LuisTeodoro.com

President Arroyo may have beaten her potential rivals to the draw by claiming that the absentee voting bill just passed by the House and the Senate is her gift to Filipino migrants. By enabling as many as 7.5 million Filipinos abroad to vote in Philippine elections, the bill could decide the outcome of the 2004 and future polls. But the OFW vote may not necessarily go Mrs. Arroyo’s way two years from now. The “gift” could instead blow up in her face.

The crucial factor is her government’s support for a US war on Iraq. Such a war is likely to affect as many as a million (including the undocumented) Filipino workers in the Middle East in some form or another, including their exodus back to the Philippines. Overseas workers constitute the bulk of Filipino migrants abroad, and are therefore the backbone of the absentee ballot.
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The officials of the Arroyo government should stop trying to justify the unjustifiable—in this case the national ID card system its National Security Council endorsed on October 14, because the more they talk about it the sillier—and the more dangerous for everyone—it gets.

The silence should start with National Security Adviser Roilo Golez, whose most recent statements border on the incredible for their convoluted reasoning and outright lack of sense.
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From arming barangay tanod to a Metro Manila-wide curfew to reviving the proposal for a national ID system to the registration of cell phone SIM cards, the response of some of the country’s leaders to the October 19 bombing of a bus in Balintawak has ranged from the pointless to the dangerous.

The arming of barangay tanod, proposed by the mayors of Metro Manila, is both. Under that scheme, these so-called village guards, of whom a barangay can have 20, would be issued guns in furtherance of counter-terrorism. Since authentic terrorists are not likely to be resident in barangay in huge numbers, and given the composition of the tanod, the likelihood is that some of them will end up terrorizing their neighborhoods if not shooting themselves.
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Senior police officers hit the talk-show circuit over the weekend in the wake of the bombings in Zamboanga City and Metro Manila, and President Arroyo’s appeal for calm and unity.

Judging from what these leaders of the lead agency that’s supposed to protect the public were saying, however, we’re in real trouble. One police officer who’s supposed to be on top of the counterterrorism campaign in Metro Manila, for example, kept saying that “there will be more bombings,” and repeated an earlier police warning for people to stay away from crowded places.
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The most recent bombings in Zamboanga City are likely to generate shock waves to revive flagging lawmaker interest in passing an antiterrorism bill or bills, as well as provide Malacañang another excuse to push for a national identification system.

However, the antiterrorism bills that I’ve seen have almost the same flaws, besides many of their provisions’ having been patterned on the US Patriot Act of October 2001.
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At least one senator, Joker Arroyo, is correct about the old proposal to create a national identity card system, which the National Security Council dusted off last Monday supposedly in aid of the anti-terrorism campaign.

Like most other suggestions from the police and the military, the proposal implies that the problem will be solved once another law is passed. We all know that that has never been the case, at least not in the Philippines, where every law and order problem we can think of persists because of our inept, and often corrupt, “law enforcement” agencies—not because of the absence of appropriate laws.
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One of the worst presidents we’ve ever had” was how one caller to the US public TV channel C-Span described Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States, on October 12.

History is likely to say otherwise. Carter, who was US President from 1977 to 1981, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the day before. Coming as it did at almost the same time as the US Congress’s approval of a resolution giving the current US President, George W. Bush, authority to wage war against Iraq, the award constituted a sharp rebuke not only on Bush but on the US’s drive to wage “preemptive” (read: aggressive) war.
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