PMA a hatchery of coup makers?

PMA a hatchery of coup makers?

Amando Doronila
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Asia News Network
Manila

The role of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) in
strengthening democracy in this country has come under the
glaring spotlight of scrutiny in the wake of the failed July 27
coup.

The PMA was conceived as the training ground of the officer
corps who are to lead the Philippine military. But within a space
of 17 years, between 1986 and July 2003, Philippine democracy has
been rocked and threatened by eight coup attempts, all of which
were led by PMA alumni.

The Philippines has had more coups than the Latin American
banana republics had in the age of coups in the 1970s; and
Indonesia, where the Indonesian army has played a pivotal role in
toppling regimes, notably that of president Sukarno in the 1960s.

The succession of coups in the Philippines has raised
questions on whether the PMA is a foreign body in a democratic
ambience; whether the PMA graduates have imbibed the democratic
culture; and whether the academy has, indeed, proved to be a
nursery of anti-democratic ideas and methods, a hatchery of coup
makers, whose education has been subsidized by taxpayers' money.

The record of PMA alumni in staging coups is unlike that of
military academies in advanced democracies. The PMA is patterned
after the U.S. military academy at West Point. But the latter has
never in its history produced a cabal of officers who challenged
the civilian supremacy in the United States, and the authority of
the American president as commander in chief of the armed forces,
no matter how distasteful his decisions have been.

There were, of course, impulses of caesarism from West Point
graduates -- the prime example being the late Gen. Douglas
MacArthur who was sacked by president Harry Truman from his Far
Eastern Command over a conflict of policy on the Chinese
intervention in the Korean War. But MacArthur took his dismissal
without a murmur of defiance despite his brilliant campaign in
the Inchon landings.

Two leading Western democracies -- Britain and France -- have
famous military academies, Sandhurst and St. Cyr, respectively,
but these academies have never been the nursery of putschists.
Britain and France had been imperial powers, in which their
armies gave them military glories during the wars of the 19th and
20th centuries, highlighting the role of military leaders.
Wellington, came under close scrutiny from the Whig opposition in
the British Parliament for his cautious campaign in the Iberian
Peninsula during the Napoleonic Wars.

During the Algerian war, a number of French generals were
involved in coup plots against the Fourth Republic, which was
cracking under the strain of the Algerian crisis, but president
Charles de Gaulle, himself a brigadier general, smashed the plot
after he was vested with wide emergency powers to reform the
Fourth Republic, which he did starting with a new constitution
that anchored the Fifth Republic, his own concept of a strong
presidency in a modern parliamentary democratic context.

Despite these sporadic impulses of unrest in the French army
officer corps, no coup was ever mounted to overthrow the more
than 40 governments in a revolving-door regime change in the
crisis-prone Fourth Republic.

The parent coup was staged by Napoleon together with the
directorate to restore order in the wake of the anarchy of the
Reign of Terror and in the face of the threat of invasion posed
by the coalition of France's neighbors which backed the move to
restore the Bourbon monarchy decapitated by the French
Revolution.

Despite these earlier impulses of military interventions in
France, the military has been reined in, such that it has never
been a threat to the continuity of civil governance in the French
Republic even between wars.

No military cabal has ever emerged from either Sandhurst or
St. Cyr. France's and Britain's officer corps never formed a
military caste defined by their association with the academies.

Our pattern of developing a military caste is based on the
unique PMA class system that has fostered bonds among the class
members, bonds which have proved to be stronger than their
loyalty to the larger constitutional principles, such as, the
supremacy of civil authority over the military. The coups, from
the l980s and the one in 2003, illustrate how fragile the loyalty
of the PMA-trained officer corps is to Philippine democracy and
we should be disturbed by this.

From the political statements of the numerous coups, the PMA
curriculum has produced not only a culture, but also the
dangerous "savior mentality" that holds that the officers have
the right to overthrow a government, according to their norms of
legitimacy.

Why the PMA and its class system have been the breeding ground
of officers who spearheaded coups should be one of the key issues
that the Feliciano Commission should address in its inquiry into
the recent events at the Oakwood Hotel. We are nursing in the PMA
the virus of anti-democratic culture that is incompatible with
the principle of civilian supremacy over the military, which
notion is the cornerstone of constitutional democracy.

Our version of military intervention in politics is out of
step and outside the wave of democratization for the past 30
years. That Oakwood took place 17 years after the restoration of
democracy should shock us into realizing that our democracy is
incubating its own enemies in one of its own elite leadership
institutions -- the PMA and the military establishment.