Monday, Feb. 24, 1986
By George Russell
As a parody of
democracy, the scene had a certain dramatic
charm. Until they were ordered into silence,
hundreds of colorfully dressed spectators in the
galleries of the Philippine National Assembly
cheered and booed passionately as politicians on
the turquoise-carpeted floor below walked
through their parts. One at a time, brown
envelopes containing vote totals from each of
the country's 147 voting centers were presented
to the legislators for inspection. Tallies were
read aloud, and results posted on green tote
boards that were lined up before the 200
mahogany desks of the Assembly. Charges flew
that some envelopes were improperly sealed, that
entire towns had been eliminated from some of
the tallying documents. Jeers and accusations
rocketed back and forth, and recording the
objections to all the voting certificates took
hours.
Inexorably,
the charade moved the Philippines closer to a
new turning point in a potentially explosive
national drama. At week's end the National
Assembly, dominated by members of President
Ferdinand Marcos' ruling New Society Movement,
produced its tally after angry opposition
members walked out of the legislative hall to
protest government railroad tactics. The rump
gathering declared that Marcos, 68, had defeated
his presidential rival, Corazon ("Cory") Aquino,
53, by 10,807,179 votes to 9,491,716.
Thus, in a
final travesty of parliamentary procedure, the
Assembly formally declared that Marcos had been
re-elected President, in an election whose
outcome had been shaped by vote buying,
intimidation, outright fraud and bloodshed. The
legislative body also proclaimed the election of
Marcos' running mate, Arturo Tolentino, 75,
ending weeks of speculation that the autocrat
might find a way to include Aquino's
vice-presidential running mate, Salvador Laurel,
57, in his newly refurbished government.
As the
counting proceeded in the cool confines of the
Assembly building, each vote recorded for Marcos
added anger and outrage to the tension building
across the far-flung archipelago. Tentatively
but with increasing signs of determination,
Aquino supporters were starting to take their
frustrations into the streets. Wav- ing clenched
fists and chanting "Fight! Fight!," thousands of
Filipinos marched in a 13-mile procession
through the capital. They escorted the
flag-draped coffin of Evelio Javier, 43, a
regional Aquino campaign chairman who had been
brutally gunned down days earlier in the
province of Antique. Though far smaller in
scale, the Javier funeral demonstration reminded
many Filipinos of the huge outpourings of grief
that followed the 1983 assassination of Aquino's
husband Benigno Aquino Jr.
Meanwhile, the
104-member Catholic Bishops' Conference of the
Philippines added its powerful voice to the
clamor of those who claimed that Marcos had
stolen the election. After a two-day meeting,
the clerics sharply attacked Marcos by asserting
that "a government that assumes or maintains
power through fraudulent means has no moral
basis." To those who agreed with them, the
bishops issued a call for a "nonviolent struggle
for justice."
Watching
closely was the slight, determined figure of
Corazon Aquino. The quiet widow who had turned
into candidate and crusader, who had ignited a
popular passion for change during her 57-day
election campaign, continued to insist last week
that she rather than Marcos was the rightful
President of the Philippines. Deliberately
ignoring the National Assembly hoopla, Aquino
went on the personal offensive. She staged a
giant rally in Manila's Rizal Park on Sunday to
protest Marcos' alleged election fraud. That
event was the kickoff of a protracted "People's
Victory" campaign of nonviolent rallies and
boycotts in coming weeks around the country.
The
culmination of the Victory plan would be a
nationwide general strike, accompanied by other
acts of civil disobedience. Aquino's goal was to
make Marcos relinquish the power he has wielded
from the presidential Malacanang Palace since
1966. Said she: "Let me appeal to all friends of
democracy and supporters of freedom abroad.
Stand tall by these principles that you and I
hold dear."
Slowly but
steadily, political events in the Philippines
seemed to be rolling to- ward a point of no
return. Where the pro- cess might lead was
unforseeable. Once again the wily, ailing Marcos
had seem- ingly entrenched himself by nominally
democratic means, a strategy he has used on four
occasions since 1972. But this time his victory,
and his subsequent authority, seemed more hollow
than ever.
Suddenly there
was a prospect of dramatic political unrest and
repression in the former U.S. colony, which
might ultimately pose a threat to the two
important U.S. military bases on the islands,
Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. The
growing confrontation promised to redound to the
benefit of the increasingly powerful Communist
New People's Army, whose insurgency will soon,
in the Pentagon's view, pose a real military
challenge to the Marcos regime.
