One attack weekly by sea pirates in RP waters should be cause for alarm

While weíve been worrying about attacks on land by rebels and bandits, we seem to have forgotten the other "battle" which must be waged at sea. I’m referring to the admission by the Philippine Navy that almost every week during the past two years, armed raiders have boarded fishing vessels and freighters to commit robbery and other crimes.

In a paper read at a conference on transnational crimes in Pasay City, Capt. Alberto Araojo, deputy chief for operations of our Navy, revealed Mindanao is still a major haven for sea pirates, described as mostly members of Muslim rebel or terrorist groups.

The report averred that 57 out of the 82 known attacks on ships at sea or in port in our archipelago were staged by these Mindanao-based pirates.

What’s interesting is that the 20 violent attacks involving kidnapping and wounding or killing of victims occurred in Basilan, Sulu, Sarangani, Zamboanga and General Santos City.

The fifty-seven incidents of piracy, mentioned above, took place in Western Mindanao, particularly in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), and the provinces of Zamboanga del Norte and del Sur, Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.

I’m not surprised, really. If you’ll recall even during the Spanish colonial centuries, Moro "pirates" and marauders from the Sulu Sea were legendary. The Tausugs, for instance, a seafaring tribe who still describe themselves as "people of the current", used to take their swift vintas with colorful, tell-tale sails ranging as far north as the Ilocos provinces in Luzon, in search of loot, women and slaves, putting villages and towns to the torch and targeting Christians in particular.

When I was a kid, we still could see the ruins of the Spanish watch-towers erected by the seaside so spotters could look for the approach of Moro vintas (their equivalent, it can be said of the Viking "dragonship") whose unique and easily recognizable sails could be identified as they topped the horizon. In such emergencies, a warning bonfire would be lit, and the call to arms would be transmitted from every barrio to the poblacion, by a familiar and terrifying shout: "Hay Moros en la costa!" (There are Moros on the coast!).

In my boyhood days, in every Ilocano community including my own hometown, a popular morality and action play was the annual zarzuela, named "Moro-Moro", in which, in song and sword versus kris-fighting, the Christians would, in the end, vanquish the Moros.

Years ago, in 1965 when I was a guest speaker at the Mindanao State University (MSU), the clever Muslim students there turned the tables on me with a hilarious parody of the "Moro-Moro" entitled "Christian-Christian."

Of course, at the conclusion of "Christian-Christian", it was the Moros who won– and the Crescent triumphed over the Cross.

That was in good clean fun. And many of us surely long for a return of that short interlude, the "good years", when there was an upsurge of confidence that Moro-Christian brotherhood and national unity, irrespective of belief or creed, could be forged. How those hopes have vanished! We pray that, someday, after all the bloody infighting and back-to-back violence, that feeling can be resurrected.

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This won’t, however, be accomplished the way Secretary Eduardo Ermita and Davao’s Jess Dureza are doing it – by still trying to fob off a "surrender" to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) as a viable "peace agreement".

Despite the obvious fact that their "ceasefire" scheme was an abject failure, I hear, they’re still trying to parley with the MILF chieftains in Cotabato City. Sanamagan: Just look at the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) of the now-jailed ex-Governor Nur Misuari. The Ramos administration, with the same General Ermita among the foremost negotiators in 1995, made "peace" with Misuari and the MNLF (a deal which cost the government, as an offshoot, billions of pesos). All these came to naught. The MNLF is back on the warpath – many of them having absconded with government-issued weapons and uniforms!

Give us a break. When the rebels are shooting at you, there’s no alternative but to shoot back. What ceasefire? The MILF exploited that lamebrained peace initiative to lick their wounds, regain strength, re-arm, re-mobilize and re-supply themselves.

In the meantime, as Maguindanao Governor Andal Ampatuan informed president Macapagal-Arroyo, when he beseeched her to drop that silly ceasefire agreement since the MILF had never stopped attacking, harassing, and extorting, the insurgents have been trying to regain their lost "camps" in Maguindanao, Lanao, and elsewhere in Mindanao.

Governor Ampatuan and eight of his provincial mayors further expressed alarm over the MILF’s cheeky effort to reestablish a "camp" at Barangay Pamalian, which is strategically located at the boundaries of the municipalities of Datu Piang, Sharif Aguak and Mamasapano. (Remember where that Islamic "recreation center" teacher – arrested some weeks ago as an Arab terrorist "suspect" – used to operate?)

