Anti-Marcos group faces sedition charges after protest

Press, 11 April 1978, Page 8

Anti-Marcos group faces sedition charges after protest

NZPA-Reuter Manila Charges of sedition and incitement to sedition are to be laid against a group including four Philippines Opposition candidates held after the police swooped on a peaceful march in Manila on Sunday, the authorities have said.

The march was protesting against alleged cheating in the Philippines General Election on Friday. President Ferdinand Marcos, claiming overwhelming victory in the poll, called a meeting of his Cabinet yesterday to assess elections and to review internal security and allied matters, including the arrests.

The authorities said that the group, including four Opposition candidates, two civil-rights lawyers, several Roman Catholic nuns, and nearly 600 others, carried posters calling fop revolution and shouted seditious slogans.

They also alleged that the police found small homemade explosives.

Foreign correspondents who watched the march, sponsored by a moderate group calling itself the People’s Alternative, did not see the alleged posters or hear any seditious slogans. Their only shouts were for the Opposition People’s Power Party. They also sang folk songs and carried two symbolic coffins and two wreaths mourning “the death of democracy.” After the march, foreign correspondents were told to wear identification tags conspicuously when covering events, to distinguish them from “agents provocateur masquerading as journalists.”

The director of the Bureau of Foreign and National Information (Mr Lorenzo Cruz) also called on the Foreign Correspondents Association “to screen its ranks and co-operate with the Philippines Government in ensuring that the foreign press community is not

infiltrated by subversive foreign agents.” Mr Cruz said the moves were necessary because the police had difficulty in distinguishing journalists who covered the march. The arrests have brought protests from another civil rights lawyer, a former senator, Jovito Sglonga, president of the organisation which sponsored the march. He told reporters that he had reminded the Defence Under-Secretary (Mr Carmelo Barbero) of the constitutional right to peaceful assembly. He also said that the arrested leaders, were known to the President as moderates who did not believe in violence. Mr Salonga said the Under-Secretary had reacted by quoting the President’s statement on Saturday, that he had ordered the military to make pre-emptive arrests to prevent any repetition of p r e-poll demonstrations, which he said had degenerated into sporadic violence leading to an unspecified number of deaths and considerable damage. It is clear that the President’s New Society Movement, which had a well-or-ganised machine, will capture an overwhelming majority of the 165 seats at stake for a new interim National Assembly. By early yesterday — more than 60 hours after polling closed — the commission on elections had formally declared only 5 per cent of the vote cast in metropolitan Manila, the most sensitive area, where 21 seats were at stake.

With 561 of the more than 11,000 precincts officially announced, the President’s

wife, Mrs Imelda Marcos, was leading what looks like beng a New Society sweep : of the capital’s 21 seats. The top Opposition People’s Power candidate was its leader, : the detained former i senator, Benigno Aquino, who was trailing the lowest Government candidate by i 40,720 votes. Mr Aquino, an arch-rival ; of Mr Marcos, has been in > military detention since the start of martial law in 1972 • and who has a death sentence hanging over him on subversion charges, on Sunday said that the elections were still “a moral victory for the Opposition.” The slowness of the official count, blamed on lack of tabulating equipment, the complicated block and individual voting system, and an alleged bomb threat, has added to Opposii tion suspicions about the conduct of the poll, Senator Lorenzo Tanada, the People’s Power campaign manager, said before he was arrested. Official results showed the Government taking less than 70 per cent of the capital’s 3.2 million votes. This is well down from ' the 90 per cent Government support claimed in past mar-tial-law referendums including one only last December which endorsed the President to be Prime Minister as well when the new interim Assembly is formed. The Government appears to have lost some seats in the centra] Visayan Island, where the local leadership is said to be unpopular, and possibly a few on the Mos-lem-rebel troubled southern Island of Mindanao. But in

many areas it was opposed by only scattered Independents.