Few people had
more reason to be concerned at the latest turn
of events than President Reagan. Increasingly,
the White House found itself on the spot in what
Richard Holbrooke, a former Assistant Secretary
of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs,
called "the most serious foreign policy crisis
this Administration has faced."
As part of a
U.S. bid to solve the crisis, Philip Habib, 65,
a specially appointed U.S. envoy, late last week
flew at President Reagan's behest to Manila.
Habib's mission: to find some way of reconciling
the opposing Aquino and Marcos political camps.
On arrival, the diplomat immediately closeted
himself for the weekend with members of the U.S.
embassy staff.
Even as Habib
winged on his way, the Administration was
preparing to issue its statement in reaction to
Marcos' proclaimed re-election. Among other
things, it declared that the election had been
"marred by widespread fraud and violence
perpetrated by the ruling party." So extreme was
the misdoing, the statement continued, that the
election's credibility was "called into
question, both within the Philippines and in the
U.S." The White House then called on "all
responsible Filipinos" to seek peaceful ways to
achieve "stability in their society" and to
avoid violence.
The Saturday
statement, which Administration aides touted as
a "major blow to Marcos," was the White House's
way of extricating itself from a controversy
over its earlier reaction to the questionable
Philippine election. As official U.S. observers
brought back eyewitness reports of widespread
election cheating by Marcos supporters,
President Reagan's response had been less
outraged than many members of his own
Administration would have liked --and than many
Americans, treated to an unparalleled and
intimate view of a foreign election, expected
from their President. At a Tuesday news
conference, Reagan had ventured the possibility
that fraud "was occurring on both sides."
Reagan's words
led to a flurry of congressional responses that
might . ultimately end in a bid to cut off all
U.S. aid to the Marcos regime. Said Democratic
Representative Steven Solarz of Brooklyn,
chairman of the House subcommittee on Asian and
Pacific Affairs: "How we handle aid will be the
test of how credibly we have disassociated
ourselves from a discredited dictator."
Perhaps even
more important to the Reagan Administration than
the congressional reaction was a sudden freezing
of relations between U.S. diplomats and the
increasingly assertive members of the
anti-Marcos opposition. Aquino charged the White
House with tilting in favor of election theft,
and anti-American demonstrations took place in
front of the U.S. embassy in Manila. For his
part, Marcos seized on Reagan's ill-considered
remarks to try to bolster his own position.
The Reagan
response raised a broader question of what
exactly Washington could do to affect the
political course in the Philippines, both to
protect important U.S. interests and to further
Filipino democracy. To many Administration
critics, the answer seemed to lie in some form
of anti-Marcos sanctions, but at the White House
the problem was seen as more complex than that.
Said an Administration official: "We're trying
to stay as neutral as possible, gently pushing
Marcos into making accommodations with the other
side."
Neutrality had
been the banner that the Administration carried
into the Feb. 7 elections. Washington's
oft-stated preference during the Philippine
campaign was only for a fair and credible
balloting process. The unprecedented
foreign-press coverage meant that the campaign
was scrutinized almost as if it were a U.S.
election. Marcos and Aquino appeared repeatedly
on interview shows; U.S. television networks
sent anchors to Manila to broadcast the election
finale.
What Americans
saw on their television sets came as a shock.
U.S. viewers were treated to a vivid
documentation of Marcos supporters buying votes
with money and rice, of poll watchers from the
opposition who were beaten and shot after they
tried to protect ballot boxes, of voting rolls
that failed to include countless Aquino
supporters but listed improbable numbers of pro-
government voters.
The images of
skulduggery at the polls were enhanced by the
vast divergence in voting tallies that soon
emerged between the official, Marcos-dominated
Commission on Elections (comelec) and the
volunteer watchdog organization known as the
National Citizens Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL).
At times COMELEC had Marcos leading by as many
as 600,000 votes, while NAMFREL showed Aquino
ahead by about the same number.
The sheer
range and flagrancy of the cheating charged
against the Marcos camp were impossible to
ignore. Nonetheless, the Reagan Administration
held back its comments pending the return from
Manila of Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman Richard Lugar, who, along with 19 other
delegates appointed by the President, monitored
the voting. In interviews on the scene, almost
all the observers professed themselves shocked
by what they had seen. But even as the Lugar
delegation arrived in Washington, the
Administration was speaking in a variety of
increasingly dissonant voices about how the
election results should be viewed and how the
U.S. should respond to them.
