If we don’t ‘cure’ the Comelec, how can we hold elections in 2004?

While we’re wallowing in charges and countercharges and "investigating" practically everything under the sun, isn’t anybody worrying about the bitter "Mexican stand-off" that is paralyzing the Commission on Elections?

Let’s get real. If we don’t "fix" what’s wrong with the Comelec, then we can’t have Presidential elections in 2004. Could anything be clearer than that? We seem to forget that free and credible elections are the bedrock of every democracy. If no true polls are held, our democracy becomes a joke – and a sick one at that. Yet, I don’t see enough people worrying about the Comelec, as if shrugging helplessly and saying, bahala na.

In choosing for a nation the kind of leadership it desperately requires in times of crisis, there can be no bahala na. The gridlock in the Comelec simply won’t go away all by itself, as long as the Gang of Four there outnumbers the three, including himself, in the group of Comelec Chairman Alfredo Benipayo.

The four were all appointees of former President Estrada (Luzviminda Tangcangco, Rufino Javier, Thompson Lantion and Mehol Sudain). This dissident Gang keeps on attempting to dominate the Comelec by issuing its own alleged en banc resolutions and instructions. It tried, for instance, to cancel the elections in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) by a midnight resolution declaring that the elections be called off that day owing to problems in certain areas. Fortunately, local poll officials ignored this weird directive entirely – and the ARMM elections went on successfully (if not uniformly even-handed in some places),

However, you get my drift. How can we go on this way? With the Gang forever sniping at their Chairman Benipayo and his two allied commissioners (Rex Borra and Florentino Tuason) both of them Comelec veterans who rose from the ranks, our electoral system can only be doomed.

In more civilized countries, except in dictatorships where the results are known the day before, who has been elected President, Vice President to Congress, etc., is either known the next day, or even the same day. We’re the laughing stock of the world for our tortuous, chalkmark, hand count which doesn’t tell us who were elected for several weeks.

Where are computerized lists? The voters’ ID cards? Anything at all?

* * *

The trouble is that, under the Constitution, the Chairman and the six commissioners can only be removed by impeachment. This is a legislative process by Congress by which commissioners can be convicted for culpable violation of the Constitution, treason, bribery, graft and corruption, betrayal of public trust and other high crimes.

The process of impeachment is already a tedious and arduous one, but what I hear is that the House of Representatives wants to even make more difficult by amending its rules and regulations for impeachment.

What can be done? There has to be a remedy and sanction to deal with commissioners who run berserk.

Quick, somebody come up with a solution! As for me, I’m full of frustration, but plain out of ready options. But we’ve got to do it pronto.

* * *

Only last month, the Gang of Four did a weird thing.

This may substantiate what the poll body’s personnel have been whispering since that fast-break deal was hatched (then opposed by former Comelec Chairman Harriet Demetriou and nixed by her successor, Chairman Benipayo). Namely, that there’s a great deal of profit in that multimillion-peso deal which was approved by the Gang although its cost was bigger than the Comelec budget earmarked for it. (What do those Comelec geniuses think they have – a machine that produces money out of thin air?)

In any event, a petition for mandamus and prohibition was filed with the Regional Trial Court in Quezon City by "Photokina Marketing Corporation", against the seven top officials of the poll body. The petition seeks to compel the Comelec to formalize and execute the above-mentioned contract for the Voters’ Registration and Identification System (VRIS) project that had been vehemently opposed by Demetriou and canceled by Benipayo.

Lo and behold, four of the "defendant" commissioners – Tancangco, Javier, Lantion and Sandain – immediately filed a manifestation that they have no objection to the issuance of a writ of preliminary mandatory injunction for the continuation and execution of the Photokina contract. Evidently, this is a ploy designed to strengthen the plaintiff’s position and cripple the defense.

How will the court rule? That’s up to the court.

* * *

This is a case of murder most foul.

The other week, Velma Cinco, the officer-in-charge of the Comelec’s Education and Information Department, was ambushed and killed in broad daylight, in which appears to be a job-related assassination. Incidentally, the slain Cinco had been installed in her post by Chairman Benipayo to replace the Tancangco protégé who had earlier held that position, Angelina Matibag.

The daring ambush occurred on Pedro Gil and Eden streets in Paco.. A suspected hit-man has been apprehended and charged with murder, attempted murder, and illegal possession of firearms. Hopefully, he will start singing like a canary. Sources in the Comelec say that the apprehension of the murder suspect will reveal only the "tip of the iceberg" on what’s going on in the Comelec.

