Marcos overthrown by people power

Throughout most of last weekend, on Sunday and Monday and well into Tuesday, I found myself, as the French say, hypnotised by a single television station that's based not in New York or Washington or Los Angeles or any other metropolis, but in Atlanta, Georgia.

It's a private cable station owned by one Mr Ted Turner who had the idea, a few years go, that the country could stand having a 24-hour news station with a staff working in three shifts like coal miners. Mr Turner was derided at the time but that's only because most of the experts – I mean the big shots of the big networks – imagined he would simply be reduced to chewing over the hourly news bulletins available from the news agencies and would, therefore, most of the time, be chewing on his cud. Moreover, how many cities, then, had cable? Maybe 20 at most.

I went down there to Georgia shortly after the experiment got going and I was, at the time, as they say, flogging a book and the Turner station had set up an interview. I was alarmed when I was told the interview would take place in the station's newsroom. A city newsroom, with its continuous din, even since they abandoned typewriters and installed word processors, is the last place for anyone to meditate aloud. To my relief and great surprise when I was ushered into the newsroom, I might just as well have been walking down a cathedral aisle to exchange some quite reflective words with the priest.

The great square room, as large and fluorescent as the newsroom in which Woodward and Bernstein tapped out their fateful revelations about Nixon and Watergate in the movie 'All the President's Men', the newsroom had the usual large staff in it, but there was no sound of keys being tapped or buzzers being buzzed. I don't know how many, maybe 20, 30 people, mostly young women, were sitting there each in front of a large television monitor. They appeared to be in a comfortable stupor. They were looking at blank screens, some of them. Others, however, were watching pictures. What pictures?

A printed sign over each monitor gave the enterprise, if not the game, away. One said Moscow, another said Tokyo, another Stockholm, another Madrid, another Washington, Paris, Honolulu, Dallas, London and on and on. The secret of this audacious novelty should have been clear from the outside of the building which is a modern building in the Sixties style, clean, white lines and, as I recall, no more than three or four storeys high. Planted around the building were flower beds at ankle level but, high above them, many huge saucers which were there to pick up by satellite all the images that showed up on the interior monitors.

What Mr Turner had done was to say, 'We're not going to depend on the news tickers or on the film crews of the three nationwide television networks, we're going to have our own reflectors of what can be seen to be happening in scores of cities around the globe'.

Well, by now, the station has its own correspondents, hundreds of what newspapers used to call 'stringers', all over the place, ready for a call to or from the Atlanta headquarters and its resident large staff to drum up a film crew and get there. I began to pay serious attention to this station one night in, must have been the autumn of 1984, when having watched the late night news round-up on three networks that come on at 11 o'clock, having flicked around the dial and being about to go off to bed, I came on a totally incomprehensible interview from New Delhi. A youngish Indian was being interviewed about his mother. Briefly, I must say and then we cut to a house guarded by armed soldiers. From there we went to crowds in the streets being hemmed in by patrolling police and soldiers. Very soon the story came shockingly clear. Mrs Gandhi had just been assassinated by members of her own bodyguard.

Next morning on the seven o'clock, eight o'clock, nine o'clock news, all the networks had it. Today, there are scores of cities that offer cable channels released to independent companies which supplement the channels of the three commercial and the public, non-commercial network. And all of them make a point of having Ted Turner's CNN Atlanta channel available.

What's more, I notice in Chicago, in Washington, in San Francisco, in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, wherever the three big networks have a news gathering staff, I notice that in the headquarters of these people, whether, say, the NBC Centre in Washington or the BBC headquarters in New York, most, if not of all, of the offices of the staff have a television set tuned more or less permanently to Mr Turner's station.

A famous American general once said that the great aim of a field commander was 'to get there fastest with the mostest'. That has been Mr Turner's aim and I have joined the increasing number of my friends who, when something really startling or unexpected is happening, ditch the big networks and stayed tuned through the day and, last weekend, the night, to Atlanta. Its regular routine is to do a visual round-up of the news every half-hour or 48 times every 24 hours. Last weekend we were going to Manila and their crews there whenever, it seemed, the need arouse.