Privately,
many lower- and middle-level U.S. diplomats were
outraged by what they considered gross abuses of
the democratic process by Marcos supporters. But
on Monday, Deputy State Department Spokesman
Charles Redman tried to put a conciliatory gloss
on the tumultuous balloting process. Whoever was
eventually declared the winner, he said, the
U.S. hoped that "the two sides can get together
to avoid violence." President Reagan struck
almost the same note that day in a White House
meeting with a group of regional U.S. newspaper
editors. While noting that he was "concerned"
about reports of election fraud, Reagan declared
that the Administration wanted "to help in any
way we can . . . so that the two parties can
come together."
Those
sentiments took on a more assertive tone at a
White House press briefing. Spokesman Larry
Speakes stated flatly that when the hotly
disputed election results were "complete," both
sides should "work to form a viable government
without violence." A senior White House official
was even blunter. Said he: "The main thrust of
our statement is not to have demonstrations in
the streets just because you did not like the
election. A strong government is essential to
maintain a peaceful resolution of the problems
that face the Filipinos."
The White
House remarks could only be interpreted as a
warning for Challenger Aquino. The deeply
religious mother of five had warned throughout
the election campaign that street protests were
likely if Marcos cheated during the balloting.
But the White House remarks also reflected a
more conservative view of the still simmering
Philippine election crisis than that held by
many officials at the State Department. Simply
stated, the dilemma as seen on Pennsylvania
Avenue was how to strike a balance between
condemnation of Marcos' activities and support
for the stability of an important Pacific ally.
As a senior White House official later put it,
"We're in a no-win situation at this point. If
we accent the fraud, it gives Marcos an excuse
to throw out the election. If we side with
Aquino, it's a signal to her to take to the
streets. We're opting for stability, that's the
key word."
Whether the
White House chose the correct way to achieve
that objective is another question. If the
Administration stressed stability above all
else, it risked giving the impression that it
was siding with Marcos. That was very unlikely
to make him change his ways, and could
conceivably give a helping hand to the country's
radical left.
But behind the
choice of language was an assessment that for
all the uproar following the voting, President
Marcos still had the upper hand, at least in the
short term. There were no signs last week, for
example, that the country's 230,000-member armed
forces were about to disintegrate in Marcos'
hands. Said a White House official: "It's
obvious that Marcos has control."
Above all,
White House concern continued to focus on the
two U.S. military bases, Clark and Subic Bay.
Some U.S. officials feared that if Aquino ever
took power, she would prove more susceptible to
leftist pressure to remove the bases from
Philippine territory. Others were concerned that
an Aquino government would be unequipped to cope
with the growing Philippine insurgency. Many
simply did not believe that Aquino could ever
wrest power from Marcos with anything less than
armed force.
At the same
time, the Philippine President's grave problems
with systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease
that frequently attacks the kidneys, make it
likely that there will be a change in power in
the country before too long. Said a senior
Administration official: "Marcos isn't going to
last forever. We're trying to help hold things
together over there until some of the personal
obstacles to change are gone."
That line of
argument came most strongly last week from
National Security Adviser John Poindexter and
his staff expert on Asian affairs, Gaston Sigur.
Among others who reportedly felt the same way
was White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, an
ex-Marine, who said on This Week with David
Brinkley last ; month that the U.S. would
condemn any electoral fraud, but added that "if
it's a duly elected government, so certified,
you'd have to do business with it."
There was a
competitive edge to the White House analysis.
Some staffers apparently felt that the State
Department, and in particular U.S. Ambassador to
the Philippines Stephen Bosworth, had prejudged
the Philippine election. Said a White House
official: "They in effect told us that unless
Aquino won, that would be proof positive of
widespread vote fraud. That falls into the realm
of prognostication and outside diplomacy."
Finally, there
still seemed to be a question in at least some
White House minds about Aquino's qualifications
for running the country. The Administration had
previously said that it could work well with
either presidential candidate. Last week,
however, one White House official said in
exasperation, "How State thinks that Aquino can
govern on her own is just beyond us."