The MILF, let’s face it, has never stopped trying to reestablish control, regain lost ground, and push forward by arms and violence its concept of an "Islamic State."

While we slept, they even beefed up their forces on the island of Basilan. Former hostages of the Abu Sayyaf told Congress a few days ago that in was in those MILF camps in Basilan that the Abus used to hide their captives when hard-passed by military pursuit.

It’s time La Gloria realized that her "advisers" have been leading her down the garden path – to humiliation and defeat. GMA, kindly send the general, for example, back to Batangas. When he was a congressman there, he didn’t do too badly. That’s where he should have stayed.

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I notice that the Philippine Bar Association has issued a statement which "strongly condemns the statements of former President Estrada assailing the integrity of our justice system." For its part, the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP), through its president, Teofilo Filando, Jr., has also issued a press statement affirming the IBP’s "full faith in the judicial system."

Both declarations were evidently in reaction to ex-President Erap’s assailing the integrity of our judicial system, particularly the Sandiganbayan and the Supreme Court, and wailing that he could not expect justice in the plunder and perjury cases pending against him.

Okay, okay. Having virtually expressed themselves in condemnation and support, those two bar associations ought to redirect their ire at what really – more than Mr. Estradaís incantations and complaints – derails the integrity of our justice system. What should be cause for concern is the continuing venality of members of the judiciary, especially crooked trial court judges who "sell" for substantial sums their decisions, temporary restraining orders (TAOs), and writs of injunction.

This is, of course, a twice-told tale. Yet, for all the exposés and the fact that corruption in the judiciary is of common knowledge in legal and business circles, nothing effective has been done about it,

Almost everybody knows by now, deplorably, that one of the "most marketable commodities" in our judicial set-up is the TRO. It’s clear that no number of stern or warning circulars and admonitions from the Supreme Court has slowed down the issuance by insolent judges of a steady stream of TROs and write of injunction.

For instance, there was a very interesting TRO issued a few days ago by Branch 38 of the Makati Regional Trial Court. Iím not jumping to any conclusion about it, but, without delving into the merits of the case, may I remark it’s fascinating that, literally at the very last minute, the Makati RTC stopped the mortgage foreclosure and auction sale by the Philippine National Bank of the five-storey Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center Building along Gil Puyat (formerly Buendia) avenue in Makati City.

The TRO came out of the blue, just a day before the Makati sheriff served the foreclosure paper.

Indeed, if an inventory of TROs and injunctions issued by Metro Manila RTCs were to be made, the total tally of those TROs and injunctions – foreclosing on and selling off properties submitted as collateral for unpaid loans –would shock our Justices of the Supreme Court. Perhaps it’s this kind of shock that would finally bestir the High Tribunal, which is the only authority that can bring erring judges to heel, into more resolute action.

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The truth is that the entire banking community has grown alarmed over the current "culture" in the judiciary of restraining not only bank forclosures of mortgaged properties but even their sale at public auction. RTC courts step in even after titles over the properties have already been consolidated in the names of the creditor banks.

Even appeals made by the banks concerned to the Court of Appeals don’t seem to secure a reversal of the lower courts’ orders granting TROs and writs of injunction. Invariably, the appellate court ends up affirming the orders for the same "reasons" the TROs or injuctions were granted by the lower courts!

What’s worrisome is that, despite the disciplinary sanctions meted out by the Supreme Court against some venal and erring judges and even justices, graft and corruption in the judiciary appear unabated. The "hoodlums in robes" (as ex-President Estrada used to call them when he vowed, but abjectly failed to curb them) are still very much in business. It is the unfortunate Erap who is now accused of being the hoodlum.

Yet those judicial "hoodlums" must be weeded out and punished. There’s no compromising on that. Otherwise, how can the public have faith in a mercenary judicial system – or foreign investors even think of venturing into our vipers’ nest of judicial pitfalls and flimflammery?

Our banking industry is already groaning under the battering of those TROs and slaphappy injunctions. And we’re still concerned about Mr. Estrada’s remarks denting the faith of our people in the justice system?

It’s the corruption in our trial courts that should be a more proximate and grave cause for alarm.