Philippines election queried

It used to be an annual pleasure, as well as a duty, to talk on this particular February weekend about the coincidence of Lincoln's Birthday and Valentine's Day and how they were celebrated or, in the South, ignored – Lincoln, not Valentine. And if inspiration ran dry on those great occasions, there was always Washington's Birthday coming up on 22nd.

But now, or a year or two ago, it was decided that a general work stoppage on 12th, if Lincoln's Birthday fell in midweek, and another on 22nd for Washington was too much for the needs of commerce, school and work routines, not to mention the jamming-up of traffic for two snatched holidays. So, the two great dates which every schoolboy knew have been blurred in one, long, intermediate weekend, which means the holiday date varies so that pretty soon, if not already, you'll have to send out for a schoolboy to say when both of these great men were born.

Valentine's Day, on the other hand, not only does not interfere with commerce, it is as much of a stimulant to various billion-dollar businesses as Mother's Day which was, long ago, an invention of the telegraph companies in association with the florists.

Gone, along with the true dates of the two American giants, are the ritual newspaper editorials calling all Americans to the wisdom of old George and the simple grandeur of old Abe. In fact, the only conspicuous reminders of either of them have been a flood of television commercials begging you to get in on such bonanzas as the Washington birthday cut-rate computer sales, one day only. Or the Lincoln bargain bedroom furniture sale.

The truth is that since the United States became the increasingly harassed top dog of the world's nations, it has less and less time to celebrate the old heroes. It is pressingly preoccupied with the new heroes –Sharansky's triumphal arrival in Israel – and the new villains, Duvalier, to everybody's relief, ousted from Haiti. But most of all, Marcos's stubbornly refusing to be ousted from the Philippines.

If there are two topics that overwhelm the attention of the Americans from coast to coast and beyond, they are the Philippines election and, closer to home, the investigation or investigations now going on about the cause of the catastrophe that, a couple of weeks ago, saw Challenger soar off into the Florida sky and explode into a huge shower of smoke and flame.

Within a week of that appalling debacle, I was talking with a television director, an intelligent and not, I should say, a conspiratorial type, who assured me darkly that NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, already knew the cause but was sitting on the information. I thought back almost 20 years to a dinner, a private dinner, I'd had with four of the early astronauts, a privileged occasion for me, since as a working reporter I felt I ought to pick up the elements, at least, of this new and thrilling science.

I can only say looking back to that evening that I might just as well have been sitting in with Einstein, Rutherford and Oppenheimer on an early technical discussion of nuclear fission. Even the elementary sense of what the astronauts were saying was beyond me.

All I gathered from that evening is that space and space travel is an enormously complicated business. So the other evening, I said to my television director, 'Do you suppose that 140 of the space technicians in Houston have all agreed on the primary cause and have somehow circulated a round robin pledging each other, pledging the whole team, to silence?'

Not for nothing is this man a television director. He lives, night and day, with a special view of the news. The news that can be simplified for a large, general audience into pictures and, I should say, that for the past two weeks, I, as a regular news watcher, have been bombarded with pictures or models of booster rockets and the seams that bind them together and the safety seals of the seams, both the single seal and the back-up seal, not to mention the normal and abnormal behaviour of the gasses at preposterous temperatures and the possibility which, at least, two bodies of experts have been working on of the effect of exterior and interior cold temperatures on the fuels.

You recall that the morning of the shuttle launching was most unusually cold for southern Florida. It had been down below freezing and a maintenance team chopped off icicles that had formed on the boosters.

Well, the trouble with what I've called television's special view of the news is that immediacy is its prime need and a nightly report is compulsory and, of course, you can't go on saying the same thing night after night. What in practice the reporters have to do is sniff around for one expert's guess, usually called a NASA source, or one former astronaut, and elevate his guess into a suspicion.