State
Department staffers were dismayed by the
statements that emerged from the Speakes
briefing. The diplomats at Foggy Bottom
requested a "clarification" of the White House
views. But before that request was formally
answered, President Reagan held a 40-minute
meeting at the White House on Tuesday with the
returning Lugar.
The
Reagan-Lugar meeting was an ambiguous exercise.
Sitting in on the session were Poindexter,
Regan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and
Secretary of State George Shultz. Lugar spent
much of his energy at the meeting trying to
convince the skeptical majority of his Executive
Branch audience that they should not give up too
soon on support for the unobstructed democratic
process in the Philippines. The normally terse
Senator spoke movingly of brave souls like an
ordinary Filipino housewife who confronted armed
thugs in order to defend her ballot. He urged
the White House not to resign itself to a Marcos
victory too quickly.
Reagan replied
with an anecdote of his own. He told of a Marcos
election worker who had allegedly pitched a
supply of Aquino ballots into a ditch, and he
doubted aloud that anyone would try to cheat by
doing that. Said the President: "If he was
really trying to get away with fraud, you'd
think he'd have burned those ballots."
When the
President emerged from that session, he
mollified some State Department concerns by
describing the Philippine elections as "flawed"
and "disturbing." He announced the appointment
of Special Envoy Habib as a would-be mediator.
The choice was shrewd. A tireless career
diplomat, Habib is a veteran Asia hand who
retired from the Foreign Service in 1983 after
serving as the President's special emissary to
the Middle East. Habib's new job, said Reagan,
would be to advise on how the U.S. can "help the
people of the Philippines overcome the grave
problems their country faces, and to continue to
work for essential reforms."
Less than five
hours later, the President stunned Senator Lugar
and most of the other election observers with
his casual but devastating news-conference
remarks. Reagan said Lugar's delegation had
briefed him on the "appearance of fraud" during
the voting. Then he said the observers had told
him that "they didn't have any hard evidence
beyond that general appearance." At this point
he got in real trouble by adding that it was
also possible that fraud "was occurring on both
sides."
Reagan's
contentious remark was a flub, pure and simple.
It was based on intelligence reports from U.S.
operatives in the Philippines, who stressed that
fraud by Marcos forces was overwhelmingly more
pervasive than any by the Aquino opposition.
Reagan first made the accusation during a
practice question-andanswer session with his
staff before the Tuesday-night news conference.
The President was corrected. But, says a Reagan
aide, "he had it in his mental computer, and it
couldn't be erased."
The statement
turned out to be a painfully important mistake.
Senator Lugar, for one, quickly bridled at the
President's observation. Claiming that Reagan
"was not well informed," Lugar asserted that the
predominance of fraud "was by the government."
Later the Senator said he would probably
consider curtailment of U.S. aid to the
Philippines if the balloting was discredited by
an obviously orchestrated Marcos declaration of
victory.
Intentionally
or not, the President soon discovered that he
had knocked down a hornet's nest. Increasing
numbers of Congressmen used his remarks as a
springboard for issuing their own foreign policy
prescriptions for the Philippine mess. Two days
after Reagan spoke, for example, Democratic
Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, an influential
member of the Armed Services Committee, sent the
President a two-page letter demanding "clear
statements" that the Marcos regime had committed
massive electoral fraud. Nunn asked for a pledge
that the White House would refuse to recognize a
Marcos election victory. Finally, Nunn wanted
the U.S. to terminate all aid to the Philippines
if, as he put it, "the will of the voters, as
expressed at the ballot box, is not followed."
Another harsh
reaction on the Hill came from Congressman
Solarz. After Speakes' Monday press briefing,
Solarz charged that "they are smoking hashish in
the White House. They appear to have lost touch
with reality." A number of other Senate and
House Democrats vowed to cut U.S. military- and
economic-aid appropriations for the Philippines
(1986 authorization: $245 million) unless the
Administration agreed to something like a
rejection of the election results. After the
proclamation of Marcos' win, prospects for a
friendly reception in Congress for further aid
requests looked even dimmer.
Finally, it
seemed that the new situation was prompting some
influential Congressmen to examine alternative
sites for the valuable U.S. military bases in
the Philippines. During his Tuesday news
conference, President Reagan alluded vaguely to
the existence of contingency studies on where to
move the sensitive facilities, an extremely
difficult and costly proposition. On Thursday,
Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole of Kansas
took that search a step closer to reality. He
announced that he would formally propose
legislation this week that would ask the
Pentagon to evaluate the cost and feasibility of
setting up alternatives to the installations. No
one doubted that the cost of such a move would
run into the billions.
