SAN FRANCISCO—Twenty-five years ago, as peace talks with the underground Left were falling apart, Cory Aquino declared that she was prepared to “unsheathe the sword of war.”
And so she did.
A quarter of a century later, the wars rage on. The killings haven’t stopped. The rebel armies are still fighting government.
Now, it’s her son who is being pushed to embrace the cruel fantasy of “all-out war.”
To his credit, Noynoy Aquino appeared to be resisting the pressure — he appeared to be taking the long view.
“We are not interested in knee-jerk reactions that will jeopardize our efforts to address the roots of conflict in the region,” he said in one of the most important speeches of his presidency.
This part, in particular, is a powerful statement: “Anong klaseng pag-iisip ang nagsasabing awayin ang lahat, sabay-sabay, miski ang nananahimik, sa lahat ng sulok ng Pilipinas, para lang masabing may ginagawa ka?
[“What kind of thinking says we need to fight everyone at the same time, even those who want to live in peace in every corner of the Philippines, just so it can be said that we are doing something?”]
Courageous words. But then came the stunning contradiction: He gives the Philippine Air Force the go-ahead to bomb areas of Zamboanga.
Supposedly, the goal is to root out “lawless elements.” But the cost of the operation was immediately clear: More than 10,000 people caught in the crossfire, forced to evacuate.
From his statements, at least, P-Noy appeared to understand the key question right now: Do you really want to abandon peace talks, and lump those within the MILF who want peace with the hardline elements pushing for war?
But that’s what the new offensive may, in fact, achieve.
To be sure, the deaths of the Filipino soldiers were tragic. But it’s also clear that the best way to honor those young men is not to send even more young Filipinos to more battles that will surely not end the war anyway.
Especially since it’s really still unclear what happened — Was it a sneaky, sinister ambush by the rebels — or a bungled military adventure masterminded by a group of bumbling officers?
It doesn’t help that some of those making the loudest calls for all-out war will be far, far away from where the killing and bloodletting will take place.”
Take Erap, the movie-star-turned-terrible-president, who quickly turned this tragic, complicated mess into one of the cheap action movies that made him famous.
“Pulverize them,” he told the Philippine Star. “End this decisively. … We have to wage war in order to gain peace.”
Of course, he conveniently forgot to mention that he himself tried that when he was president — and it failed.
The attack on Camp Abubakar was supposed to be the decisive offensive that would break the back of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
And Erap was so arrogantly confident that he had achieved final victory that, in a stunning display of the worst kind of cultural and religious insensitivity, he celebrated with the troops inside the captured camp with beer and lechon.
A decade later, the MILF still exists. The insurgency in the south continues.
The reason is clear: Calling for all-out war to put an end to a conflict deeply rooted in social and historical reasons may be dramatic, it may be the ultimate “papogi” battlecry of macho-talking trapos who actually have no idea what war entails.
But it doesn’t work.
Sure, the military may win a battle here and there. They may parade suspected rebels supposedly captured in daring raids and fierce gunbattles, and declare that this barrio or that sitio has been “cleared” of insurgents.
But our own history has shown repeatedly, all-out war doesn’t work!
We can already predict what will happen, if the ongoing campaign escalates into the all-out war the war-mongers are eager to unleash.
Impoverished, already war-weary communities will be militarized.
Which then leads to human rights abuses by an armed force still notorious for trampling the rights of civilians, especially in remote rural areas.
Which creates an ever expanding pool of would-be recruits for the rebels who, through decades of fighting, have already mastered the art of guerrilla warfare.
Which means an even more formidable rebel army, an unending rebellion.
To be sure, the MILF will never win.
But then again, if those in the Philippine military obsessed with military victory have their way, the rebels also will never be defeated.
The war will just keep going and going and going.
For that’s what all-out war really means: endless war.
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