MANILA, 16 May 2004 — President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo yesterday invited her opponents to join a government of national unity and reconciliation, and at the same time warned that any attempt to “destabilize” the nation would be met with “the full force of the law.”
While the nation awaited results of an official count on Monday’s general elections, exit polls and unofficial counts conducted by the rival parties have indicated a victory by Arroyo.
As early as the night of election day, hundreds of followers of Arroyo’s closest rival, actor Fernando Poe Jr. gathered at Manila’s financial district of Makati, claiming that their candidate was cheated even before any official tally had been released.
The protest rally fizzled but rumors of a coup plot had been flying as ousted former President Joseph Estrada, who is under detention on charges of economic plunder, called on his supporters to mount a “people power” revolution in support of Poe.
President Arroyo’s spokesman Ignacio Bunye said yesterday that “any attempt to destabilize the government will be a blatant travesty of the Filipino people’s will as expressed during the May 10 elections.”
“We discourage those disgruntled politicians and their allies from any sinister plans, which will be met with the full force of law,” he said in a statement.
In an ABS-CBN TV interview on Friday, Arroyo called the elections “an opportunity for change,” and said she needed a six-year mandate to complete economic and political reforms she began when she succeeded Estrada after his ouster in a 2001 “people power” revolt. Beating Poe and three other candidates would give Arroyo her first public mandate to run the country.
Final official results from the May 10 vote won’t be out for weeks, with counting being done manually after the Supreme Court nullified a contract to automate the voting and counting process for being ridden with irregularities.
As a result, even the supposed “quick count” by the officially sanctioned election watchdog Namfrel had been dragging. Five days after election day, Namfrel had tallied less than 30 percent of the votes cast as of last night.
That count showed incumbent Arroyo leading Poe Jr. slightly.
Sen. Edgardo Angara, a key official of Poe’s coalition, said they have no intention of launching a “people power” revolution.
But he said they were not just going to let the alleged cheating by the Arroyo administration go unchallenged.
Opposition candidates claim the extremely slow manual counting of votes, which is expected to be completed in about a month, could also be another avenue for cheating.
Presidential candidate Panfilo Lacson, who is in third place, said yesterday his campaign staff was preparing to file a complaint with the Commission on Elections over reports that official canvassers in some areas were re-shuffled without prior notice.
Lacson said he asked his lawyers and volunteer poll watchers to remain in the field until the last ballot has been counted.
Although an exit poll has reportedly pointed to President Arroyo as the likely winner, none of her four opponents has conceded defeat in the bitterly contested presidential race. Alyansa ng Pag-Asa standard-bearer Raul Roco, trailing badly — like Lacson and evangelist Eddie Villanueva — in the unofficial count, has slammed the elections as a “soiled process.”
Roco said votes were bought by as much as 1,000 pesos each.
In an interview with the Inquirer, Roco categorically said he would not seek any public position under the next administration.
Asked if he was already conceding defeat, Roco said: “You cannot concede because there is no winner, and it is unclear as to who is the (real winner).”
Be Counted
Villanueva launched yesterday what he called a nationwide fact-finding mission — dubbed “Operation Be Counted” — to verify reports that close to one million Filipinos were unable to vote in the polls.
The aim of “Operation Be Counted” is to gather any evidence of widespread cheating and it would then be up to the people to decide whether or not to accept the election results, Villanueva said in an interview on ANC television.
“Our objective is to list down the Filipinos who were not able to vote and whose rights to elect the leader of their choice were trampled upon,” said the top preacher of the Jesus is Lord charismatic movement and leader of the Bangon Pilipinas movement.
“If there is evidence that there was massive fraud and cheating, we will report that to the people ... Let the people decide.”
Villanueva, whose supporters alleged that many of them were prevented from voting, said it was premature to talk of conceding defeat while a cloud hovered over the credibility of the polls.
“As far as the Bangon Pilipinas movement is concerned, we cannot accept a bogus president,” he declared.
“What we need is a legitimate president who should have won (in) a clean, honest and legitimate election.”
He said his orders to his followers was to gather the signatures of people who failed to vote because they could not find their names in their precincts.
The evangelist also called for “unity, vigilance and sobriety. “
“I would like to tell all that Brother Eddie will not concede until it becomes clear what is truly the will of the people,” he said.
He said he would not concede defeat unless the “huge and ugly cloud of doubt in the elections” was cleared.
He cited alleged padding of voter’s lists, massive vote buying, ballot box stuffing and the “mysterious” power outages during the counting as among the irregularities.
Conceding defeat is also very premature while less than 10 percent of the votes has been canvassed, he said.
Once cases of widespread cheating were documented, “we can cripple this dirty system and initiate reforms” for future elections, Villanueva separately said at a news conference in Bocaue town, Bulacan province.
Broad Front
In response to Arroyo’s invitation, self-exiled Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria Sison said that left-wing parties seeking congressional seats can form “a broad united front with all other parties and candidates that the regime has also cheated.”
“The massive cheating can ignite a protest movement that is strong enough to topple the Macapagal Arroyo regime,” he said in a statement.
Sison lives in exile in the Netherlands. The military believes he still leads the Communist Party and its military arm, the New People’s Army.
Arroyo refused to talk about allegations of vote tampering and irregularities, and said opponents “can protest verbally” within the law.
Instead, she said she wanted to form a “government of national unity and reconciliation, and it would be good if my opponents would join me.”
Arroyo said she’d work on “institutional reforms” and changing the country’s culture of corruption while speeding up privatization of public utilities and keeping the budget deficit down.
On Friday, she urged members of her Cabinet to tender courtesy resignations and give her a chance to rebuild her team.
Just Usual Talk
Amid coup rumors, the military also warned that troops would use “necessary force” to maintain order.
On the other hand, security analyst Rene Jarque, a former army officer who used to be with the military’s office of strategic studies, said: “There are no actual threats. What we are actually hearing is part of the political noise during elections.”
Lt. Col. Daniel Lucero, a military spokesman, denied there was any restiveness and said the rumors were “just disinformation purposely meant to confuse and polarize our ranks.”
“Our chain of command is working properly,” he said.
Several retired generals, most of them identified with Poe’s camp, raised concerns over the army’s role in the reported vote manipulation on the southern island of Mindanao, which is home to thousands of Muslim and communist rebels.
But some government officials countered that the retired officers themselves were encouraging soldiers to join plots to undermine the election.
Lt. Gen. Rodolfo Garcia, commander of the army’s election taskforce, said troops had been non-partisan.
“It is unfair to our soldiers who have exerted all their efforts to ensure the sanctity of the process,” he told reporters. (Input from agencies)
