A FEW YEARS AGO I went to interview Joseph Estrada in one of his lush Manila mansions. A roly-poly former action movie star gone to seed–with his Errol Flynn moustache and his Elvis bouffant hair–he was, amazingly enough, at that time, vice president of the Philippines.
I was ushered in to meet Estrada’s chief of staff, a casually dressed fellow absorbed in a cerebral looking journal called The Denim Review.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “the vice president will be a bit late for your appointment. I think he’s having a massage, but sometimes in the afternoon he has a nap.”
Estrada went on to win a democratic election and become president–one of the worst the country has known. And believe me that’s saying something.
He plundered millions of dollars in personal corruption and made all his real decisions in smoke-filled all-night drinking sessions with his “midnight cabinet” of gangster cronies and pals from the entertainment world. Under Estrada, foreign investment fled and Islamic terrorism took hold in the south.
Now the Philippines looks set to repeat this winning formula by electing another fading action movie star, Fernando Poe Jr., as president in national elections on May 10.
Poe is backed by some of the same cronies who surrounded Estrada and before that the late Ferdinand Marcos. Already serious discussion is underway in Manila about the prospects and mechanics of a military coup should Poe win.
But the truth is, even if the incumbent, the feisty but ineffectual Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, should hang on, the Philippines is on a one-way road to crisis and perhaps catastrophe.
With all the difficulties in Iraq and the Middle East, no one in Washington wants to hear this right now. But the Philippines could be the next giant mess for U.S. foreign policy. Already, the 7 million Muslims of Mindanao and surrounding areas in the southern Philippines form substantially a no-go area for the government. This no-go area provides the heartland for al Qaeda-linked terrorism in Southeast Asia.
But this is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the profound crisis of governance in the Philippines. Philippine politics has been so corrupt, so incestuous, and so ineffective for so long that most Filipinos no longer take it seriously. There is a blithe irresponsibility to voters’ choices. Electing a movie star like Poe–who unlike Estrada has no history of seeking elective office or even expressing views on political issues–seems no more irresponsible than electing a regular politician.
This may change because things are steadily getting worse. The Philippines may be a failing state. It’s not a failed state–that’s some distance off. But it’s failing. One telling sign is that all these years after the fall of communism there is still a serious Communist insurgency in the Philippines. Of course, it’s fueled mostly by gangsterism rather than ideology, but a state has to have a very low level of legitimacy before the lunacies of Communist ideology, however attenuated, can have any appeal.
Beyond the Islamic and Communist insurgencies, all the social indicators are heading south. Asian Development Bank figures show that in 1996 per capita gross domestic product was $1,153. By 2002 it was $894. Population increase is out of control. Today’s 85 million Filipinos will be 100 million by 2010.
Economic development is often stymied by a peculiar mixture of bad security, excess regulation, corruption, and mad, populist, left-wing activism. Mining is a classic example. The United Nations lists the Philippines as the fifth most mineral-rich nation on Earth. Yet minerals now account for less than 3 percent of exports, compared with 25 percent two decades ago. Under populist anti-foreign pressure, the Supreme Court ruled the Minerals Act unconstitutional because it allowed foreign ownership of mines. The result is minerals stay in the ground and Filipinos stay poor.
Now, however, the pervasive crisis of governance in the Philippines is hurting the interests of other nations. In Southeast Asia, Singapore excepted, it’s as well to be fairly pragmatic about corruption. But corruption in the Philippines is now compromising the war on terror.
The Philippines’ Muslims have a lot of legitimate grievances against the central government, and most of them want nothing to do with terrorist groups. But the ineffectiveness of the state means that many terrorist, separatist, and just plain criminal groups thrive now in the Muslim areas. The two most important Muslim terrorist groups are the Abu Sayyaf gang, a small, murderous crew who have specialized in kidnapping tourists for ransom but have recently branched out into bombings, and the much bigger Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
The MILF may have up to 12,000 men under arms. It tries to look more mainstream and legitimate than Abu Sayyaf and denies links to al Qaeda, though these links are well established.
It also has intimate cooperation with the al Qaeda affiliate based in Indonesia, Jemaah Islamiyah. JI carried out the 2002 bombings in Bali which killed more than 200 people, about half of them Australians.
JI uses MILF-controlled territory for rest and recreation purposes, and more important for training. Western intelligence knows of at least one functioning JI camp in Lanao del Norte, in Mindanao.
On its face, that is astonishing. The Philippines is a military ally in good standing with the United States, yet al Qaeda-linked terrorist training camps flourish in its territory. Not only that, they flourish in part through the assistance of corrupt elements of the Philippine military.
In July 2003 a ridiculously good-looking, young naval lieutenant, Antonio Trillanes IV, led an abortive coup attempt. He said he was disgusted at military corruption, especially the military’s sale of weapons to the terrorists. After Trillanes went to jail, some public-minded citizen circulated the term papers Trillanes had written a year earlier while a student at the Philippines National College of Public Administration.
They laid out in astounding detail a catalogue of incidents in which the military had cooperated in seaborne smuggling of weapons and other supplies to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Throughout the south, terrorist groups have become deeply involved with organized crime and bribery of local officials, giving the Philippines that most deadly combination–terrorism intertwined with criminal and commercial networks.
What can Washington do?
It may soon have to make tough choices. Imagine the fallout of a major terrorist incident in Southeast Asia (or in the United States for that matter) in which large numbers of Americans die and it turns out the terrorists were trained in the Philippines. Would Washington feel obliged to take out, militarily, the JI camps then?
Imagine if Poe wins, governs appallingly, and there is a coup. Say the coup leader cracks down effectively on terrorists. Would Washington move to crush the coup in order to restore such a broken democracy?
The deeper tragedy of all this is that the Filipinos are mostly such likable and talented people. They deserve better. But their politics is broken. Helping them fix it should be a higher priority for a number of countries–Japan, Australia, its Southeast Asian neighbors–not just the United States.
Given the historical links, however, the United States is often presumed to play a unique role in Philippine politics. Certainly in recent years the Philippine military has performed well against the terrorists only when there have been American soldiers looking over their shoulders.
Washington hardly needs another crisis right now. But the Philippines may be heading for a train wreck in which we all get badly hurt.
Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian, is a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of Cities of the Hot Zone: A Southeast Asian Adventure (Allen and Unwin).
