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Monday, September 05, 2005
Ledesma: Better hurt than dead
By Jun Ledesma
Sunbursts
'How very quickly have we forgotten the bombing incidents that claimed and maimed hundreds of innocent civilians.'
IT IS indeed unfair to tag Mindanao as a "terrorist academy" but sometimes we deserve a shock to awaken us from the more dangerous state of passivity and ennui. I have been listening to Manila and Davao-based radio commentators who, along with some grandstanding politicians, attributed the recent bombings in Zamboanga City and Basilan as merely an administration ploy to remove the heat from President GMA on the searing impeachment issue.
I am afraid that this languor induces vulnerability and this is where the terrorists thrive, this is when the terrorists strike. How very quickly have we forgotten the bombing incidents that claimed and maimed hundreds of innocent civilians. Elsewhere in the heart of many capitals in the world, terrorists strike with devilish fury. Since then their have not waned and their security forces have not slept.
It's by their nature that the communist fronts and some nit-witted politicians claim that threats of terrorism are nothing but military's invention to get a lion's share of the government's budget and intelligence fund. In the first place the CPP/NPA are on the active list of terrorists. But even the main MILF command had acknowledged the presence of Jemaah Islamiyah and its Indonesian bomb experts actively recruiting and training the locals in the art of making explosives and undertaking bombing missions.
If you don't call this terrorist academy then you must have stayed too long in the university campus where the only closest thing fashioned into a bomb are pill boxes. Nothing in those times can sink a super ferry or wreck a train. Nothing of those kinds can kill and blow up to smithereens hundreds of innocent civilians that just happen to be where the terrorists wanted them to be.
Imagine Davao City without Task Force Davao and the iron determination of Mayor Rody Duterte to shield the city from the incursions of terrorist elements. Imagine our state had we listened to the ministrations of the communist fronts and their allies among the benumbed politicians who say of the terror threats as: "politika lang yan."
It hurts when they say that Mindanao is a terrorist academy. Remember that in the 1980's Davao City was branded "the communist laboratory." The ghetto that was Agdao was dubbed "Nicaragdao." The city was the killing field of the NPA's liquidation squad known as "sparrows." Davao City was so terrorized that few brave souls dared to go out of their houses after 7:00 P.M.
Even that we quickly forgot. Listen to those who complained of alleged military and police brutalities. They forgot that not too long ago the communists sowed terror with extreme brutality. Daily, the death toll was no less than 15. The threat of EVAT is nothing. In those days the NPAs exacted taxes not only on the affluent who eventually fled Davao, but also, eventually, on the masses in Agdao. The little rice that a family saved for the porridge of the children were handed, along with their tax, at the point of a gun, to the NPA collector which in turn delivered this to the MRGUs (main regional guerilla units) for their sustenance. Eventually, the mass base was awakened to the stark reality and the scourge that the NPAs have inflicted on them. Alsa Masa was born and the rest is history.
The spirit of Alsa Masa has not waned in Agdao. It's vigilance, not vigilanteism. Either that or we submit to the notion that all this jazz about terrorism is nothing but "politika lang yan."
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (September 5, 2005 issue)
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