Kidnapping everywhere: Why don’t we prove then, we can handle the problem?

With six kidnappings taking place within 24 hours, from Metro Manila to Mindanao, we’re still bragging indignantly that we don’t need outside help or advice, and we, by ourselves, can handle the problem. That’s the measure of what ails us in our tribalized society.

I guess this springs from the amor propio, the prickliness and hubris (maybe more accurately "conceit"), we derived from the Spaniards, and the bahala na attitude we inherited from our Indo-Malay forbears.

Sad to say, these qualities are not virtues but the albatross around our neck.

We hear that, blinking under a torrent of criticism from such individuals as described above (as she frequently does), President Macapagal-Arroyo is on the verge of abandoning the very smart and valid idea she had announced earlier of recruiting Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, as an adviser on law and order problems.

There was no guarantee Giuliani would have agreed to have come here at all, but it was a good plan. Who better than the tough guy who had curbed crime and reformed a crooked NYPD, the New York police force, in the most high-profile and brawling metropolis in the world, to help us in doing the same thing in our capital region and our other crime-riddled urban centers?

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Moreover, the recruitment of Giuliani to "help out" in the Philippines would have focused world attention on our earnest fight against violence, crime, lawlessness and urban blight. His presence would have projected Metro Manila and our country into the international spotlight as a nation earnestly struggling to exorcise its own devils and battling to make its neighbors safe. For Giuliani, whether anybody likes it or not, is the "Flavor of the Year" internationally, not just because TIME Magazine lauded him as Person of the Year, but because of the leadership, coolness under strain, and compassion he exhibited during the terrible, shell-shocked hours that followed the carnage and destruction which toppled the Twin Towers, his city’s proudest landmarks, and the horrible deaths of over 3,000 victims trapped in and underneath those fiery infernos.

If we could only have learned a couple of lessons from Giuliani – that of firmly responding to crisis while demonstrating calmness and compassion – any "visit" by him to our country would have been worth his weight in gold.

Yet, the very thought of enlisting the help and advice of a "foreigner" aroused so much breast-thumping and Tarzan-type yelling that it would be an "insult" to Filipinos to have to "import" Rudy G. that GMA – who perennially wants to please everybody – began backpedalling humiliatingly from her announced plan.

That’s why so many opportunities are lost. Our President gets scared at every squeal of criticism, or threat from the noisy minority. As for us, we feel threatened, it seems, at the slightest hint that we can’t hack it ourselves, even if, over the years, the problems of crime and lawlessness – from kidnapping to drug-dealing, robbery, rape and even smuggling (I won’t even mention rebellion) – have grown worse instead of better.

It’s time to bring in Rudy G., Interpol, Scotland Yard, Charlie’s Angels, the Mod Squad – sus, even borrow the Texas Rangers from Georgie "Dubya" Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. If French Inspector Cloiseau of the "Pink Panther" series had still been alive (alas, Peter Sellers has gone on to the Big Laugh-in in the sky), we might even have recruited him in our desperation.

Yet, we smugly boast that we Filipinos can solve the problem, all by ourselves – with no assistance from any dumbkopf foreigners, thank you! Sure we can: If we only got rid of the shackles of the inferiority complex which I fear is the reverse side of our national smugness and revulsion against "alien" meddling. In the light of the current foo-foraw and the screeching of the usual politicians and blowhards, I don’t believe we’re ready to shrug off that complex, just yet.

Adolf Hitler trumpeted in his time that the Aryan race was the "master race." He got it wrong. We Filipinos, the way we’re shouting it to the four winds, are the master race. You know where that demented idea brought Herr Adolf and his dream of a Thousand-Year Third Reich. I hope we’re not on the way to our own Gotterdammerung.

A little humility, at this stage, I submit, won’t hurt.

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By the time this column sees print, I’m afraid there will be reports of more kidnappings. This is because kidnapping has become, with the exception perhaps of drug manufacture and proliferation, the biggest and most lucrative "growth industry" in our archipelago.

And the awful truth is that kidnapping has gone unpunished. True enough, we have dozens of kidnappers in our prison system, even on Death Row, but not one of them has gone to the Lethal Injection chamber. This is due to the fact that our turtle-paced justice system is still processing the appeals for reconsideration of such vermin as kidnappers, killers, rapists and other perpetrators of heinous crime. In the meantime, our prisons leak like a sieve. There are escapes and "disappearances" from our jails and penitentiaries of hardened criminals and already-convicted felons.

What we need is a Capital Punishment. What? We already have it on our statute books? Why, by golly the way things look, it’s never been tried! I know, I know. The bishops and bleeding hearts, and the European Union want the "death penalty" removed in every country, regarding the Americans as barbaric for still insisting on executing criminals. The Yanks may be barbaric, indeed, even in their junk food habits, but this may be the sort of barbarism we need in our own land, which is the Asian version of the Wild Frontier. Don’t you think we should rather kill kidnappers than risk the killing of their kidnap victims?