A suspicion, because there are literally hundreds of reporters, male and female, television and radio and newspaper employees whose reputation depends on getting the jump on their competitors. Which means, in the serious press, writing more and more exhaustive and knowledgeable stuff about possibilities that are beyond the grasp of the general reader. And in the popular press, it means always looking for dirty work at the crossroads.

I'm afraid my television director, for all his intelligence and his experience as a documentary producer with difficult and subtle material, was falling – at an absurdly early stage of the investigation – falling for a deep-dyed plot.

Well, by the time some people in distant lands hear these words, the truth of course may out, but it seems very unlikely, so I don't propose to say any more about the shuttle disaster until it has been successfully probed and the story can be told in words that you and I can understand, which may be next week or never.

The other, consuming topic about which, also, the hard truth may never be known, is the tortured mess of the Philippine elections. The Philippine Islands, an archipelago off the south-east coast of Asia, comprise, in fact, just over 7,000 islands which might seem to give some credence to President Marcos's plea for patience in collecting the ballots.

The Philippines have been, for just on 90 years, an object of shame and pride to the United States. The Spanish named them after King Philip II and founded Manila in 1571. Spain held them till its defeat by the Americans in the Spanish-American war, two years before the end of the nineteenth century. It was, need I say, a period of glorious or rampant imperialism.

Big nations didn't fight other big nations in order to liberate their possessions, but to exchange them and in the only, happily brief, period when the United States too succumbed to dreams of empire, the United States took possession of the Philippines in 1898 – a presumption that was murderously fought by a guerrilla uprising which was only put down after seven years.

Of course, the United States, following the British example in far-flung places, at first established civil rule under the military and then withdrew the military and set up genuine, civil government under an American governor. After that came the usual praiseworthy efforts of developing education, agriculture, public health, roads, commerce and so on.

The large and benevolent President Taft in 1907 coined a slogan and issued a proclamation which took the United States along a road it had probably not meant to go, 'The Philippines for the Filipinos' was his slogan. It led to the Philippines getting control of both houses of their own legislature. What Taft had not bargained for was the movement, which never stopped rolling, for total independence.

Well, as we all know, the Japanese attacked the Philippines on 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor. The Philippines was, and unfortunately still is, the strategic tee to south-east Asia, which is why the United States today has its two main Pacific bases there and I should throw in the reminder that while many congressmen wish there were some other place to transfer those bases, I doubt there is more than the smallest handful of either party that doesn't want to retain them.

So the Japanese conquered the Philippines by the spring of 1942 and I, for one, shall not soon forget the day when the headlines, three years later, blazed with the news, 'MacArthur Enters Manila'. He had, as he promised, returned and the Japanese were thrown out.

The Philippines had been promised – so far back as 1934 – complete independence some day. Since the Filipinos were the first and, for a long time, the only Asiatic native peoples that rallied to the Allies and fought the Japanese, the date of their independence came in less than a year after the Japanese surrender – 4 July 1946 was the happy choice of a day to declare the Philippines free and for nearly 20 years the Philippines were a shining example of democracy in Asia.

In 1951, the United States and the Philippines signed a mutual defence treaty and in 1966, one President Ferdinand Marco reduced the lease on the US bases from 99 to 25 years, which means they may be held by consent only until 1991. Marcos's whole reign – and it's not too much to call it a reign – was consolidated in a dictatorship in 1973 when he practically wrote a new constitution and set himself up as president. Perpetual president.

He has been harassed and hounded by guerrillas, by Communists, and most recently, since the assassination of Aquino, by increasing great numbers of people who would like to return to a genuine democracy with at least a two-party system. His decision to call a snap election this month was a brilliant stroke to prove that, if he was a dictator, he was there at the dictate of the people's will.

As I talk, the whole question of how far the people were allowed to speak and vote and for whom is being thrashed out in Washington, and now by the old, the very able, diplomatic troubleshooter, Mr Philip Habib.

Maybe a week from now, maybe not, we shall be able to say something definite and sensible about what happened and how and why. At the moment, it cannot be done. Not by me, anyway.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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