Philippine People Power 2 - cellphone revolution

Filipinos are obsessed with text messaging. RICHARD LLOYD PARRY discovers how a teenage fad became a weapon of subversion.

MANILA - Alex Magno, a professor of politics at the University of the Philippines in Manila, is a quietly spoken, moustached man in his mid-40s with a striking affliction.

Like many Filipinos, young and old, he gives off little beeps - uncontrollably, unpredictably and sometimes 100 times a day.

The beeps come from the slim mobile phone which he keeps in a nylon pouch on his trousers, and these days Magno no longer notices the interruption - without pausing in conversation, he can whip out the phone, squeeze the rubber button and read the short text message which somebody has sent to his screen.

It may be a brief note from his wife or a student, or one of the many feeble gags Filipinos bounce around, transmitted from one friend to another at the touch of a button.

On the day I had lunch with him, it seemed almost certain to be a joke about the country's appalling and despised President, Joseph "Erap" Estrada, whose corruption, womanising and stubborn refusal to leave office have embarrassed and enraged educated Filipinos since last year.

Magno hates Estrada more than most, and has just been explaining to me his ideas about the best way to force him out of office. But even he is taken aback by the message announced by his latest beep.

"Why now?" he says slowly. "This wasn't supposed to happen until next week."

He shows me the little plastic phone, and the message on its grey screen, written in the dense abbreviated code that is the language of the text message.

It comes from the committee of the Coordinated Multi-Sectoral Opposition, the chief group agitating for Estrada's resignation: "Full mblsn tday Edsa," it reads. "Imptnt calls will be made."

"Full mobilisation," says the professor, thoughtfully. "That's when we throw in everything, including the kitchen sink."

His phone beeps again, and then again, and by the time he has passed on the messages to his friends and read the new messages, he is beeping so urgently and continuously that it is hard to continue conversation.

And by now the TV in the little restaurant is showing images from Manila's Edsa Shrine. It is clear that something very remarkable is happening there, faster and more decisively than anyone has expected.

Edsa has been the site of anti-Government demonstrations since the previous Tuesday, when the impeachment trial against the President came to a disgraceful end after a legal ploy by a group of pro-Estrada senators.

Thousands of outraged Filipinos took to the streets that night, more the following day, and on Thursday their numbers had swelled to 10,000.

But now something new has happened, and the whole atmosphere has changed. People are swarming towards Edsa from all over Manila - the final estimates will range as high as half a million, and not lower than the hundreds of thousands.

In a few hours, although we do not know it yet, the armed forces will respond to the enormous anti-Estrada protests by mounting a peaceful military coup.

There is one reason why the crowd has gathered so quickly, in such a multitude - many, perhaps most, had been summoned by text messages on their beeping mobiles.

All this happened four days ago, but already it seems like another era. Back then Estrada was President of the Philippines. Now he faces charges of corruption and plundering state funds which carry a maximum sentence of death by lethal injection.

Magno was a university professor. This week, perhaps even today, there is a good chance that he will named as a cabinet minister by the new President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

But something more important has changed, to do with the relationship between politics, people and technology, and symbolised by the beeping text message.

A week ago, the messages were little more than toys, a way of flirting, making simple arrangements, and sending unfunny jokes.

Last weekend, for the first time in history, they brought about a revolution.

"Texting," as it is called, is all the rage elsewhere too, but the first time you try it is hard to see what all the fuss is about.

For a start, it is fiddly - the narrow mobile phone has only 10 keys, and elaborate and repetitive combinations are required to generate the dozens of letters, numbers and punctuation marks needed to send a comprehensible message. In the Philippines, you are limited to 160 characters, about 30 words.

It is quicker, easier and more direct by far to send an e-mail or, better still, use the phone to speak to someone, rather than fooling around with text.

It is hard to imagine a Western power's politics being shaken by such a crude novelty - in the rich West, and also in Japan, where texting is enormously popular, it is a game played by teenagers, nothing more.

In the right kind of place, though, it can be a powerful weapon of subversion and revolt.

The Philippines is a poor, struggling country, cursed with poor education, urban squalor and seemingly incurable corruption, but blessed with the sunniest, wittiest and most irreverently extroverted people in Asia.

There are 70 million Filipinos, and between them they own more than 4.5 million mobile phones, a remarkable number in a country with an average monthly income of just 170 pesos a family. A standard Nokia costs about 4800 pesos ($218), and even for the educated elite of Manila the cost of the calls quickly adds up.

But text messages can be as little as one-tenth of the cost of a voice call and, up to a certain limit, they are free. Filipinos send 52 million of them - 11 for every mobile phone owner - every day.

Even before the Estrada scandals broke, texting was epidemic, the perfect medium for the Filipino pastimes of gossip, joking and invective. "Expose: Cardinal Sin has a daughter by d [the] name Cristina," read one message about the country's respected Catholic leader, Jaime Sin.

On the island of Mindanao, Filipino troops are reported to exchange taunting text messages with the Muslim guerrillas they are fighting.

But it was last October, when a former friend of Estrada spilled the beans about the bribery, corruption and womanising which flourished at the presidential palace, that the text revolution quietly got under way.

In 1986, when the "people power" revolution removed the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Magno was a young activist leader.

"Now," he says, "I wonder how we managed these things without cellphones."

Organising any national movement is a vast undertaking in the Philippines, an archipelago of 7100 islands, 2000 of them inhabited, and many with wretched communications. Electricity fails regularly. Typhoons force flights to be cancelled, and batter the slow, rusty ferries which connect the islands.

"Being an archipelago, we needed four weeks' lead time in order to set things up in 1986," Magno says.

"We'd send out messengers on the interisland ships and, if they got picked up on the way by the Marcos people, we'd lose a city.

"On the barricades in Manila, I had a runner - literally a young student who ran with messages for me from one command post to the next. We relied on one radio station which might be closed down by the Government at any minute.

"Now we can send messages in real time - to the north of Luzon, to the Visayas. Four and a half million people are transmitters and receivers, and then they pass it on to all the people around them. Even a TV, you can't carry in your pocket, but this thing you can, and it's virtually free.

"In revolutions, people used to say, 'Keep your powder dry.' Now they say, 'Keep your cellphone charged."'

After his opponents succeeded in impeaching Estrada last year, it was through texting that news of his sensational trial was relayed across the country, along with jokes, and rumours.

Estrada's Government examined ways of tracing the originators of the most offensive messages.

But, rather than having contracts with monthly bills sent to a fixed address, most Filipinos charge their phones with prepaid cards bought anonymously, making it impossible to track them down. Estrada had a choice - either shut down the network completely, or live with the text libels.

The demonstrators at the Edsa Shrine had all the traditional accoutrements of protesters throughout history - flags, banners bearing wittily offensive slogans, whistles and klaxons.

But the most characteristic image of People Power 2 was that of a young Filipino in T-shirt and jeans, frowning down - not speaking - into a cellphone.

For hours at a time the networks were overloaded with the text traffic. The television stations began reporting the latest messages as news.

Now, with one President beeped out of office and a new one beeped in, it is difficult to imagine that the beeping in the Philippines will ever stop.