Dump that insane plan to recruit 35,000 armed bullies

Was Senator Rodolfo Biazon quoted right when he announced that President Estrada had approved a P1-billion plan to mobilize 35,000 recruits to serve as members of paramilitary Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Units (CAFGUs)? What nonsense! The supposed CAFGU "volunteers" are intended, the senator said, to boost the drive against communist and secessionist -- meaning Moro -- rebels. This is a stupid move in which the cure will surely prove worse than the disease.

Can you imagine where the armed forces will be getting those CAFGU militiamen? From those out-of-work and ragtag elements in the barrios and barangays.

These recruits, under the usual CAFGU formula, will be armed and trained on how to use the weapons issued to them by the government. What about psychological testing and vetting with regard to morality and motivation? You know this never happens in hasty militia recruitment. The first to step forward will be those who glory in having a gun with which to swagger around and bully their neighbors and unarmed families within their "geographical" domain.

Military discipline? How can military discipline be enforced on irregulars, who aren't schooled in proper military academies but, instead, simply given a "short course" in gunnery and arms-handling? We'll just be adding more hoodlums to the landscape -- goons who'll be doing the bidding and, c'mon let's face it, the "dirty work" that soldiers and military men aren't prepared to do.

In a recent estimate, the armed forces said that the ranks of New People's Army cadres have been augmented to about 11,000. I wondered at the time this was publicized why such figures were released. Were they "budgetary NPAs", conjured up to justify an enlarged military budget? Now I realize that this scary statistic had been dredged up to justify the expansion of the CAFGU contingents still existing in "hot spots" all over the country, particularly in troubled Mindanao -- currently about 30,000 or so in number.

The prospect of 67,000 CAFGU militiamen, loaded down with artillery and aggressive instincts, is simply appalling. Those government-armed ruffians will, if they run true to form and begin harassing men and women within their reach, create more "rebels" rather than curb rebellion and defend exposed communities.

In Flint, Michigan, only the other day, a six-year old boy who filched a gun from his parents shot dead a six-year old girl, a classmate with whom he had quarreled. Can you imagine grown men with the mentality of six-year olds pushing their weight around because they are emboldened by the possession of a firearm?

As The STAR pointed out yesterday in its front-page story, priest-killer Norberto Manero Jr. and his brothers were this type of militia volunteers. No further argument against ill-trained CAFGU braves is needed.

True enough, Senator Biazon is chairman of the Senate Committee on national defense and security and a former general, a tough Marine who fought in Mindanao against the NPAs (when Davao City, where he commanded a Marine brigade, was "No Man's Land," with the Communist rebels rampaging at will and gunning down two to four persons a day).

I recall those days only too well. Friends used to meet for their morning coffee sessions in the Apo View Hotel to "count heads" and conduct a roll call to see whether any of their group had been murdered by the NPA butchers in the night.

Now that Davao is peaceful and "civilized", people even there tend to forget those days spent on the wildest of frontiers. Perhaps Biazon was influenced in his thinking by the fact that the NPA's iron grip on terrified Davao was broken only by former Communist guerrillas themselves who -- sickened by the endless carnage -- mobilized themselves into an anti-communist militia called the Alsa Masa and shot back, driving their bloodstained former comrades from the area with equally ruthless efficiency.

The Alsa Masa, however, was a unique phenomenon. It was organized by former ideologues who had become outraged by the heartless butchery being undertaken in the name of Maoism and Marxism by their demented kapatids. CAFGUs, by definition, don't have this sort of disgusted, "fight back" motivation. Maybe it's heresy, but I say that there's no comparison between the Alsa Masa -- cruel though they might have been -- and ordinary CAFGU militia volunteers.

Another advocate of resurrecting the CAFGUs is former Defense Secretary Johnny Ponce Enrile. Where Biazon is an ex-Chief of Staff of the AFP, Enrile also has had experience in running the military. When he served under the late Apo Ferdinand E. Marcos, on the other hand, he must have observed that, after the many months of mortal combat in which a defiant Bangsa Moro "army" of blackshirts battered the military and Philippine Constabulary chewing up young Army and PC recruits and sending them home in boxes and body bags, Marcos hit on the formula of bribing the chieftains of the Muslim rebellion -- handing them perks, money and luxurious accommodations in places like the old Manila Hotel, or "respecting" their smuggling and warlord activities.

Such a tactic won't work any longer. The younger fundamentalist fanatics of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the Abu Sayyaf, and other irredentist mujahideen or "volunteer warriors of Islam" are a different sort altogether. They are the exponents of jihad or Holy War and look down on the soldier as asker, an Arab term for a military professional which has the connotation of "mercenary" rather than a "believer." An example of an Islamic markaz, which is a base of operations for "the honorable banditry and the ribat of fighting brotherhoods on the frontiers of the Muslim world" is the MILF's so-called "Camp Abubakar," held inviolate from government forces' attack.

In Mindanao, we're now up against the concept of umma, as the worldwide Islamic "community" is described.

