Philippines Armed Forces

A week before rebel planes strafed and rocketed Malacanang Palace, Philippine President Corazon Aquino relaxed on her guest house couch and assessed her performance after nearly four years in office. "I am politically secure," she told a British journalist. "Foreign investment is increasing because the message has got through that the country is politically stable and the daily danger of coups is long past."

Philippine military officials said Saturday that three brigadier generals and at least 12 middle-grade officers will be relieved of their duties for joining the coup attempt that finally ended after eight days, leaving at least 83 dead and more than 580 wounded. Rebel soldiers Saturday surrendered their last stronghold and ended their revolt, the sixth and bloodiest attempt to oust President Corazon Aquino.

President Corazon Aquino, addressing a throng of supporters from behind a bullet-proof shield, vowed Friday that she will never resign and indicated that politicians who supported the latest attempted coup will be investigated by a presidential commission. "I am angry," Aquino declared at her first public appearance since the collapse Thursday of the most serious military rebellion in the Philippines since she came to power in 1986.

At the beginning of this century, when the United States acquired the Philippines from Spain, humorist Finley Peter Dunne summed up the American attitude toward its first overseas territory. "We propose f'r to l'arn ye the uses of liberty," Dunne wrote, as the fictitious Mr. Dooley. "We can't give ye any votes . . . but we'll threat ye th' way a father shud threat his childern if we have to break ivry bone in y'er bodies."

The White House, addressing the sensitive topic of the Aquino government's hold on power in the Philippines, acknowledged Thursday that some U.S. officials are privately questioning whether the regime can survive the political and military unrest there.

President Corazon Aquino's government declared Thursday that the Philippines remains in crisis as military authorities confirmed that at least half of the soldiers and all of the leaders behind a weeklong military rebellion are still at large. Brig. Gen. Oscar Florendo, the armed forces spokesman, told reporters that the uprising that began Dec.

The night was quiet in Tagaytay. On a mountaintop perch known as "the palace in the sky," tall microwave relay towers and radar, a critical military communications link to the south, silently scanned the nation's most strategic airspace. In the distance, far below, the lights of Manila twinkled. Suddenly explosions rocked the air. The towers were down. It was 11:45 p.m., Wednesday, Nov.

Hundreds of mutinous soldiers, singing, boasting and draped with belts of ammunition, marched back to their barracks early today, abandoning the besieged financial district and ending a bloody weeklong coup attempt. The dawn withdrawal came hours after Aquino declared a state of emergency throughout the Philippines to stem the deepening political and economic crisis.

The scene at the posh suburban home of a rich, anti-government businessman Wednesday night was an inside glimpse of a coup gone bad. Renegade Brig. Gen. Edgardo Abenina, self-styled political leader of the sixth unsuccessful coup attempt against Philippine President Corazon Aquino, was snacking on pickled eggs and Blue Nun wine and sending perhaps his final taunt to his former classmate--the man who was hunting him. "Surrender?"

An American real estate executive was about to explain Tuesday how he had become one of the 400 or so "guests" of Philippine rebels at a swank Manila hotel when sniper fire crashed through a lobby window. "Lie down! Lie down!" a rebel soldier shouted. The advice was hardly necessary. Everyone at the besieged hotel, the Inter-Continental, seemed to know the drill. Almost immediately, they were flat on the carpet, hands covering their heads.