from web site
July 19, 2007, Cebu Daily News, Opinion, Unclenching fists, by Juan Mercado,
CEBU, Philippines—“You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist.” And the beheading of 10 marines slain in a Basilan ambush, and the mutilation of their genitals, infuriated including those who’ve backed peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Demands for harsh reprisals have surged to stridency unheard since General Teodulfo Bautista and his men were ambushed at a Patikul peace meeting. Upon assurances of safe passage by Sulu rebels, they went unarmed – and were cut down.
The decapitations fractured the Third Geneva Convention. Article 13 prohibits disfigurement, whether of prisoners or the dead. But international law rarely figures in the calculus of many MILF leaders, even as countries, the world over, have made “command responsibility” a keystone of governance.” That spurns accountability under standards acceded to by 194 countries and Philippine laws. This disdain trickles down to foot soldiers.
What stokes today’s raw anger, however, is not MILF’s expanded claim to Basilan as their territory. Sez who? snapped columnist Ana Marie Pamintuan. That has been the near-universal reaction. And what law empowered them to kill trespassers? asked Cebu Daily News’ Ricky Poca. “That’s not an argument of a civilized mind.”
No, it is not. Indeed, Islam prohibits suicide, and corpses, from conflict, are to be respected. Families of combatants, as well as their sick, old and clergy, must be protected. “Do not aggress as God does not like aggressors.” (Qur’an: 2:190).
Departure from this humane standard, shared by all major faiths, stokes today’s fury. Those who looted the cell phone of Private First Class Rueben Doronio sent mocking messages to his family. “Binaboy ang aking anak,” wailed a mother at the Villamor Air Base necrological rites. Translation dilutes the anguish in “binaboy.” (“They mutilated my son like a pig.”)
This is a brutal negation of a common humanity – done to “a piece of divinity in us that owes no homage unto the sun.” Yet, it was not always this way.
Muslims, lumads and Christians, for years, lived side-by-side in peace, as Philippine Human Development Report case studies note. “Our playmates and classmates were all Maranaos. And we went caroling to both Christian and Maranao homes. During Ramadan, we fasted. We called the hilot who helped our mother during deliveries “ina” – the Maranao term for mother.
Migration into Mindanao, land grabbing, fraud by corrupt Muslim “leaders” and embedded poverty were fuel for revolt. Even today, life expectancy in Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, at 52 years, is almost a generation shorter than 71 for Cebu. Using international development yardsticks, Maguindanao finds itself bracketed between India and Yemen.
The 1970-72 onslaught by lowland “Ilaga” vigilantes and rouge military lit the fuse for the eruption. Damage spread with the October 1972 Muslim National Liberation Front uprising. And MILF continued this campaign of armed conflict while negotiating, after MNLF crumbled from Nur Misuari’s inept leadership. Nur spoke of carving six-lane highways in his native Sulu. He refused to be bothered by literacy scraping 58 percent. Seven out of 10 lacked potable water.
“Peace is not only better than war but infinitely more arduous,” George Bernard Shaw once said. And the past half century has seen painful efforts to rebuild bridges: from ulamas and bishops regular consultations to today’s peace talks with international cooperation. Malaysia is “referee” in peace talks with MILF.
In his 20 February 1981 address to Muslim representatives in Davao, the late Pope John Paul II summed up the search for common values: “I deliberately address you as brothers: that is certainly what we are, because we are members of the same human family, whose efforts, whether people realize it or not, tend toward God and the truth that comes from him. But we are especially brothers in God, who created us and whom we are trying to reach, in our own ways, through faith, prayer and worship, through the keeping of his law and through submission to his design.”
That hope has been further blurred by MILF’s stances: admission of staging the ambush; pledges to punish those who violated Islamic tenets (let alone Filipino and international standards), then refusal to identify or hand over perpetrators. MILF, meanwhile, flaunts the unproven claims of 30 marines killed.
That splashes fuel on to an already raging fire. It does little to allay already deep suspicion that MILF harbors foreign terrorists. And its de-cajon brush-off claim that attacks are staged by rouge commanders, not under MILF control, is wearing thin.
The issues of transparency, responsibility, justice and impunity must be addressed. Whether Abu Sayyaf or MILF members did the mutilation and looting of the fallen cannot be just be brushed aside. A reassessment of the peace talks does not cancel the peace process. Fairness reinforces that process. And it is necessary because many of the insurgent grievances are legitimate.
But we cannot just skid back to normalcy, as if nothing happened. After all, the MILF does not live on another planet. Like the rest of us, they find themselves in an international community that holds standards to set us off from savages.
What really is at stake here is whether we can end this discord in our time, so all our grandchildren can live in peace. Failure to do that will only dump on them this old conflict, made more lethal by Al-Qaeda aberrations of a faith that teaches Allah is “the merciful, the compassionate…”
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