Friday, August 08, 2008 Wenceslao: Word war, Bangsamoro and China’s miracle By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
A Cebu governor engaging a Cebu City mayor in a verbal war, or vice-versa, is not a recent occurrence. When I was Capitol beat reporter, then governor Vicente de la Serna and Mayor Tomas Osmeña also traded insults. One time, beat reporters even discarded a City Hall press statement that negatively portrayed Tingting’s former wife.
Word wars can be acceptable if these enlighten the public about important issues related to governance, not when these deteriorate into name-calling. I don’t think the people gained anything from Osmeña calling Gov. Gwen Garcia “Queen of Darkness,” Guv mentioning a “Tom Cat and” and her brother Byron tagging the mayor a “drag lord.”
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The criticism leveled at some in Capitol’s list of “Garbo sa Sugbo” awardees is expected and is thus par for the course.
Having two of the governor’s relatives, father Pablo and brother Winston, as awardees was bound to be rapped. Having a controversial personality (nationally, that is) in Winston as awardee is bound to get the same treatment.
It’s actually the call of Capitol and the selection committee. Besides, the matter of being the governor’s relative and being controversial aside, all of the awardees have achieved something at the national level that many of us ordinary Cebuanos can’t hope to duplicate in our lifetime. Ranged against them, even a Cris Saavedra looks rather puny.
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The issue on the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (BJE) and, before it, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) can be taken in the context of federalism. The creation of the ARMM and the BJE concept are variations of efforts to decentralize further the country’s political setup. It’s just that only the Bangsamoro is involved here.
I say the BJE proposal would have been less contentious had this been presented in conjunction with the push for a shift to a federal state. Why not subdivide the country into smaller states, which is virtually what BJE is about?
Or should other groups pushing for the creation of their own federal states first wage war before their wishes are granted?
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Can the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) be left on its own once a BJE is created and it gains state-like powers? This is a crucial question especially in the context of the fight against international terrorism. The last thing we want is for the areas under the BJE to become a training place of terrorists and staging ground of terrorist attacks.
There are issues on the MILF that needs to be cleared first. Is it true that the MILF camps the Armed Forces destroyed during the Erap administration were also terrorist “academies”? What is MILF’s relation with the Abu Sayyaf and the Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiyah? Won’t the MILF become the Philippine’s Frankenstein’s monster?
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That Sun.Star front page photo showing basketball star Yao Ming carrying the Olympic torch past the portrait of the late communist leader Mao Zedong is symbolic. While Deng Xiaopeng, and not Mao Zedong, was largely responsible for China’s economic strides in the past decades, it was the Mao-led revolution that started it all.
Those critical of the communist ideology ignore the fact that the Chinese Communist Party engineered the economic miracle whose crowning glory is Beijing’s hosting of the Olympics. China before Mao was a sleeping giant, a euphemism for a backward country ran by inept and corrupt “democratic” government like ours.
(khanwens@yahoo.com/ my blog: cebuano.wordpress.com)
