Knight's sacrifice.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

ONE down, two to go. The young officers who mounted the weekend mutiny in Makati had demanded the heads of three top military and police officials, and for now they seem to have gotten one: that of Brig. Gen. Victor Corpus, chief of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

Corpus resigned on Monday, but top officials scrambled to deny the mutineers this pyrrhic belated victory. National Security Adviser Roilo Golez said the resignation was unrelated to the renegade officers' demand and had been under consideration for at least a month. Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Narciso Abaya said the same thing, stressing that "it was not due to any pressure."

But there it was, clear as day, the cause and effect in Corpus' resignation letter. "In chess, when a queen is beleaguered it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice a knight to save the game," he wrote. "I feel that the restiveness will not calm down with my continued presence."

What is less clear is whether the knight's sacrifice or keeping him is the better way to save the queen.

The mutineers claimed Corpus was in Davao last April when the Sasa wharf was bombed, killing 16 people. One of them recalled that he had been given orders by a superior officer to also bomb mosques in Davao. All this meant, they said, that either Corpus had a hand in the bombings or he was incompetent.

Corpus has, of course, denied that he had directed the Davao bombings. But the young rebel officers could not have missed the irony in the fact that the intelligence chief whom they called incompetent played a key role in crushing their pocket rebellion. For all his rather shoddy intelligence work in the past, Corpus was on the ball as far as this latest attempt at a power grab was concerned.