The military in charge
February 20th, 2003
War has once more broken out in Mindanao, and it has been greeted with fear, apprehension and puzzlement.
Part of the puzzle is whether Mrs. Arroyo is still commander in chief, and why, despite her announced policy of holding peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the military persists in undermining that policy, this time through an offensive that from all appearances could have been avoided.
Apparently not consulted at all before the military attacked the MILF camp in Pikit, North Cotabato, Mrs. Arroyo had ordered a stop to military operations on February 11. Despite that order the military continued to pound the camp with artillery and to advance from their positions.
A military spokesman, and not Malacañang, later blandly announced that Mrs. Arroyo’s cease-fire order had lapsed. That was followed by Mrs. Arroyo’s face-saving “order” for the military to seize MILF territory—which was precisely what it had been trying to do all along from day one of the fighting.
The military argument is that the MILF has been harboring members of the kidnap-for-ransom Pentagon gang, a claim the MILF has denied. In any event, the MILF repeatedly said that if there were indeed Pentagon gang members in its camps, all the military had to do was to submit their names to the MILF, which would then seek them out and turn them over to the government.
The military replied only with guns, in a move reminiscent of the US decision to attack Afghanistan despite a Taliban offer to turn over Osama bin Laden upon the US presentation of proof that he indeed masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. It is equally reminiscent of the current US determination to invade Iraq on the basis of its supposedly sheltering al-Qaeda operatives.
In both cases war was, and is, the US predetermined course from which it could not and will not be deterred. Apparently it is equally the Philippine military’s course, as war rather than negotiations has always been its one and only approach (despite all the noises it makes about “civic action”) to the “Mindanao problem.”
Unfortunately, that course has never worked, as the military’s own experience since the days of Hajji Kamlon should have demonstrated to it by now. The Kamlon rebellion, described as no more than banditry in the 1950s, was indeed defeated then.
But it rose again, transformed into a stronger and more determined MNLF in the seventies, and, since the 1980s, into the even more organized MILF.
The “solution” the military favors is in fact no solution at all, and could very well be part of the problem by, among other consequences, fueling the historic resentments of the Muslim community that for centuries have made peace so elusive in Mindanao.
No strangers to conflict, but weary of decades of fighting, the 30,000 people so far displaced by the fighting appear to fear only for their futures and even for their survival. Plaintive as their laments are, however, there is resentment as well against a government which, in their minds, has once more forced them out of their homes and into further misery, harm and death.
“When will this end?” asked one refugee from Pikit’s barangay Nalapaan, which had earlier been declared a peace zone but which has since been overrun by the Philippine military.
Peace in Mindanao is what three Philippine administrations since Corazon Aquino have declared a national priority. It is to the credit of the Aquino and Ramos administrations that in pursuing that policy they at least recognized that a lasting peace in the Land of Promise can only be realized by addressing the poverty, neglect and persecution the Muslim communities have been subjected to for centuries.
Never mind the Estrada administration, which vainly tried to solve the “Mindanao problem” through the means most favored by the military—incidentally then commanded by Angelo Reyes—which is to smash the rebel groups no matter what the cost to lives, property and the country’s standing before the civilized world.
The Arroyo administration is, at least in the declaration, in the tradition of the Aquino and Ramos dispensations. Again and again Mrs. Arroyo has declared the imperative of peace in Mindanao, and the need for the MILF—since the decline of the MNLF now the leading secessionist formation in that region—and the Philippine government to talk.
Unfortunately there is the military, over which, it seems, the Arroyo administration has little or no control. The MILF and the government were therefore not talking as of this writing, when the fighting had spread to three provinces as the MILF allowed its local commanders free rein to respond to the military assault on MILF strongholds. At least 35 MILF guerrillas were dead as of February 14, while the military admitted to four of its own soldiers killed.
Some 30,000 people had once more become internal refugees as they fled the fighting. Unable to totally cope with their needs, and as three children died in the evacuation centers, Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman was forced to ask for public donations of clothes, food, medicine and even tents. Between the lines of her appeal, however, was a plea for an end to the fighting and an end to the misery it compounds.
Mrs. Arroyo’s Vice President was more forthright. Vice President Teofisto Guingona Jr. questioned the wisdom of the military assault, and urged the resumption of talks between the government and the MILF. Opposition and Mindanao Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr. on the other hand wondered how a government that’s supposed to be talking peace with the MILF can at the same be making war.
Pimentel even more frankly wondered why an earlier order of Mrs. Arroyo for a stop to military operations against the MILF was ignored by the military.
“If the commander in chief is not being obeyed by the military, then who’s in charge? Is Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes the caretaker of government?”
Reyes was in fact conspicuous by his omnipresence in the media, even as amid all of these his commander in chief, the President of the Republic, was conspicuously silent. At one point Reyes issued what sounded like a declaration of policy toward the MILF, by claiming that the attack was “what the people of Mindanao want.”
“The people of Mindanao are tired of conflict, they are tired of terrorist actions perpetrated by these elements,” Reyes said. “There is a lot of noise against this offensive, but the silent majority of the Christians and Muslims in Mindanao, including the lumad, want to have this thing done and over with.”
Reyes of course meant “over and done with.” But he suffers from afflictions other than his problems with English idioms. Primarily he suffers from the delusion that the “Mindanao problem” can ever be “done and over with” merely through the simple-minded expedient of pounding Muslim communities to bits, turning tens of thousands into refugees so their children can die in the refugee centers, and along the way smashing the rebel groups.
That is of course what this is all about, the Pentagon gang angle being so patently only a convenient excuse for Reyes and his hotheads to once more fill the trenches with Filipino dead, no one in his right mind—perhaps not even the “commander in chief”—believes it.
Senator Pimentel does make sense when he urges the otherwise petulant and loquacious President of the Philippines to take charge—to “bang heads to assert her authority,” stop the fighting and resume negotiations. War and peace are far too important issues for the military—especially for the Philippine military—to decide.
The question, however, is not so much “Will she take charge?” as “Can she?”—and therein hangs another tale.
(Today/abs-sbnNEWS.com, February 18, 2003)