Dan Mariano - Phlippine Post
Have the country's chiefs been entirely candid about the fierce fighting they have plunged us all into the far south?
True, the AFP, the PNP and the militias are the ones getting shot, wounded and, in almost 100 hundred cases, killed as the gun battles in Central Mindanao as well as in Basilan and Sulu rage.
But while most Filipinos have yet to hear a shot fired in anger, there is no denying that the entire nation is suffering the consequences of the government's decision to choose the military option in dealing with Muslim separatists.
Waging war against Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Abu Sayaff is estimated to cost anywhere from 20 million to 100 million a day. Who, in the final analysis, do you think is going to pay for that? It gets, even worse.
A Catholic priest - Rev. Eliseo Mercado, OMI - openly accuses defense Secretary Orlando Mercado of engaging in "military adventurism" by deliberately ignoring an agreement that could have prevented more blood from spilling in Mindanao.
It now becomes a case of the word of a clergyman who have been closely following the aborted peace talks against the word of a politician who is known to be aiming for the highest political office in the land.
Did Mercado, the defense chief, order the assault on the MILF with the intention of basking in the widespread publicity, which the operation was bound to generate? Ramon Magsaysay was, after all, a defense secretary, too, when he was hailed by the press - with substantial encouragement from the American CIA - for crushing the Huk rebellion in the early 1950s.
Is Mercado thinking of similarly blazing a personal trail to Malacañang on the bodies of soldiers and separatists killed in hostilities, which he could have avoided? What price ambition?
As war rages in Mindanao, the call has been made for even journalists to rally flag. Implicitly, it asks newsmen to exercise self-censorship so that the military -- and the Estrada administration -- could proceed with their southern campaign minimum resistance on the home front.
The AFP chief of staff, Gen. Angelo Reyes, for one, displayed unmistakable irritation during a recent press briefing when reporters asked him about the cost of Mindanao war. The tone of his voice and his body language relayed an unmistakable message: anyone raising question was being unpatriotic.
Why the defense establishment has been so touchy is, of course, understandable. While the battlefield is in Mindanao, the AFP also knows that it must also compete for public approval in the rest of the country.
Reyes was still a cadet when 1,000 km to the east, U.S. troops were fighting communist guerillas in Indochina. As a student-officer, he must have learned that the mightiest super power was, to a large extent, humbled by a bunch of low-tech Orientals because American public opinion had turned against US involvement in Vietnam. It was opinion that had been swayed media coverage.
While compelling, this theory was not entirely accurate.
For one thing, it failed to acknowledge the righteousness the Vietnamese cause and, therefore, the high morale it imparted to the guerillas who valiantly fought, not so much for the establishment of a proletarian paradise in Indochina, but for self-determination.
American colonials had accomplished a similar feat 200 years earlier against the British empire.
The Moros are engaged in exactly the same enterprise.
If only they would be honest about it, ordinary Filipinos -- the so-called Christians -- feel little kinship and affinity for those whom they perfunctorily refer to as: Muslim brothers." There is a great deal of discrimination and prejudice against the Moros that is express officially, as in the disfranchisement of entire Muslim portray Moros as crude, opportunistic yokels.
The Moros are a people that have been set apart from the Filipino nation by history, faith and culture. Their integration into the Philippine Republic was fabrication of colonialism.
The creation of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao merely acknowledge this fact, but it did not go far enough to rectify a centuries-old mistake.
The creation of a homeland that the Moros can truly call their own is the only intelligent solution to the Mindanao problem. When this come to pass, only they can Filipinos and Moros learn to live in peace -- as good neighbors.
