Peace through war
March 21st, 2003
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo announced the other day during a TV interview that the Philippine government had created a P500 million fund. Called the Mindanao Peace and Development Fund, Mrs. Arroyo made it clear that the Fund would be used for—war.
The Fund, she said during its Malacañang launch in a speech worthy of Orwell’s 1984, would be “a big step” in fighting “terrorism” because it would make the Armed Forces and the police “even more effective.”
She didn’t say anything about spending a centavo from the Fund for feeder roads, or health centers, or school buildings or anything else the poor communities of Mindanao need, or even to help resettle the tens of thousands of families displaced by the ongoing Armed Forces offensive against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Instead the Fund will be used to provide the military and police what they need—communication equipment, vehicles, reward money for informers.
Mrs. Arroyo apparently did not see the irony in a Fund for Peace and Development’s being actually a fund for war and destruction.
Mrs. Arroyo did say that the Mindanao lawmakers who put the Fund together from their pork barrel allocations would be involved in deciding how the Fund will be spent—but together with representatives of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police.
Her accompanying statements could not have been clearer as to who will be making the hard decisions, however. Since the Fund, as Mrs. Arroyo said, will be spent for “communication and other equipment, mobility vehicles, intelligence gathering, setting up reward systems, relief operations, barangay identification and security programs,” those decisions will obviously be made primarily—perhaps first and —by the military and the police.
The Fund, in short, is one more sign of, as well as a further boost to, the increasing power of the police and the military in making decisions in Mindanao. It is also one more nail of irony in the coffin of peace in the troubled areas of that region, where obviously the Arroyo government does want peace—except that it has to be the kind in which everyone accepts in silence what’s going on, or else.
This is the peace otherwise known as the peace of silence and surrender, not the peace based on social justice, equal opportunity and democratic participation that drove the Revolution of 1896 and which continues to fuel the Moro resistance to “assimilation”.
The argument in government circles, especially in Malacañang and the military nowadays, is that rebellions, insurgencies and revolutionary movements deter development. Whatever the historians, the sociologists and the political scientists say, the government has thus insisted that rebellions, etc. are not the results and symptoms of underdevelopment and poverty, but their cause.
It’s an argument which to be consistent would make the Revolution of 1896 the cause of the country’s problems with Spain in the late 19th century and not their result. It distorts the link between poverty and underdevelopment on the one hand and social unrest including armed rebellions on the other by refusing to accept that rebellions are rooted in the unjust social, economic and political structures of this particular society.
The same arguments naturally lead to—perhaps it is more precise to say that they are used to justify—the kind of policies the Arroyo administration has adopted in dealing with rebellion, etc., in Mindanao and elsewhere.
If rebellions, etc. are indeed the cause rather than the results of poverty and underdevelopment, the obvious solution would be to spend as much as you can on the military and police approach of crushing all forms of social protest including armed rebellion, and you’ll have peace and development.
The Mindanao Fund for Peace and Development is thus in the same category as other funds focused on that very purpose, its Orwellian doublespeak name not being specially unique. By having an intelligence component and a reward system, it is also likely to be, as Mrs. Arroyo quaintly put it the other day, “unaccountable,” meaning not subject to audit.
Because they’re not subject to government auditing procedures, intelligence funds are the accounting equivalent of open wounds, except that they bleed money from the treasury into the pockets of those in charge of them. There’s a lot of logic indeed—P500 million worth—in putting such a fund together, and in the name of peace and development too.
However, suspend your disbelief and assume the honesty of the police and the military as well as of the Philippine political class. What’s left is still logic of a sort, though mostly twisted, in calling a fund for war a fund for peace.
That logic is based on the assumption that peace can be achieved only through war, and development only through destruction. It’s simple enough to the simple mind and no longer surprising. It is after all the logic of the military that now has power over the presidency. And it’s logic to which the entire world has been subjected these past many months.
It is the very same logic at work in the rudimentary minds of those now in control of the US government whose greed for control of Iraqi oil via a war that could turn into the Third World War the Arroyo government supports.
What it amounts to is that to save Mindanao and its people in conflict areas you have to destroy them. This is a local variant of the logic behind the US argument for war in Iraq, which its partisans say is meant to bring peace and to save the Iraqis. In the process the world will be plunged into war, much of Iraq destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of its citizens maimed and killed, but never mind. All that oil is worth it.
In the part of the world called the Philippines, all those resources now in areas with Muslim majorities are the local equivalent of oil. They make the killing, the displacement of thousands of people, and the destruction of entire communities worth it.
The lure of those resources helps explain why an honest and just peace based on negotiations which would address the historic grievances of the poor and the marginalized has never sat well with the military and its allies among the economic and social elite, mostly Christian, in the rest of the country as well as Mindanao, where that elite has coveted for decades the timber, the marine resources and whatever minerals are buried in mostly Muslim ground.
As one Cotabato “entrepreneur” put it in a forum on the Mindanao conflict two years ago, leave everything to him and his fellow businessmen; unlike those Moros, they know how to turn a profit.
But before they can do that—“develop” Mindanao—peace has to be achieved, and it better be a peace in which those who object to Muslim marginalization and disempowerment have been silenced, preferably forever. As this government has been demonstrating since, that kind of peace can only be achieved through war.
(abs-cbnNEWS.com, March 20, 2003)