‘Nowhere Left to Hide,’ Refugees in Manila Discover

MANILA —  Rogelio Cinco and his wife were so afraid of the right-wing vigilantes in their home province of Leyte that they borrowed money from their parents, bundled up their five children and fled to what they hoped would be a safe haven in Manila.

That was six weeks ago. Now Cinco’s wife, Hermelihinda, says the family has learned that “we can run, but there is nowhere left to hide--the fear is everywhere now.”

For on Sunday, more than 200 Manila policemen stormed the university campus where the Cincos and 140 other refugees from their village were staying and arrested all the adult males.

It was the first time that law enforcement authorities had raided a college campus here since the early 1970s, when then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared martial law and arrested thousands of dissident students.

Groups Condemn Raid

Civil rights organizations and teachers’ unions condemned the raid, which took place at Polytechnic University--the Philippines’ largest with 48,000 students. They challenged the government of President Corazon Aquino to justify what they called “a resurgence of terror and fascism” and “a direct threat to academic freedom.”

The day after the raid, a spokesman for the president said Aquino had known nothing of it until afterward. The spokesman said that Brig. Gen. Alfredo Lim, Manila’s chief of police, had ordered the raid after seeing intelligence reports that Communist assassination squads were hiding on the campus.

Lim said the university is in a district where rebels ambushed and killed a police intelligence officer last week and that it is suspected of being a “habitual escape route” for rebel assassins. More than 90 soldiers and policemen have been killed in Manila this year.

He said the raid was timed to coincide with a police operation in which more than 500 young men were arrested in a nearby squatter area. It was the biggest police raid since Aquino took office, and it followed a broadcast statement by the president that something had to be done to curb urban terrorism.

3 Americans Were Slain

The crackdown also followed the killings last week of three Americans in separate but coordinated attacks near Clark Air Base, 50 miles north of Manila.

Since then, Clark has all but closed its gates to the nearby community of Angeles City, touching off fears among Americans here that the Aquino government is not strong enough to protect them.

Those fears were heightened Monday when five armed men entered an Angeles City subdivision where American servicemen live and disarmed two security guards. Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, the armed forces chief of staff, said he suspects that the gunmen were Communist rebels looking for future American targets.

That concern continued Tuesday as police in Manila discovered a powerful bomb made with 86 sticks of industrial dynamite at a convention center that now houses the government’s Department of Foreign Affairs. An anonymous caller tipped off police a few hours before the device was set to go off.

Tuesday morning, a Manila newspaper reported that Americans nationwide remain at risk, quoting an unidentified guerrilla spokesman as saying that U.S. servicemen, businessmen and CIA agents have been targeted for death by the Communists. “It will get worse for Americans before it gets better,” the spokesman said.

A university official, who asked not to be identified by name, said: “Perhaps the raid at Polytechnic University was an attempted show of force by the government and the Manila police . . . meant to reassure everybody. But if it was, it failed. There were, and are, no rebels here. All it did was scare everybody even more and bring back ghosts of dictatorships past.”

The police found no weapons at the university, but the raid was described in Monday’s newspapers as a major setback for the Communist guerrillas.

The right-wing Manila Journal contained a headline that said, “Troops Nab 39 Metro Reds,” and moderate newspapers quoted police authorities as saying the raid reflected the police department’s aggressive new attitude toward terrorist assassinations.

But human rights groups said there were no Communist guerrillas among those arrested, only refugees fleeing the violence.

The only evidence the police found at the university, Lim said, consisted of three military fragmentation grenades found in the bathroom of the university president, Nemesio Prudente.

Prudente, who was jailed as a dissident by the regime of the deposed President Marcos, told The Times: “Certainly they aren’t mine. I don’t know where they came from. We have no arms here, nor any need for arms. We are for peace, not for war.”

Human rights groups said the grenades had been put there without Prudente’s knowledge in an attempt to “frame” him.

Prudente, asked what the raid on his campus symbolized, replied: “I am hoping that there is no reemergence of fascism. Let’s hope that the days of Mr. Marcos are over--that the democratic space will be expanded rather than contracted. I must say, though, we are all kind of apprehensive now.”

He said he had allowed the 140 refugees from Leyte to stay in the university social hall after several human rights groups had asked him to do so.

“It is most tragic,” he said, “that these people from the barrios who came here to Manila seeking safety and a better life are now the subject of additional repression. I wish the president would at least be more concerned.”

On Tuesday, the wives and children of some of the 39 detained refugees took their case to the streets and to the Philippine Senate. Many of them, testifying before a Senate committee on human rights, told of abuses and threats they had received from the vigilantes in their area. At the same time, hundreds of human rights workers joined other relatives in picketing the downtown police station where the male Leyte refugees were being held.

The demonstrations apparently had some effect. Late Tuesday afternoon, 54 hours after the arrests, police conceded that they had no evidence against the refugees and released all but one. They continued to hold the 39th man on the basis of a telegram from his local police chief accusing him of rebel activity, a charge he denied.

The damage had already been done. The prisoners had been held longer than the legal 36-hour limit for detainees, several said they had been beaten while in custody--and the families were left wondering why the arrests had happened.

‘We Are the Victims’

Among the refugees most stunned by the arrests was Lolita Dellarosa, the wife of the village chief appointed by Aquino to run the barrio of La Paz. Dellarosa, an elementary school teacher, told an interviewer:

“My god, we are not rebels. We are the victims. We came here to escape the terror in our home province, where the teachers are so afraid that they will not even come to school.”

She said vigilante groups had been created and armed by the police and military authorities as civilian sentries to protect the barrios in her region from attacks by Communist rebels, and she added:

“We are more afraid of the vigilantes than the rebels. The vigilantes are ex-convicts who tell us we must either join them or they will assume we are rebels and kill us. They have set up checkpoints on the road, and they block the food from reaching us.

“What kind of life were our children having there? So we left our homes, our little bits of land, to come here for some safety and maybe enough peace so our children can go to school and learn. And now this. Now my husband is in jail.”

So is Rogelio Cinco. His wife, Hermelihinda, summed up the sentiments of many Filipinos who now feel they are caught in an endless crossfire between the forces of the left and right.

“There is nowhere left for us to go,” she said. “I want to go home, but the vigilantes are there, and they have told my husband he will be killed. We cannot stay here, because the police in Manila believe we are rebels. There is no peace anymore, anywhere.”