Government Seems Helpless in Wave of Attacks on Activists : Slayings Jolt Confidence in Aquino

A half-dozen bodyguards surrounded the hospital room where university president Nemesio Prudente was recovering Monday from the second attempt on his life in six months.

As an added precaution, the patient’s nameplate outside his private room at suburban Makati Medical Center simply said, “Occupied.” At all times, heavy curtains inside Prudente’s room remained closed.

Such security was not the result of paranoia. After unidentified gunmen fired more than 100 machine-gun bullets and threw a grenade into Prudente’s armored van in downtown Manila on Thursday, an anonymous caller telephoned the hospital to say: “Tell the doctor to treat him well so he will recover fast. Once he is up and well, we’ll finish him off.”

The next day, one of Prudente’s colleagues was shot and killed on another downtown street.

‘Endangered Species’

Prudente, 61, the president of the Philippines’ largest university, is the most dramatic example of what one Philippine legislator calls “a new endangered species in the Philippines”: human-rights lawyers and educators who have been fighting to protect the Philippines’ newly restored democratic government from a return to right-wing dictatorship.

In the past month alone, three other human-rights leaders have been slain by gunmen who civilian civilian investigators suspect are members of right-wing death squads, some of them apparently having ties to factions of the Philippine armed forces.

A half-dozen other human-rights workers and members of left-leaning organizations have been shot to death in the streets during the last several months. The crimes are causing many political analysts and politicians here to fear that, after a period of relative stability, President Corazon Aquino’s government is again facing a serious threat from fanatic, armed anti-Communist groups.

Worse, critics say, is a growing perception that Aquino, whose husband was the victim of a military-sponsored assassination five years ago, is unable to put an end to the Communist insurgency under way here for 19 years or to curb the human-rights violations by violent right-wing groups that the insurgency has spawned.

“The specter of human rights violations is beginning to be the nemesis of the Aquino government,” Amando Doronila, editor of the Manila Chronicle, wrote Monday in a column. He called attention to sharp criticism of Aquino on the human-rights issue that was registered during her recent visits to Geneva and Rome.

“The seeming powerlessness of the civil government to halt the violence is likely to lead to a loss of confidence in the government,” he said.

Doronila and other analysts back such criticism by pointing out that neither police nor armed forces investigators have solved a single one of the dozens of politically motivated killings that have occurred since Aquino took power in February, 1986. Human rights leaders have charged, in addition, that the lack of arrests and trials of suspects suggests that death squads are, at the very least, sanctioned by the police.

After the first attempt on Prudente’s life last Nov. 10, police said they lacked enough evidence for an arrest. But civilian investigators reported that just a week before the attempt, Manila policemen were chanting “death to Prudente” during the funeral of an officer killed by suspected Communist killers. They also concluded that at least one Manila policeman was involved in attempt.

Sen. Rene Saguisag, who was a prominent human rights lawyer before being elected to the National Assembly, introduced a resolution Monday requesting an independent Senate inquiry into the killing of human-rights workers.

“The list of human rights advocates as victims of violence continues to lengthen to such an alarming extent as to disturb even those who have long learned to live dangerously,” Saguisag said in proposing the inquiry.

“It is as if (the gunmen) were cocksure that the authorities would look the other way as they go about their deadly business.”

The latest attack on Prudente took place in an underpass as he was driving from home to his office on the campus of the Philippine Polytechnic University at about 8:30 a.m. Thursday

In an interview from his hospital bed, he said that the underpass is usually jammed with rush-hour traffic but that his attackers, who were wearing military-style fatigues and carrying M-16 assault rifles, had arrived as early as 7 a.m. and asked shopkeepers in the area to close up and warned pedicab drivers stay away.

“They took up positions behind the concrete pillars, and, when our van came through, they opened fire,” Prudente recalled. “They just kept firing and firing, stopping only to reload. It must have lasted five to seven minutes. When they finished, they fired a grenade at the van just to make sure.”

The attack left three of Prudente’s bodyguards dead and six others wounded.

Prudente, who still has bullet scars from the attack on him last November, said he was saved only because his van had reinforced walls of bulletproof steel and he threw himself to the floor when the shooting started.

Went Underground

For Prudente, a veteran educator who went underground in 1972 to fight for the overthrow of dictatorial former President Ferdinand E. Marcos, the attack was little more than one of a series of illustrations that law and order is breaking down in the Philippines.

“This definitely reflects on the credibility of the government,” he said, adding that he personally continues to support Aquino strongly.

In recent months, Aquino’s government has been the subject of a series of negative international reports on human-rights abuses. The most recent, issued on June 14 by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York, concluded that right-wing vigilante groups here have committed “countless acts of murder, illegal arrest, forced recruitment, robbery, arson and other crimes” since the Aquino government took power from Marcos.

Entitled “Vigilantes in the Philippines: A Threat to Democratic Rule,” the 200-page report recommends that all civilian-based groups, upon whom the armed forces says it depends to cope with the Communist insurgency, be disbanded; that their guilty members be prosecuted and that the government condemn their abuses “at the highest levels.”