Crime and punishment / How define terror

We’ll give her a first round of applause, but that is all. If President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her handlers think we are now in her thrall because she has launched her rip-roaring roseate roadshow against crime, they err greatly. Sure we do sit up as we see Malacañang for the first time besieged by a slew of arrested felons in the custody of police. And we are no less stirred when media, particularly TV, laps this all up with La Gloria in the midst of it all, smiling, taunting, gloating the "real termites" of society are now helpless clay in the hollow of her hands.

Cheers, Mrs. President, but one swallow does not a summer make. If you must war on crime, I submit we can only sit bolt upright when you haul in the big fish.

Those who have been brought with melodramatic flourish to the Palace are common penny-ante criminals. They are the riffraff, the stuff of everyday crime, pickpockets, carnapers, bagsnatchers, cellphone thieves, child molesters, second story thieves, highway holduppers, suspected drug-pushers. But these can be hauled in by our police and law enforcement agents any day of the week. Routine really. Except that the Palace has put a spin on the news. GMA in her SONA declared war on crime. And – lo and behold! – Justice Secretary Hernando Perez, PNP chief Hermogenes Ebdane Jr. and Chief State Prosecutor Jovencito Zuño occupy pride of place astride GMA as criminal elements are brought in. The bugles blare the still phoney message that the days of crime are numbered.

Are they? I don’t think so. All this reminds me of the time when Vice President Joseph Estrada as newly appointed head of the PACC (Presidential Anti-Crime Commission) savagely barked to the heads of organized crime: "Your days are numbered." It turned out after hardly three years into the presidency that Erap Estrada found himself accused as the nation’s top criminal after EDSA II kicked him kicking and screaming into the calaboose.

What now, Mrs. President? Those photo-ops are fine. They show you in immaculate, long-sleeved white ensemble at the Palace in proud dominion as the criminal suspects are brought in. We are summoned to treat them like vermin which in all probability they are. And we are to look at you now in a different way. Henceforth, we must rip out all our doubts and skepticism about you as president and realize, what you want us to realize, that you are the next best thing to Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale.

Ma’m, we prefer to hedge our bets and wait.

We want the big fish, the sharks, the barracudas, the killer whales. We want corrupt colonels and generals in the PNP. The same corrupt colonels and generals in the AFP. The big narcotics lords who have bought their way to power while jabbing carefully at their teeth with golden toothpicks. We want the thieving gorillas of the Bureau of Customs and the Bureau of Internal Revenue. We want to see some SOB senators and congressmen hauled in because they occupy prominent positions in the political rot that begins at the very top. We want some name multimillionaires and billionaires in the business community who are the nation’s most notorious tax-evaders. We want past and present members of the presidential cabinet, notorious for their greed and rapacity, brought to the Palace in handcuffs. We want name smugglers. We want somebody arrested immediately and shipped out because he’s a fugitive from US justice. We want justice to descend on the Marcoses, keehaul the guiltiest ones to jail. Pronto. Tomorrow. Jeez, this Imee Marcos is beginning to make me sick.

A big order, Mrs. President? Of course, it’s a big order.

But that’s where your war against crime really begins. I have seen this happen in other countries. In Italy, more than a decade ago, the government in a fit of uncommon anger cast a big wide net against crime. Wriggling in the net were present and past cabinet ministers — even prime ministers I remember well – like Aldo Moro, Giulio Andreotti, Amintore Fanfani. They were among the biggest names in Italian politics. Bluebloods actually. But that didn’t matter anymore. Operations Mano Pulite (Operations Clean Hands) was sprung and Italian justice struck with the unerring aim of a Sicilian blade. Even if no arrest warrants were issued as yet, those summoned and investigated agonized for weeks in the stockade. Some committed suicide. Those found innocent or relatively were released. But already, their once pious armor was badly dented, their reputations shattered.

In South Korea, hardly a decade ago, then president Kim Young Sam scoured society for the nation’s top crooks and criminals.

