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Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Ong: A permit to enter madness
By Ted Aldwin Ong
Misreadings
"OUR civil wars have already exacted a heavy price on people's lives, wasted our resources and stunted our economy," says Miriam Coronel Ferrer of CARHRIHL or the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law on the issue of war on communist rebels in the Philippine Daily Inquirer's Talk of the Town.
Ferrer further added: "from 1986 to the early 1990s, the insurgency reportedly cost the government P21 million per rebel and displaced 1.3 million people. Such huge losses are not collateral but central to the whole question of our well-being as a nation."
To shell out P1-billion for the sole purpose of crashing communist insurgency in the country is a senseless effort especially that the national government have not performed well in terms of finances and operated under a re-enacted budget. A P1-billion for an anti-communist insurgency campaign is mediocre amount.
In these times of crisis from almost all corners of everyday life, the Macapagal-Arroyo administration has dipped its fingers in a campaign with a target enemy that can easily mutate. To quote Ferrer again, "poverty is usually made to explain why the armed conflict began and persists." Like insurgency, poverty is a problem that our national government has neglected to solve. With a lopsided priority, I believe that it current regime will not be able to crash the insurgency problem in a given timeframe for it has not even started to address the poverty issue.
The Macapagal-Arroyo regime is now in the offensive position after the February attempt to topple her from power failed. The flagship "Oplan Bantay Laya" is a campaign disguised as an all-out military offensive out to smash "communist threat" but without distinction whatsoever between armed rebels and open political dissenters. This is a campaign against legal political opposition of the current regime.
Mrs. Arroyo's declaration that "the fight against the left remains the glue that binds" is a clear endorsement for the massacre of more political activists and personalities just by simply branding them as leftists.
In just three years, hundreds of activists and journalists were either tortured, killed in broad daylight or assassinated in a systematic effort to squash the last and most effective bastion of political opposition-the legal progressive movement. This kind of initiative is but commonsensical of a government that cannot wash away its issue of legitimacy.
This embattled regime is so desperate to survive that it will use everything at its disposal particularly public funds to confirm its right to rule. This is happening in a juncture where resource allocations to vital social services are at its lowest. Under the Arroyo regime, the education's share in the fiscal pie went down by 27.9 percent while spending on health is 0.27 percent of our Gross Domestic Product.
Our people are dying of communicable diseases like malaria and tuberculosis-diseases that are highly preventable and treatable. And yet, Mrs. Arroyo has the nerve to buy attack helicopters and aircraft to smash an insurgency that is precisely rooted and fanned by an atmosphere of lack of needed social services and social justice.
Without a doubt, the funds that will be allocated to Oplan Bantay Laya are nothing but annihilation funds out to exterminate all citizens humbly exercising their right in exposing and opposing the illegitimacy of the Arroyo regime. However, the first victims of this madness were not be armed rebels but the student activists, priests, journalists, NGO workers and sectoral leaders who struggle with the poor in aspiring for a better life.
The country's insurgency problem will flourish with this old-timer strategy. "The government, in effect, has been the best recruiter for the NPA," explained Ferrer, because of its "repressive measures and abuses committed by government agents." This systemic killing is the wrong door from which the current regime has pinned its hopes for its own survival.
This campaign might finally put Mrs. Arroyo in the pedestal of dictatorial leaders who crumpled democracy and people's freedom as they move on to rule with an iron fist, but in her case, for how long? When the streets have gone empty and the people systematically silenced, there are other would be attackers like this weekend's intestinal virus. Nature has its way to capitulate the most iron of fists and Mrs. Arroyo is not an exemption.
Comments to tao.ssi@gmail.com
(June 27, 2006 issue)
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