How can we use irregular CAFGU bullies against such a fanatical group, deriving their inspiration from the Afghan war against the Soviets, the suicide attacks of the Lebanese Hezbollah, and the radical Palestinian Hamas who mounted the anti-Israel intifada? It would be tantamount to dispatching clubfooted hoodlums to combat such fanatical warriors. In his brilliant and defining book, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 2000), Prof. Mark Juirgensmeyer (director of Global and International Studies, and editor of Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World) quoted Abd al-Salam Faraj, the author of one of the bibles of terrorism, the pamphlet Al-Faridah al-Gha'ibah ("The Neglected Duty"), as arguing that the Qur'an (Koran) and the biographical accounts of the prophet Muhammad in the Hadith "were fundamentally about warfare."

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of Faraj's thought, he said, is his conclusion that peaceful and legal means of fighting apostasy, e.g. Christianity, "are inadequate." Faraj preached that "the soldier of Islam is allowed to use virtually any means available to achieve a just goal: Deceit, trickery, and violence are specifically mentioned as options available to the desperate soldier."

These words should be the backdrop to our every approach to dealing with the insurgents of the MILF, the Abu Sayyaf, and the various "Lost Commands" of the Moro rebellion. As usual, the "reward" pledged by Mullahs, Imams and Ayatollahs is "a place in paradise."

Such a place, we must wryly observe, was presumably earned by Faraj himself in 1982, when he was caught, tried and executed for his role in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during a parade and review in that leader's honor in Cairo. What had Sadat's unforgivable "crime" been? He had signed a peace treaty with the hated enemy, Israel.

The Russians, for their part, were humiliated by the Afghan Islamic mujahideen in the Afghan War. They were further humiliated and forced to withdraw in Boris Yeltsin's futile war to subdue Chechenya five years ago.

This is why the Russian forces under acting President Vladimir Putin are so ruthless in crushing the Chechens, smashing into Grozny and striving to wipe out the surviving Chechens rebels in the hills and mountain passes through incessant rocket, artillery fire, and aerial assault. The world is "aghast" at the non-stop "violation of human rights" in the massive Russian campaign to grind the Chechens, including civilians, underfoot. The Muslim Chechen fighters, so ruthless in their own way, have met their match in the traditional "Tatar" ruthlessness of the Russians.

What did America and the West expect? That the aggressive people -- who had built all those Gulags and condemned their own homegrown dissidents, reformers, anti-Soviet intellectuals, scientists and writers to the tortures of the damned in the dreaded KGB Lubyanka, the concentration camps, and even the insane asylums -- would suddenly become soft and tender because they had embraced "democracy"? There is a hunger for the respect and fear formerly engendered by "Soviet Power" and the methods of the Tatar Yoke which Gospedin Putin, a former KGB officer, so cleverly exploits.

When the American visitors, Western European prime ministers and officials and NATO critics scold him, or the IMF and World Bank, and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan attempt to "persuade" him to deviate from his mailed-fist course, Putin doesn't spit in their eye. He merely smiles his Russian smile, gives them his frosty stare, politely tells them to mind their own business -- and goes on pummeling the punch-drunk Chechens. Of course, the eye of worldwide television records the pitiful and heart-rending scenes of the ravished, the wounded, the amputated, and hollow-cheeked, shell-shocked Chechen children and refugees. To no avail.

The unruffled Putin knows he will be overwhelmingly elected to the Russian Presidency on March 29. You can bet on this.

Coming back to the CAFGU controversy, President Erap must not cave in to Biazon's and Enrile's importunings.

They say that the original concept of CAFGUs was first hatched by the late President Ramon Magsaysay when he was Secretary of National Defense under Apo Elpidio Quirino.

Monching, whom we called "The Guy", turned the tide against the Communist Hukbalahap, the progenitors of the NPA, who were already maneuvering on the outskirts of Manila and threatening to overthrow the writ of government. The Huks had originally been an anti-Japanese guerrilla force (Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon) and later renamed themselves the HMB (Hukbong Magpapapalaya ng Bayan, or People's Liberation Army).

Magsaysay, on the other hand, mobilized his militiamen the Barrio Self-Defense Units, mainly in a controlled environment, in besieged Central Luzon (Pampanga, Tarlac, Bataan and Zambales, mostly). The BSDUs were more strictly supervised by Magsaysay, who utilized them exclusively to "defend" their home barrios and as intelligence outposts to report on the presence of roving Huk bands.

As a young reporter, my first beat was the anti-HMB guerrilla campaign of Magsaysay's and I saw first-hand how each unit, including the revitalized PC and Army, operated in Battalion Combat Team (BCT) fashion. The battle group most dreaded by the HMB insurgents came to be the fabled, ruthless "Nenita Unit", blackshirts emblazoned with the death's head patch of skull and bones, and commanded by the redoubtable Colonel Napoleon Valeriano.

Valeriano lived up to his name of "Napoleon." He had both bravery (actually recklessness) and flair. He would put on a white jacket -- so, he laughed, the Huks could distinguish him from his men and shoot directly at him -- and led his troops personally into battle. He was a legend. After the HMB "war," he sought retirement, moved to the United States, joined Colonel Ed Lansdale's staff. As a "CIA instructor," Pol helped train the Cuban rebel force which landed at Playa Giron on the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) but was destroyed because American President John F. Kennedy, newly-inaugurated and afraid of making a mistake, denied the "invasion" air cover and support.

I spent some months in Cuba (staying in Havana and travelling around interviewing Fidel Castro and miliciano officers and men who had fought the invasion force) to write a series on what had gone wrong.

The same conclusions I derived then tell me that to mobilize 35,000 CAFGUs would be equally wrong -- a serious miscalculation and mistake.