What virtually
everyone in Washington agreed on was that Marcos
emerged from the election in a somewhat weakened
position. Said a top Pentagon official: "It's an
exceptionally unstable situation." The very
instability compounded U.S. difficulties in
deciding what to do next. Said a White House
aide: "There's no magic solution to this
situation. Nobody is claiming he has any
inspiration on how to solve this."
Indeed, the
number of short-term U.S. options for dealing
with the Philippine crisis remained
embarrassingly small. The decision to send Envoy
Habib to the Philippines may have bought the
Administration some time--but not much--to think
further about the problem. Says a Pentagon
official: "The longer it takes to come up with
some sort of reasonable policy in the
Philippines, the better it is for the
Communists."
In that
context, many of the more extreme proposals
being advocated on Capitol Hill run the risk of
proving counterproductive. Sweeping moves to cut
off military aid to the Philippines (a modest
$55 million this year) seem especially likely to
do more harm than good. Morale among the often
corrupt and ill-equipped Philippine armed forces
is already bad. An aid cutoff might make things
worse, although some Philippine military
reformists dispute that. Even so, eliminating
all American money might prove especially
hazardous for armed-forces reformers, who have
been chafing at the stagnation of the late
Marcos years. Without protective U.S. influence,
many of the approximately 1,200 reformers in the
14,500-member Philippine officer corps might be
purged.
Selective
withholding of funds, however, might have
positive effects if properly done. Such
calibrated coercion might allow the
Administration to demand specific reforms that
would allow some degree of reconciliation to
take place in the Philippine political cauldron.
There is a
great deal to be said for statements like the
one the White House made on the weekend. As a
senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide
points out, every U.S. President has enjoyed
enormous prestige in the Philippines--more,
perhaps, than any Philippine incumbent. Marcos
is aware that public U.S. statements deeply
affect his legitimacy, and the threat of further
broadsides might force him to make political
concessions.
But the stark
fact of Marcos' stubbornness cannot be
overlooked. On the basis of his track record, it
is not clear that Marcos would submit to even
the toughest U.S. pressures. Indeed, the
Philippine President, who has long honed his
skills as a ruthless infighter, might lash out
independently if he felt he was dangerously
cornered. In an explosion of violence, the lives
of his opponents might be even more directly at
risk.
The limited
range of those options underlined the importance
of Aquino and her proposed nonviolent campaign.
This is a mighty challenge for someone who has
spent most of her life in the wings of politics
rather than at center stage. Aquino's wrenching
entry into an active role in Philippine public
life can be dated from Aug. 21, 1983. On that
date her husband, Opposition Politician Benigno
Aquino Jr., was gunned down while getting off a
China Airlines Boeing 767 at Manila
International Airport on his return from three
years of exile in the U.S. Suddenly his wife was
catapulted into the position of a national
saint.
Politics,
however, had always been in her background, and
she was hardly an average homemaker. The
daughter of one of the Philippines' patrician
political families, she was a helpmate during 28
years of marriage to the country's most
prominent opposition figure. As a spouse, Aquino
remained largely on the political sidelines, but
within eight months of her husband's
assassination, she was stumping the Philippine
countryside on behalf of opposition candidates
for the country's 1984 National Assembly
elections. She was prodded into running in the
presidential campaign by, among others, Jaime
Cardinal Sin, leader of the Roman Catholic
Church in the Philippines.
Once committed
to the presidential race, Aquino quickly showed
a steely determination that belied her reserved,
soft-spoken manner. She displayed remarkable
stamina. The galvanic response that she elicited
from ordinary Filipinos as she flew from town to
town during the 57-day campaign came to be known
as "people power." Now a battle-hardened
political veteran, Aquino intends to harness the
same force in her dangerous and quixotic
struggle to occupy Malacanang Palace.
Last week she
spent much of her time huddling with aides and
planning strategy. Aquino and her closest
advisers realized very early that they had been
outmaneuvered by Marcos in the questionable
election balloting. On Tuesday, the day that
President Reagan gave his news conference, a
group of pro-opposition legislators told top
Aquino campaign officials there was no way to
stop Marcos from steamrolling to victory in the
National Assembly tallies. Reason: he has
complete political control in two important
areas of the northern island of Luzon plus the
central Visayan islands. In all those regions,
he would be able to pad voting results with
impunity, thus overcoming any Aquino lead at the
polls elsewhere.