Bribery, graft and corruption – and murder? Good grief! What a snake pit.

* * *

Here we are, with Christmas just around the corner, yet the "Christmas spirit" still has to kick in. Don’t worry. It will. The Filipino will have his Christmas joy, whether rich or poor. It’s our saving grace as a nation.

Of course there are woes here — and, since misery loves company, there are woes all over. Germany’s unemployment rate is at an all-time high. The United States, always described as the world’s only remaining super-power, is super-worried. Not only is unemployment 5.7 percent, a total unpredented in many decades, but in industry alone, one million American jobs have been lost. Congress still has to approve a stimulus package. (Yet, the Americans must be thankful they have a budget capable of providing a stimulus package. In our case, what budget?)

The war in Afghanistan must be costing the US billions of dollars. When this writer was aboard the USS "Independence", not one of the most modern of American aircraft carriers, the Admiral on board and the captain of the vessel told me that "it costs one million dollars a day to operate this carrier." That was during a period of peace. With aircraft roaring off that deck, unleashing heavy loads of bombs and rockets, then returning for refueling and rearming, they must be spending at least 20 to 25 million dollars a day.

And that doesn’t account for the helicopters already crashed in the Afghan conflict.

* * *

I’m afraid that the Balkanization of Afghanistan has begun. With the "taking" of their last two strongholds, the city and province of Kandanar and the mountain base of Tora Bora, the Taliban which ruled Afghanistan for seven years in an iron vise of stringent Islamic fundamentalism is all but finished. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar is being sought for arrest and "trial" — but everybody knows that trial is not the way the Afghans settle matters.

As for Osama bin Laden — where is he? Don’t expect him, except by some lucky happenstance, to be caught so easily. The Americans have been dropping leaflets reiterating that a $25 million bounty will be paid to anyone who reveals where Osama is. Let’s see what happens.

In the meantime, the 19-member ad interim government, set to run the country for six months under the Chairmanship of anti-Taliban leader Hamid Karzai hasn’t taken over yet, but is already in trouble. Unless Karsai and his group, so hopefully assembled at that meeting in Bonn, can convince certain powerful warlords to join them, the struggle to fragment Afghanistan (as what occurred in Yugoslavia, with Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina — and perhaps eventually Kosovo — breaking away from Belgrade) may begin sooner than later.

The Russians, who have dealt themselves back into the game by landing an unwelcome contingent in Kabul, are miffed that their protégé, outgoing President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik, is being ousted from his position. In Kandahar, for that matter, local Pashtun militia chieftains have started squabbling who will take over.

The most serious cloud on the horizon is the fact that General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the warlord who controls the key city of Mazar-i-sharif and a large chunk of the north and center absolutely rejects the new government and refuses to bow knee to it. Dostum growls that his Uzbeks are not properly represented.

Dostum is a rough-cut warrior who shows no mercy to his enemies (his men were the ones who gunned down the Taliban prisoners who rebelled in that old fort). His name is a byword for brutality. He has fought on all sides.

If you look back at January 1994, when Dostum walked out of the Rabbani government, his artillery began shelling Kabul. His attack accounts for many of the ruins you see on television. In that internecine fight, more than 50,000 inhabitants were killed, mostly civilians. His soldiers, ferocious in battle, are notorious for looting even his home base of Marz, everytime they recaptured it. His headquarter is called the "Fort of War." He might be described as a war-lover.

When the Taliban finally pushed to conquer Marz-i-Sharif in May 1997, he initially routed them, killing 3,000 of their fighters and taking prisoners of 3,500. Two thousand of these prisoners were executed, or starved and tortured to death. In the end, Dostum was forced to flee to Turkey, and returned only this year to rejoin the Northern Alliance. Turkey has the most influence on him (not Iran, Russia, or the Central Asian republics, and certainly not Pakistan). He has a home in Turkey.

Dostum, there’s no doubt, plans to remain in feudal control of his home bases – and then there are other regional warlords.

So, it’s clear the shaky ad interim government has its work cut out for it.

Victory and "liberation" may reveal a fact that has been simmering under the surface for more than a century: That there never was an Afghanistan. We may see the country dividing itself into regional states the lands of the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Hazzaras, and the Pashtuns (Pathans).

Given such divisions, only a miracle – not NATO, nor America, nor the United Nations – can forge the kind of nation seen as that fragmented country’s salvation. Love’s labor lost?