The result was the same. No big name was spared. The erstwhile sacred chaebols were hit. A thick cluster of the nation’s most prominent business leaders were hauled in on charges of large-scale corruption. So were a handful of frontline politicians who not only abetted corruption but waded waist-deep into it and stuffed millions of dollars into their private bank deposits. Two past presidents paid the price of runaway greed, namely Chun Doo-hwa and Roh Tae Woo. Who can forget that gripping scene? Chun and Roh were handcuffed, garbed humiliatingly in rugged grey prison uniform, their once haughty rhetoric reduced to a murmur. Their heads were bowed low as they were indicted then convicted. They lived many years in prison unwept, unhonored and unsung. Until they were amnestied by President Kim Dae Jung a few years ago.

Can we do the same in the Philippines?

Today, Operations Strike Hard continues to claim hundreds if not thousands of victims in China. It is the Beijing leadership’s relentless war against corruption – in the government, in the armed forces, in the business world. Derided at first as concentrating only on the small fish, Operations Strike Hard eventually lifted its dagger into the high echelons of government. President Jiang Zemin really cracked the whip. As far as we can remember, one top-level minister and two deputy ministers were arrested and summarily executed. In one report, it was claimed that China in just one year arrested more criminals than the rest of the world put together. The majority underwent brief trials, then were herded to public plazas. Retribution was swift. They were made to kneel down, en masse, in long rows. One bullet, drilled into the brain, sufficed. Each delivered by a single soldier standing behind These mass executions are almost a daily feature in China.

I do not know how far our president is determined to go in her "total war" against crime.

I suppose, however, that she is beginning to learn the lessons of history. As George Santayana said, those who do not learn history’s lessons are doomed to repeat them. There comes a time in every nation’s existence when the waves of crime, soared to critical levels. Then they threaten the soul. And the catharsis begins because they threaten the very existence of so-called civilized society. To survive, society has to evict and punish them. The blood must flow for that is how a society renews itself. Reading that towering historian anew, Will Durant, in his latest tome before he died (Heroes of History), he recounts:

"The condotierre violence and sexual license of the Italian Renaissance under the Borgias led to the cleansing of the Church and the restoration of morality. The reckless ecstasy of Elizabethan England gave way to the Puritan domination under Cromwell, which led, by reaction, to the paganism of England under Charles II. The breakdown of government, marriage and the family during the ten years of the French Revolution was ended by the restoration of law, discipline and parental authority under Napoleon II. The Romantic paganism of Byron and Shelley and the dissolute conduct of the Prince of Wales who became George V, were followed by the public propriety of Victorian England."

How very apt and eloquent! We Filipinos are very close to that crisis. And every historic crisis brings its catharsis. That is why rebellions and revolutions occur, convulsions as the daggers leap in the night, the swords whistle and bring down the heads of tyrants. I do not know if GMA or her advisers have studied history (I doubt they have, looking at Dante Ang, Conrado Limcaoco and Ronnie Puno in the eye). But if they have, they must tell GMA that all this road-show (so far anyway) against crime is so much mammary moonshine. The biggest crooks and malefactors have to be brought in, a great many of them. Then and only then, can we start to believe the little lady with the prominent mole beside her pert nose is serious, afraid of no one, rides her chariot without fear or favor.

If, at the same time she carries the war to communist guerrillas, GMA may be biting off more than she can chew. That is, if this war should be categorized as a war against terror. And if in the course of such a war American combat troops join the battle (the Pentagon has listed the CPP-NPA as a terrorist organization), then we are in for a sequel to Afghanistan. In the American mind, it’s possible the CPP-NPA is now the Philippine equivalent of Taliban. This must never be allowed to happen for it would plunge our nation into a vast slaughterhouse. The CPP-NPA insurgency is an internal affair.

Outside of the Abu Sayyaf – a murderous terrorist crew indeed but never the ideological enemy of the US – the Philippines has never been known to harbor "terrorists" as this word is now defined by George W. Bush. The MNLF and the MILF were never known as terror organizations. They were and are armed secessionist Muslim organizations, whose yon years go far, far back when Spain first then America colonized the Philippines. They sought independence or genuine autonomy. They were never labeled terrorist. It so happens they bear the emblem of Islam, a struggling Islam at times, a defiant Islam seeking its place in the sun. Once America labels them terrorists and therefore prey to the American war against international terror, heaven help this country.

Madame President, you call the shots here, not the Americans.