The Aquino
camp was badly shaken on Tuesday when Javier,
the campaign director of Antique province, was
brutally and publicly murdered by men with
alleged ties to a prominent leader of the Marcos
forces in the National Assembly (see box). Late
last week the bodies of ten more people, all
said to be opposition supporters, were
reportedly discovered in northerly Quirino
province. At least 156 people have been killed
in election-related violence since the
presidential campaign began.
That grim
figure was above average even for the
Philippines, where violence is a traditional
fellow traveler of politics. In 1961, for
example, before Marcos appeared on the
presidential scene, 35 people were killed during
an election campaign; that is still considered a
postwar low. In 1984, during National Assembly
elections, more than 100 fatalities were
reported.
Aquino last
week was watching Washington for important
political signals. She was badly stung by
President Reagan's offhand reference to
opposition fraud during the election. She
responded immediately with a press statement
that coolly noted the appointment of Envoy Habib
but observed that on his last White House
assignment before retirement in 1983, Habib had
failed to end civil strife in Lebanon. Said
Aquino: "I hope neither Mr. Reagan nor Mr.
Marcos is expecting to see our beloved country
go the same way." Claiming that she had been
cheated out of as much as 25% of the national
vote, she declared that it would be folly for
her supporters to "settle down to a
Western-style opposition role."
After Reagan's
press-conference remarks, U.S. Ambassador to the
Philippines Bosworth arranged a meeting with
Aquino to discuss Special Envoy Habib's
impending visit. The atmosphere during the
session was both awkward and frigid. Bosworth, a
highly regarded career diplomat who has worked
hard to gain the opposition's confidence, had
apparently been taken by surprise by the
President's remarks. Says a key Aquino supporter
who walked in on the Bosworth-Aquino meeting: "I
don't know what the Japanese Ambassador looked
like when they were bombing Pearl Harbor, but I
imagine he looked like Steve."
Any pessimism
that Aquino may have been feeling about the
future, however, did not impede her actions.
Before the memorial service for Javier, she paid
a luncheon call on the country's 104-member
Bishops' Conference to lobby for support for her
People's Victory campaign and to assure the
bishops of her commitment to nonviolence.
Shortly afterward she went public with her
Victory plans.
A key factor
in Aquino's decision to go forward quickly with
a civil- disobedience campaign was the fear that
her moderate forces would soon be overtaken by
pro-Communist groups eager to exploit the
popular frustration at Marcos' formal election
victory. As she planned her forthcoming rallies,
Aquino continued to act forcefully to keep
radical leftists from climbing aboard her
campaign. One would-be partner: the 1
million-member leftist coalition known as Bayan,
whose leadership is widely believed to have
links to the Communist New People's Army. Aquino
has every reason to be leery of newfound leftist
allies. Throughout the campaign, she was
repeatedly forced to rebut Marcos' accusations
that she was little more than a stalking horse
for the Communists.
Aquino's
closest supporters are aware that leftist forces
are still waiting in the wings. Says an Aquino
campaign troubleshooter: "The biggest problem we
have is that if Cory does not act, the moderates
will be put out of business." On the other hand,
he added, "if Cory acts, it will place this
country on the brink of revolution."
Aquino's
continuing resistance to Marcos' victory is
nothing more than a calculated gamble that may
yet provoke incalculable upheaval. Says Ramon
Mitra, a National Assemblyman and an Aquino
adviser: "We don't know whether we will be able
to keep control over this. But we thought we
would take the risk. We have to send a message
to our friends that we are not taking this
sitting down."
That stark
problem was clearly in the minds of President
Reagan's White House advisers when they drafted
his weekend statement. It was impossible to deny
that, as Reagan noted, the people of the
Philippines are "at a major crossroads in their
history. There are no easy answers. And in the
last analysis, they will have to find the
solutions themselves." One way or another,
Aquino and Marcos will soon determine that
solution.
With reporting
by Sandra Burton and
Barry Hillenbrand/Manila and Alessandra
Stanley/Washington
With Knowledge Comes Power
Start learning the
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