian casualties but rebels as well.

Speaking to a peasant crowd in the Cagayan Valley several hundred miles north of Manila where the insurgency is particularly intense, the regional commander, Gen. Felix Brawner, declared: “Through the use of force, we may be able to kill 100 people, but will that bring us peace? I do not think that is the solution.

‘Earning Enemies’

“When you kill one man, knowing he has at least five relatives, you have earned five new enemies.

“But you must help us not to kill. We can have a system where when new faces come into town armed with guns, you let us know, and we’ll clobber them. Then their friends will know they are not welcome in your place.”

Most of the military commanders, though, have resigned themselves to the realities of a guerrilla war in which populated towns, villages and even private huts are the battlegrounds.

“And, as in any war of this kind, the largest number of casualties are always the noncombatants,” said Gen. Luis San Andres, one of Ramos’ deputy chiefs of staff.

What is beginning to worry other analysts even more, though, is the overall preparedness of the Philippine armed forces to defend its civilians, if and when they do give their confidence and support.

On visits to provincial military camps, armored personnel carries with bald tires, howitzers without firing pins, soldiers short on ammunition wearing worn and incomplete uniforms are in plain view. In some rural areas, soldiers do not even have combat boots.

And even as the military is trying to become more self-sufficient in its logistics and equipment after decades of relying on billions of dollars worth of American materiel support, there was another illustration during last Tuesday’s training exercises of failures in that program as well.

Immediately after the anti-terrorist exercise, Ramos was taken to a makeshift firing range for a demonstration of a Philippine-designed and Philippine-made rifle grenade that is fired simply by slipping it onto the barrel of a standard-issue M-16 assault rifle.

Ramos himself tested the new weapon and scored a bull’s-eye, but every other officer who fired it missed. Three of the 24 rounds fired that day were duds.

“That’s about right,” said the colonel who heads the training camp. “According to our tests, 3 of 32 don’t work. That’s 10%. That’s not good.”