Aquino's Philippines: The Center Holds
Tells how Aquino plucked victory from defeat with the help of the military, how she broke with the military, how she is dealing with the communists, and the flagging economy. Threatened from both left and right, she must build up the centre.
Sandra Burton covered the Philippines for Time magazine from 1982 to 1986, and is currently Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Copyright © 1987 by Sandra Burton.
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The Philippine Republic started the new year, its twentieth as a sovereign nation, with a new President, a partly new and re-shuffled legislature, and something of an innovation in presidential inaugural addresses. "The Filipino," declared President Ferdinand Marcos to his startled listeners, including foreign dignitaries attending the inaugural, "has lost his soul and his courage. . . . We have ceased to value order. Justice and security are as myths. Our government is gripped in the iron hand of venality, its treasury is barren, its resources are wasted, its civil service is slothful and indifferent, its armed forces demoralized, and its councils sterile."
As Corazon Aquino begins the tasks of reuniting a divided Filipino people, rebuilding the institutions destroyed by a discredited dictatorship and reviving a devastated economy, she has chosen to combine the spirit of reconciliation with measures to place her new government in firm control.
The Federation of Malaysia is scheduled to come into existence on August 31 of this year by the merger of the existing Federation of Malaya with Singapore, the British colonies of Sarawak and North Borneo and the British- protected Sultanate of Brunei, thus forming a crescent well over a thousand miles long from the borders of Thailand almost to within eyesight of the southernmost Philippine islands. Although many difficulties stand in the way, the British and Malayan Governments say categorically that they will not be deterred from pushing the plan through. Some of the difficulties are historical and local, for the new Federation will be a rather arbitrary assemblage of widely separated territories with mixed populations at different stages of development. More important are the objections raised by Indonesia and the Philippines.
