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Friday, February 04, 2005
Ledesma: Miriam's fury
By Jun Ledesma
Sunbursts
"She is targeting the correct government positions, among them governors, but not the right persons."
I AM all in accord with fiery Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago in her tirade against local government officials' tolerance of illegal logging.
When you have been around in Mindanao for four decades or more, you cannot help but agree with spitfire Lady Miriam. But my paisana is saying the right thing in the wrong time. She is targeting the correct government positions, among them governors, but not the right persons. If she aims at the right target, she might discover that the family of her colleague in the senate and at least one of the members could be among the proper target. Had she known this, she could have defended her nephew Mike and we could have witnessed a lively fireworks in the senate hall.
Am I sounding convoluted? Let me elucidate. The incumbent governors, if you ask me, are hardly to be blamed. The rape of our forests started over three decades ago. Like the senators, the governors she named might still be in high school.
In the case of Governor Manny Pinol of North Cotabato and Pax Mangundadato, they might still be in short pants. The large scale and unmitigated cutting of our timber stands happened long before the incumbency of some governors. Of course not a few incumbent local government officials still are in the take from illegal logging operators but this is inconsequential compared to the massive denudation of our forest decades back. But decades back, nobody was raising a finger of protest because many of those involved in logging are either politicians or timber concessionaires who were bank-rolling the election expenses and other frivolities of their political protégés.
Let us not go far and not twiddle with the issue. Who were the big time loggers in Davao, Cotabato, Agusan and Surigao? If you know the names then you have the answers as to who were behind the unabated forest denudation, which we now are complaining of. The forest that we see today are merely remnants of reckless devastation in the past.
In those time, they log exporters do not even count the number of logs in the log ponds. That's too tedious a process. They just estimate the area occupied by the floating logs! It's like us journalists estimating the number of crowd by say four persons to a square meter and multiply this by the number of square meters of the assembly area.
By law, concessionaires are supposed to reforest their area. But that too is tedious and entail expense. So their political protégés came up with a creative alternative "selective logging." Of course none of them follows that crafty draft.
None. Including the Department of Forestry then. So they can have a share of the loot, the Philippine Constabulary then, set up checkpoints. My late friend Tony Feo has an apt interpretation of "STOP:" sapplings (these are second growth trees used as banana props), tuna, oway, (rattan), and plitses (timber slabs sawed from forest sites and brought to illegal sawmills for processing into lumber).
In Nabunturan, Davao del Norte there used to be a PC-ARMY-Forestry (they call it composite) checkpoint. Unlike that which we see today, this composite checkpoint is located atop a hill. All the logging trucks, fish cars and sapling suppliers stop here and the driver of the vehicles would run up the hill to deliver their "toll." It only disappeared when the New People's Army imposed its "hustisya alang sa katawhan." It was good for a while until the NPA's started imposing its own "buhis alang sa katawhan."
If we were to believe GMA, they too are now into illegal logging. Oh well. It looks like no matter whose regime and what ideology, we Pinoys cannot get away with the knack of getting things the easy way. For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here.
(February 4, 2005 issue)
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