Soldiers are restive at reports top brass linked to poll fraud
MANILA – Former Armed Forces chief of staff and now Senator Rodolfo Biazon said military officers and servicemen were ready to resign en masse over reports that some generals had been involved in rigging the presidential elections last year.
Worst of all, the generals whose names were mentioned in the “Gloriagate tapes” were promoted instead of punished for their involvement, Biazon said yesterday (July 5).
“When they hear that some senior officers had been used as political tools…they are mad,” Biazon said.
Unlike in the past when the military became restive and resorted to coups, the feeling now is one of defeat, according to Biazon. This is because “the prostitution of the military” had become so ingrained that reform had become all but impossible.
Most of the military, he said, wanted to preserve their constitutional role of defending the country against external threats, free from political interference.
COMMENT: The military has every right to be restive. The AFP had been turned into the private army of Ferdinand Marcos during the martial law years, and corruption was institutionalized. The Edsa Revolt of 1986 was spurred by the demand of a young core of officers who called themselves the Reform the Armed Forces Movement. Later, the Young Officers Union issued a similar demand to reform the AFP. After so many years, those reforms have not taken root, apparently.
Posted at 09:22 pm by Robert del Val
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L. Gonzales
July 6, 2005 12:04 AM PDT
The military, unfortunately, deludes itself into thinking it has become another branch of the government equal to the executive, judicial and legislative bracnches. This thinking has fed on itself over the years, perpetuating an arrangement where the generals think they are the conscience of the nation.
That situation has become worse with the entrance of military officers into politics, where one of them became president and several have been elected into high positions in Congress. Way back in the '50s and '60s. we had politicians with a military background but they never displayed any swagger that we are seeing a lot of today.
Furthermore, we never heard of any scandals that are tainting the integrity of our armed services.
Entrenched as it is in politics today, the military has become a force to reckon with. We need a thorough cleansing
from the top down, though that may take a long, long time. Any president who has the guts to tackle this problem deserves our highest accolades. But no military honors, please! |
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