While they were sleeping
July 20th, 2003
The Australian media may be outraged, but they do not seem surprised. Anyone can sense that between the lines of their editorials and other expressions of opinion over the escape of the Jemaah Islamiyah’s Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi and two alleged members of the Abu Sayyaf last Monday.
Al-Ghozi, together with Abdulrahman Ong Edris and Omar Opik Lasal, walked out of their cells in the Intelligence Group complex of the Philippine National Police headquarters in Camp Crame, most probably with the help of their own guards.
One of those guards just happened to fall asleep at the time the trio were making their way out of their cells and the complex; another had gone out to buy something at the exact same time—all in the wee hours of dawn last July 15.
Listen to Sydney, Australia’s Morning Herald:
“The mocking ease with which a convicted Jemaah Islamiyah bomb maker escaped from a Manila jail on Monday highlights the formidable challenge iof confronting terrorist threats beyond Australia’s borders,” the newspaper said in an editorial.
“This was no daring escape,” it continued. “In Catholic- majority Philippines, it is not radical Islam but personal profit that has most probably been behind the escape.
“If so it is a reminder that as long as the security forces and the bureaucracy of the Philippines and other nations in the region remain vulnerable to corruption, no amount of aid for specialist police training can guarantee (the success of) the anti-terrorist effort.
“The nature of terrorism is such that weak, corrupt and inefficient governments are easily exploited, affording terrorist groups freedom of movement and access to training grounds, weapons and false documentation.”
In short: the so-called “escape” was no escape at all, but a conspiracy between Fathur et.al. and his police guards, who most probably accepted money in exchange for looking the other way. What’s more, the “escape” should be no surprise considering the weakness and corruption of the Philippine bureaucracy, the police included.
On the other hand, the Australian described the “escape” as “a deadly farce” which had “set the fight against terrorism back years.” It also demonstrated, said the newspaper, how easy it is for terrorists to prosper in the Philippines, and how ineffective the Philippine government has been in stopping the corruption for which the Philippine government is noted in the region.
Although these newspapers are only two among the thousands in Australia, they do reflect the dominant thinking in Australia as well as other developed countries—whether Japan, the United States or anywhere else—that like other Third World governments, the Philippine government is inefficient, weak, and ridden with corruption.
That conclusion is inevitable. Although perception of Philippine corruption is an article of popular wisdom in developed countries, it has been repeatedly validated by the observations of businessmen, diplomats and survey organizations, who have uniformly listed the Philippines among the most corrupt countries in Asia.
By implication, that finding suggests that the Philippines government is also among the most inefficient in the region, official corruption being the leading factor in the kind of deliberate incompetence that allows even high risk prisoners like al-Ghouzi to escape—or for that matter, that permits the construction of roads that lead to nowhere, and of captured illegal drugs’ ending up in the streets.
Certainly official government policy is to keep people like al-Ghouzi in jail, just as it is official policy to develop the country’s infrastructure and to combat the drug menace.
The Arroyo government has not only repeatedly announced its commitment to anti-terrorism. It has also committed the country to unconditional support for the United States’ own war on the international terrorist networks to the extent of supporting the latter’s unjust war on Iraq; and welcomed Australian aid in the Philippines’ own supposed effort to combat home-grown terrorists as well as those of the international variety who have taken refuge here. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was in fact welcoming Australian Prime Minister John Howard on the day Al-Ghouzi et.al. walked out of Crame, and was promised A$5 million in aid in support of the anti-terrorist campaign.
The development of Philippine roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure is on the other hand a continuing policy of all Philippine governments, as is the campaign against illegal drugs. The Arroyo government has made the latter a major plank of its current policy thrusts, launching only a few weeks ago a supposedly tough campaign meant to halt the alarming growth in drug addiction in the country because of the impunity with which drug rings have been operating in Philippine territory.
These policies not withstanding, newly-constructed roads still disappear with the first rains of the wet season, bridges still collapse, or are not built at all despite millions allocated for them, and the anti-drug campaign appears headed for the vast graveyard of government failures.
The “escape” of Al-Ghouzi suggests the same fate for the anti-terrorism policy. The “escape” shares with the Abu Sayyaf’s success in breaking out of Lamitan in 2002 the same possibility: that collusion between security forces and the groups and individuals they’re supposed to be fighting, and not the terrorists themselves, is what makes the campaign against terrorism problematic.
Corruption is the one single factor that unites most government failures, and corruption that’s at the core of the weak state. The weakness of the Philippine state is in fact based on its inability to enforce its policies through its own institutions, agencies and officials, and only peripherally on its inability to enforce its will among the governed.
The second is a consequence of the first. In Lamitan, for example, the escape of the Abu Sayyaf, whose neutralization has been a state policy for at least two years, was made possible not because that group was in any way superior in arms, tactics or intelligence to the Armed Forces, but because of the corruption of the very institution and men charged with the task of implementing that policy.
The same is equally true in the implementation of the state policy of infrastructure development. Critical to the country’s progress, the roads, bridges, airports that would transport farmers’ produce to market, bring tourists into the country and link its various communities together are either not being built despite the millions allocated for them, or else are built haphazardly because of the cost of corruption, which in the Department of Public Works and Highways is conservatively estimated at 30 percent of each project.
Essentially the same problem is evident in the anti-drug campaign, which has been hobbled by corruption among police and military elements. Corruption in the form of bribery as well as direct police and military involvement in the drug trade has led to the Philippines’ conversion into, for the international drug rings, a reliable transshipment point as well as a growth zone for their illicit product.
What these suggests is the urgent need to reform the bureaucracy including the police and the military beyond falsely claiming that “the strong Republic” has been achieved.
A misnomer to begin with, that phrase has served no purpose except to conceal from public understanding the most critical failure of governance in the Philippines: that of its own instrumentalities’ willingness to subvert the very policies they’re supposed to implement—and even the very Constitution they have sworn to uphold.
No Philippine government, and that includes this one, has ever tried to seriously address that most basic of all problems. It’s not just the Camp Crame guards who’ve been asleep during their watch.
(abs-cbnNEWS.com, July 17, 2003)