Candidate Arroyo (2)
March 21st, 2003
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s TV interview on Saturday revealed that an immediate halt to the fighting in Mindanao is not on the government agenda.
Asked about her reaction to the urging of several groups, including the Catholic Church, that the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) resume the on-again-off-again peace negotiations, Mrs. Arroyo responded by saying that the majority of Filipinos favor war with the MILF, and she has to do “what is popular.”
Her statements came less than three months after December 30, 2002, when she announced her noncandidacy in 2004.
The interview also took place on the heels of her well-publicized designation of a special emissary to Malaysia supposedly to persuade that country to broker the resumption of government peace negotiations with the MILF. Echoing her line, her other officials had repeatedly claimed that the government wanted peace negotiations to resume.
Mrs. Arroyo’s statements during that Saturday TV interview suggested that these were mere gestures without meaning. Window-dressing intended only to appease those sectors of Philippine society alarmed over the escalation of violence in Central Mindanao.
They also incidentally suggested that Mrs. Arroyo is still focused on what’s popular and not on what’s right. Which could very well indicate that, as already widely suspected, she will eventually announce her candidacy in 2004 despite December 30.
Another possible result of that interview would be to confuse the Philippines’ neighboring states, especially Malaysia. At worst, it is likely to be the basis for the conclusion that the Philippine government is not serious in its request for third-country mediation or in much of anything else, for that matter.
Libya and Malaysia, both important members of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), have called on the Philippine government to declare a cease-fire in Central Mindanao so peace talks can resume.
The logical basis for the suggestion should be obvious to anyone with at least a double-digit IQ. It was the Philippine government which broke the peace and sabotaged peace negotiations in Central Mindanao in February, when the Armed Forces attacked the MILF’s Buliok complex in the guise of pursuing elements of the kidnap-for-ransom Pentagon gang, to which the MILF responded in self-defense by attacking AFP and police detachments.
It naturally falls on the same government to demonstrate the sincerity of its proclaimed desire for peace by halting the AFP offensive described in doublespeak by the military, and dutifully parroted nowadays by Mrs. Arroyo, as “a policy of active defense” which has so far caused hundreds of deaths on each side, ruined several communities, and displaced 200,000 people.
Having now discarded the “we’re after the Pentagon gang” fig leaf, the Philippine military has been waging a war it apparently believes will finally defeat the MILF.
This is a shortsighted assumption the history of Mindanao since the Spanish period denies. But whoever says the AFP or the Arroyo administration knows history would be mistaken.
The administration does know the surveys, however. Mrs. Arroyo is in all probability telling the truth when she said that the government’s war on the MILF is popular, whether in Metro Manila or in most other parts of the country, including parts of Mindanao.
It’s easy enough to see why. That sentiment had help, and the government provided it through its repeated claims, aired and printed over the uncritical media, that the MILF was responsible for every violent incident in Mindanao including the Davao airport bombing on March 4.
It’s a tried-and-tested technique in the manipulation of public opinion well known to the masterminds of military psychological operations. It’s called demonization, in which the other side is painted in the darkest colors possible by attributing to it the worst motives, methods and atrocities, among them the murder of babies.
In the Philippine context this technique has been especially effective because of preexisting prejudices, stoked by 300 years of Spanish occupation, 50 of American colonial policy and 57 of all Philippine governments since 1946—all of which shared the policy of displacing the Muslims in Mindanao and destroying their cultural identity through conversion to Christianity and Christian resettlement.
The Philippine military is not incidentally also a proven expert—as demonstrated before, during and after martial law—in manufacturing “evidence” such as ambuscades and bombings to prove right and justified such government goals as declaring martial law and waging war in Mindanao.
The coarse arts of media manipulation are part of this approach. Given widespread media malice and/or incompetence, it can only reap dividends in terms of an uninformed and misinformed public.
That the MILF are bomb-throwing terrorists is a view current not only among the less educated. It is equally rampant among professionals and the sizable college student populations of the country’s cities. That the Moros are a violent people likely to declare a jihad (interpreted in these parts as a war waged in the name of religious intolerance at the least provocation) has also been part of popular prejudice for decades.
Mrs. Arroyo’s Mindanao policy, despite its incoherence and deceit, thus enjoys popular, mindless and uninformed support. Uninformed or worse, disinformed—about the complex causes of the Mindanao problem and the failure of succeeding Philippine governments to address the legitimate grievances of the Moro communities, more than a majority of this country’s Christian population actually believes that all it takes to end the problem is force.
While few can argue the popularity of the government’s waging war against the MILF, many will argue its results in terms of a lasting peace. Unfortunately, the capacity to appreciate history’s lessons—among them that the use of force alone against groups whose struggles are rooted in legitimate grievances has never resulted in either peace or development—does not seem to be among Mrs. Arroyo and company’s better qualities.
Devising an enlightened and ultimately successful alternative approach to the use of military force in Mindanao will require leaders capable of transcending their political, personal, class and even religious interests, and who have the political will to implement it. To begin with, anyone no longer interested in the presidency after 2004 would not be focused on whether his or her actions will be popular—only on whether they will be right.
Although hailed in the aftermath of her December 30 announcement as precisely the kind of leader this country has been awaiting for 50 years, Mrs. Arroyo is proving every day that she is not in that category.
She is also strengthening the case for those who argue that she will run in 2004 despite her declaration otherwise. For how else can one explain her pandering to what’s popular, and the constant commissioning of surveys to which she admitted on Saturday? And how else explain her even more shameless pandering to the military and the United States government, which more than anything else her Mindanao policy of war demonstrates?
(Today/abs-cbnnews.com, March 18, 2003)