The most high-profile case of the past three days was, of course, the abduction of two young women, whose family owns the South Supermarket chain as well as the Prudential Bank – Bunny Santos Barrera, 28, and her sister, Carla, 26. The kidnap gang is demanding, we’re told, a P100 million ransom. The sisters were on their way home from inspecting the South Supermarket branch in Malolos, Bulacan, when they were snatched.

A coed was kidnapped from Adamson University. The lady student was spotted being beaten up and forced into a van by a security guard, but when he moved to stop the van as it was leaving the parking lot, the man who had grabbed the victim shouted the woman was his "wife" and sped off, leaving the guard open-mouthed in his wake. I guess it’s perfectly normal in our society to beat one’s wife in public, then wrestle her into a vehicle. But was the hapless coed really the hoodlum’s "wife"?

In Makati, yesterday’s newspapers reported, a 27-year old woman was also abducted by five armed men along busy Gil Puyat (Buendia) street in Makati City.

In the wake of these additional embarrassments heaped on them, can we wish the Philippine National Police a happy 11th anniversary?

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In the South, the Moro rebels remain very much in the same racket.

A Korean businessman, Jae Keon Yoon, and a hotel owner, Carlos Belonio, were kidnapped last Wednesday while travelling together at the boundary of Sarangani province and Sultan Kudarat. The armed band which seized them were said to be cadres of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). What happened to the "peace talks"? In between kidnappings and clashes?

In the meantime, the leader of the "Pentagon" kidnap gang, Faisal Marohomsar, casually revealed in a radio interview, that the Italian priest, Giuseppe Pierantoni, whom his gang had abducted in Zamboanga del Sur last November, had succumbed to illness while in captivity. Just like that. The "Pentagon", as I’ve continually said, is the kidnap arm of the MILF.

The most famous kidnap syndicate (cum Islamic mujahideen) is, of course, the Abu Sayyaf. And, again, it’s our government’s fault. It was a grievous mistake for former President Joseph Estrada, ironically following his successful campaign to overwhelm the MILF rebels and conquer their Camp Abubakar, to have yielded to pressure from France, Germany, Finland and the European Union, not to use force to attempt to rescue the victims from the Sipadan island resort (in Sabah, Malaysia) and permit negotiations for their release instead. In the end, our PNP and Armed Forces were humiliated, while the cheeky Abus under Commander Robot (Ghalib Andang) waltzed off with more than US$20 million in ransom from the Malaysians, Libyans, and who else – which they "shared" with "local" politicians and negotiators.

Thus, Robot and the Abus demonstrated that kidnapping not only pays handsomely, but it gives rebels the hard cash with which to purchase weapons, radio equipment (plus military cooperation?) and Islamic "glory."

We’re been witnessing a repeat of the same thing with the hostages from the May 21 Abu Sayyaf caper in the Dos Palmas resort of Palawan.

The Abus, under Commander Abu Sabaya this time, have only three hostages left – the Americans Martin and Gracia Burnham and Filipina Deborah Yap – but it’s certain that some of their other victims, with the exception of those unfortunately beheaded, "ransomed" their way out.

As for Commander Robot, where the heck is he? Somewhere living in luxury, I’ll bet, and laughing his head off.

And we still growl that we don’t need outside help? Our big talkers are even trying to shout the US troops, here to assist our boys, out of Basilan.

Oh, well. I hesitate to invoke, lest I be accused of citing, once more, a Western proverb: Pride goeth before a fall.

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THE ROVING EYE . . . There’s a fascinating article in the latest issue of TIME magazine (Feb. 11 issue) headlined "Guns and Money." Correspondent Mageswary Ramakrishnan in his report reveals how a thriving arm-smuggling network operates on the Thai-Malaysian border, supplying "a vast underworld of pimps, pirates – and terrorists." Says the TIME Magazine writer: "In Thailand and Cambodia scores of illicit arms exchanges happen everyday, some of them for as little as one or two pistols, others for crates holding several thousand Chinese-manufactured AK-47s, still encased in a thick layer of protective green grease. The two countries are the spring from which a flood tide of weapons – pistols, automatic rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, even the occasional light artillery piece – flows to every corner of Southeast Asia. The weapons are the lifeblood of the region’s criminal activity, supplying the robbers in Johor Bahru, pirates preying on the cargo ships that chug through the narrow Strait of Malacca and, yes, traders and buyers say, the region’s radical Islamic groups such as Abu Sayyaf, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Laskar Jihad and the Free Aceh Movement." A few large syndicates based in Thailand and Malaysia control the arms-smuggling trade, the newsmagazine says, but it is administered by "a dizzyingly complex system of middlemen." One of them, interviewed by Ramakrishnan, was a heavily-built Thai named Chay. After Chay said his piece about storing his caches in warehouses on the Thai-Cambodian border, then moving them elsewhere, including Myanmar (Burma) and boasting that his trucks "don’t even get stopped for checks . . . it’s easy to bribe people," his boss took over. The bossman declared: "I have never met the end buyers but from my syndicate contacts, I know that it goes to Acehnese rebel groups, Burmese minority groups like the Karen, Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and the rebel groups in Indonesia." Now, isn’t that interesting?