Deceit, etc.—or all of the above?
March 21st, 2003
As the Arroyo administration talks peace while waging war in Mindanao, it is tempting to conclude that the only offense it’s guilty of is policy incoherence and operational incompetence.
Is what we are witnessing today in Mindanao first of all the result of a failure of analysis as well as intelligence (in the sense of IQ levels and reliable information)?
Have 200,000 people been forced into the government’s dismal evacuation centers, scores on both the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front side killed, entire families arrested on the flimsiest basis (e.g., they have the same surnames as one of the Muslim victims of the Davao blast), and martial law contemplated not only because “military intelligence” has once again proven to be a contradiction in terms, but even more fundamentally because putting together a coherent policy in Mindanao—which it should have done two years ago—is simply beyond the capacity of the Arroyo administration?
Was President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo serious, and did she actually believe that Filipinos with IQs higher than that of a house plant would believe her when she “ordered” the military to pursue a policy of “active defense” when it was all the time waging an offensive in Mindanao?
Is the entire Filipino nation and the world witnessing the spectacle of a government’s sending off a special emissary to Malaysia so the latter can help “end the Mindanao violence by bringing the MILF back to the negotiating table,” while that same government throws more and more troops into North Cotabato, and ignores the MILF’s repeated offer to do precisely that—resume negotiations?
Is the same Arroyo administration spending P30 million a day for the military offensive it began in February this year while it laments its supposedly being too cash-strapped to provide the Department of Education with the budget to fill the shortfall in the number of schoolteachers needed for the basic education of Filipino schoolchildren?
To say that all this is due to incompetence would be to fault this government with something it can’t help. It would make the developing tragedy in Mindanao the result of stupidity, not malice.
And the case for stupidity is convincing. Within a few weeks, the Arroyo administration has managed to stoke the Mindanao conflict to levels of violence even Joseph Estrada in 2000 would have been proud of, and made peace much more elusive than at any time since the Marcos regime. If this were stupidity, this alone would be enough to run any government on the planet (except that of the United States) out of office.
But things have come to such a pass in the republic of our sorrows that it is actually the more benign interpretation, stupidity not being a capital offense in these parts since it is far from rare in either government or Philippine society.
If the Arroyo administration were to plead guilty to stupidity as a mitigating cause for the chaos and violence in Mindanao, exasperated Filipinos would probably sigh in resignation while they rush to the nearest foreign embassy to file their emigration applications.
Unfortunately, however, stupidity is only one of several possible explanations for the Mindanao mess, in the ranks of which malice and its companion, deceit, occupy equal pride of place.
It may well be that the Arroyo administration is deliberately and maliciously deceiving the Filipino people by pretending to be for peace and negotiations in Mindanao, while it is in reality for war—meaning the total destruction of the MILF, and along with it as collateral damage, the Muslim communities that support it. But it can’t say it is for war (that candidness is reserved for the likes of the US President), and must hide that fact by saying it’s for peace.
As by now widely suspected, it could be that its armed forces deliberately rather than accidentally sabotaged the MILF-government peace negotiations in favor of a final solution to the “Mindanao problem.” It could have done that also to create the conditions for the citizenry’s acceptance of the involvement of US combat troops in the “fight against terrorism” in the Philippines.
It might even be that the Davao airport bombing was not the MILF’s doing as the military and police were quick to conclude. The death of 21 people last March 4 could be the handiwork of the MILF’s accusers themselves so the MILF can be further demonized as terrorists.
Unlawful as this would be, without evidence to the contrary it would presume unity between the civilian authority (i.e., Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) supposedly engaged in the making of policy, and the Armed Forces (i.e., Angelo Reyes) that in this case is supposed to carry it out.
It presumes that in keeping with their respective legal mandates, the President of the Philippines has command over the AFP through the secretary of defense, who in turn regards obedience to the commander in chief as both his legal as well as moral duty.
About that there is increasing doubt in the Republic, however. Much of the Senate doubts it, as does the House—as do many civil society groups, and many in academia as well as the media.
Which leads us to the third possible explanation for the death and misery that’s threatening to spread throughout Central Mindanao. It is no less than that the defense secretary has become a separate power. And, with visions of the presidency dancing in his head, unilaterally launched the Pikit offensive last February with neither the prior knowledge nor approval of the current President of the Republic.
If true, this would mean that the civilian authority, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, is not entirely insincere in declaring that peace in Mindanao, presumably through negotiations, is the government policy—only that an out-of-control military is making and implementing its own contrary policy.
It would also suggest that Angelo Reyes, as Rep. Carlos Padilla describes him, is indeed “a dangerous man.” This interpretation would argue that, driven by his overreaching ambitions for the presidency, and dismissing Mrs. Arroyo as a lame-duck President anyway, Reyes has focused his politicking on gaining the support of both the citizenry as well as the United States through total war in Mindanao and total commitment to the involvement of US troops in combating the country’s raging insurgencies.Under circumstances in which the military’s bayonets are no longer hers to command, Mrs. Arroyo can only pretend to be on top of the situation while having lost control of it, in effect colluding with the military in the erosion of the powers of her own office.
That would explain her attempts to save face by issuing “orders” the military is already implementing. It would explain why some of those orders have been interpreted by the military according to the exigencies of the moment. It would explain the contradiction between what Mrs. Arroyo and her spokesmen say and what’s actually happening on the ground in Central Mindanao.
There is a fourth possible explanation for the military escalation of violence in Mindanao despite its consequences on the peace process and the lives of its people, and the seeming chaos in declared government policy.
It is all of the above: that the Mindanao tragedy is a mix of stupidity as well as malice and deceit, and of one man’s ambitions’ leading him to play God with the lives of Mindanao’s—and eventually the entire country’s—millions by conspiring with his US counterparts to open the second front in the US’ “war on terror” in the Philippines.
Just as in the international arena the focus of that war has become Iraq rather than al-Qaeda, in the Philippines the focus would be the MILF and the National Democratic Front rather than the Abu Sayyaf. “All of the above” would be a mix lethal enough to be worthy of George W. Bush.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, March 15, 2003)