Two Injured as Hotel Standoff in Manila Ends

Government soldiers prepare to the Peninsula Hotel in Manila. The hotel had been taken over earlier by dissident military officers who demanded that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo resign.

MANILA, Nov. 29 — Shortly after a police armored personnel carrier rammed through a hotel lobby in the Philippine capital, a group of soldiers and military officers announced they were ending the standoff with police that had begun this morning.

The seven-hour standoff at the Peninsula Manila hotel in Makati City, Manila’s business district, ended with the arrest of several people, including a senator, a former vice president, a Catholic bishop and several journalists.

The soldiers and officers had walked out of a nearby court earlier in the day, where they were being tried for participating in attempted coups in 2003 and 2006. They had taken over the five-star hotel, demanding the ouster of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who they accused of corruption and of cheating in the 2004 elections.

But minutes before the leaders of the group said they were leaving the hotel, police officers and SWAT teams surrounded the building, shots were fired and tear gas filled the hotel.

The armored personnel carrier rammed through the main entrance of the lobby, shattering glass doors and transforming what used to be one of the country’s most opulent hotel lobbies into a veritable war zone.

At least two people were injured in the incident, police said.

Inside the hotel, the rebels said they were giving up because they feared that the violence would escalate and put the lives of civilians in the hotel in danger.

“We cannot live with our conscience if one of you will get hurt or killed in the cross-fire,” Antonio Trillanes IV, a former navy lieutenant and the leader of the group, told reporters. “We’re getting out for the sake of the safety of everybody,” he said.

After the soldiers and officers had surrendered, Lieutenant Trillanes, former Vice President Teofisto Guingona, as well as several journalists, including cameramen and technicians of television networks, were handcuffed and shoved into a police bus. Police officials said the journalists were brought in for questioning.

The scene at the hotel Thursday was reminiscent of the same officers’ takeover of the nearby Oakwood hotel in July 2003, in which hundreds of soldiers took up arms against the Arroyo regime, complaining of corruption in the government and in the military.

Lieutenant Trillanes, who led the 2003 mutiny and who successfully ran for the Senate this year even while behind bars, said he had no regrets about today’s events. Brigadier General Danilo Lim, who is accused of leading a 2006 alleged coup attempt, defended the take-over of the hotel. “Dissent without action is consent,” he said.

The rebel soldiers accused Arroyo of stealing the presidency in the 2004 elections, among other alleged crimes. In a statement read during a news conference inside the hotel, General Lim said: “We have individually and collectively tried all means to resolve this legitimacy issue through the normal electoral, judicial, and congressional processes but Mrs. Arroyo used naked power” to stop attempts to impeach her.

Lieutenant Trillanes said he was particularly upset that he has not been allowed to serve his term as senator. “The people voted for me so that I can stand up for their rights but they didn’t allow me to serve,” he told reporters in the lobby.

The two leaders and nearly 30 other soldiers walked out of their hearing at a nearby civilian court while the court was on break. They then marched to the Peninsula Manila, overwhelmed the hotel security guards, held a press briefing, and locked down the premises.

Hotel guests, many of them foreigners, were eventually allowed to leave, dozens of them forming a line to a bus that would bring them to the Makati Shangrila Hotel just across the street.

The Peninsula Manila lobby, one of the most opulent in the country, was quickly consumed by the chaos as dozens of uniformed soldiers with red arm bands tied the glass doors with ropes, and dozens of journalists and remaining guests watched their every move. Hotel management later said the situation inside was generally calm.

Leaders of the country’s political opposition, particularly Mrs. Arroyo’s former vice president Teofisto Guingona and a couple of Catholic bishops, rushed to the hotel to give their support to the rebels, saying that this could be another “People Power” uprising similar to the two such events that took place in 1986 and 2001.

Dozens of supporters gathered a few blocks from the hotel. Officials of the Arroyo administration initially tried to dismiss the situation at the hotel, with Arroyo’s spokesmen refusing to even call it an uprising.

“It’s a situation but we’re on top of the situation,” said the spokesman, Ignacio Bunye, at a news briefing inside the presidential palace.

“My orders now are to rearrest them and take them back to custody, to apply the law,” Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro said. “We want to assure our people that we will apply the full force of the law to maintain peace and order in the area and the rest of the country.”

Coup attempts and mutinies are not unusual in the Philippines, which has seen more than a dozen of these since the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.