Now to some people, I suppose, this ceaseless coverage would be intolerable either on the ground that the human mind can only take in so much at a time or from the prejudice that what one camera can show at any given time is bound to be only a part of the truth and usually a colourful or violent part. But when the actual events, the really significant changes, were happening so fast, it required patience and stamina to take it in without prejudicial theories.

Surprisingly, the Atlanta men in Manila, the CNN men, acted better than the network men at their stated evening hours in cautioning us against making large assumptions from the pictures we were seeing. It was one of the networks that showed thousands of people surging into the presidential palace grounds and then cutting to a few incensed young people tearing down pictures of Marcos and stamping on them. The accompanying word was that the crowd, now termed a mob, had started trashing the palace.

By that time, Atlanta had shown similar pictures but reported over them that both the rebel generals and Mrs Aquino had ordered detachments of the army to protect all the main rooms, to repeat Mrs Aquino's plea that this was no longer the Marcos palace, but the people's palace, and the crowds were shepherded out in an orderly fashion.

When it was all over and when, by Wednesday, my mind for one was racing with jumbled images like a movie being played in double time, one or two images kept reappearing as single faces will keep reappearing in a dream. There were two that I shall remember for the longest time, one dialogue and one indelible picture of a woman standing next to a nun.

The dialogue was between a network correspondent in Washington and General Ramos, one of the two generals who first proclaimed the revolution. Did the general think he had the power, the fire power, to resist an attack from the Marcos loyalist forces? No, said the general, but he was trusting to people power. The phrase had already become a slogan to the thousands chanting on the streets. And what would that be?

Quite intensely, with a furrowed brow like a scientist explaining some knotty theory before a conference of experts, General Ramos said, 'The power that prevails over the military formations, the use of people confronting tanks and armoured columns has proved successful'. Now this was either a pathetic whistling solo in the dark or an amazing recognition of a new truth from a man whose whole life has been in the military, the man, moreover, who reorganised the military to enforce Marcos's long retention of martial law. Which was it?

The answer was illustrated by the second image. It was of a nun, on her knees and, by her side, a woman standing motionless except for her two hands upraised in prayer. In front of them was a tank at the head of an oncoming armoured column. The tank stopped. The soldier poised for action in the turret, looked down, confused and mum, for the moment. He looked and the woman prayed, then he waved his arm and the tank lumbered round and the column clumsily went into reverse. In that moment, Marcos was doomed.

So, in the end, the parallel that was drawn by that exiled Filipino foreign minister which I mentioned last time, the parallel with what happened in Thailand 13 years ago had exactly followed. The moment the dictator's army wobbled and could not or would not shoot at the unarmed citizenry was the moment of defeat.

There is, this weekend, still great rejoicing and all the ecstasy of release, freedom, independence, but we've learned from the overthrow or even the peaceful surrender of so many colonial regimes in Africa, that while the day of freedom, Uhuru, is very stimulating, the grey, tough time is the morning after, when the people who enjoyed the exhilaration of pulling the house down have to start the long, undramatic chore of rebuilding. And in the Philippines, this is going to be a task which two Philippines' experts here, both, and independently called 'staggering, monumental'.

For the time being, Mrs Aquino can appoint a Cabinet more or less of the centre, but the immense and widespread bureaucracy of the right is there and will have to be pacified and some elements of the left must come in if the Communists, the so-called New People's Army, is not to swell its ranks in the hills. The guerrillas still remain the big threat to any stable democratic regime.

A Marcos general – now we have to suppose a reformed, anti-Marcos general – said the other day, 'We could obliterate the New People's Army in a day if they would stand and fight'.

It was the same complaint made by the British commander in the American War of Independence, but the Americans, too, were scattered, sneaky guerrillas and, in imperial Rome, in the American Revolution here, against Napoleon's men in Haiti and, most recently, in Vietnam, guerrillas have an impressive record of confounding the mightiest war machines.

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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