Homeland anarchy

Many Filipinos are in awe and shock viewing Iraqis on a rampage with Saddam Hussein’s mostly unmourned fall. Welcoming alien forces that liberated them from their ruthless dictatorship, many Iraquis in Basra, Baghdad and other places broke into public offices, hotels and shops, looting them of anything of value and even torching some of the plundered establishments. There were also reported cases of Iraqis violently settling private scores, their bloody vendettas facilitated by the easy availability of guns and other arms in a country at war.

American and British soldiers merely watched while anarchy prevailed in the areas they recently took over from Saddam’s disintegrated military. The spokesmen’s official excuse was that the coalition troops were a military force and had neither the number nor the training to undertake police action, that is to say the maintenance of peace and order in Iraq. As long as the coalition forces were not directly threatened by Iraqi plunderers, looters and other local lawless elements, Iraq’s armed liberators felt no strong obligation to summarily check the anarchy their military success had provoked.

This is a most deplorable attitude. Even for a country at war, the areas directly under the control of whichever protagonist are supposed to maintain some semblance of social order. In these areas, the military and/or political authorities are responsible for seeing to it that the citizens’ rights to life and property are protected as much as possible. Being at war is not a sufficient excuse for the primal laws of civilized society to be so completely undermined. Neither the victor nor the vanquished gain any right to be irresponsible and insensitive to the survival needs of the people within their areas of control. Only in a so-called no-man’s land – a place where war witnesses a most dangerous stalemate among the conjoined forces – may one argue that no combatant party is to be held responsible for an ensuing condition of anarchy.

In Iraq, neither the Americans nor the British are describing the status of the war as currently a stalemate. In Basra as well as in Baghdad, the coalition forces speak of being in control, of having defeated Saddam’s military and of having crushed the political regime that Saddam had in the past twenty-five years.

There is no way the Americans and the British can shirk the responsibility of maintaining peace and order and ensuring the public safety of the Iraqis they had marched to liberate. Whatever the number of coalition troops and regardless of their alleged professional training, the victorious authorities must now work to provide controlling laws and effective order among the Iraqis. The nomenclature matters little. Whether they discharge their responsibility by invoking martial law or some other emergency powers, the Americans and the British must immediately act to stop jungle violence, vendettas, plunder and looting in Iraq.

Anarchy, the mother of all evils that subvert civil society, invites intense criticism from civilized nations. Predictably, some of the current calls for restoring peace and order come from the most influential and the most highly regarded personalities worldwide. The United Nations Secretary General, the Catholic Pope, a cluster of prime ministers and presidents, a flock of religious leaders as well as a legion of retired military commanders, a gaggle of cause-oriented personalities and even a pride of Nobel Laureates have all called for an immediate restoration of civil society in Iraq.

Unfortunately, extremely few Filipinos can speak from a high moral ground in addressing any question of social anarchy. Neither the national leadership nor the nation’s citizenry has carried itself well in the war against anarchy in this country. Beyond the ritual pronouncements, institutional facades and formal claims that pass for social order, Filipinos actually have suffered an increasingly anarchic existence in the last fifty years.

For most Filipinos, the law in its innumerable forms and formulations exists but its enforcement is a matter of chance, even a matter of personal whimsy. In the past it was only the most powerful and influential – the nation’s leaders – that saw themselves possessed of this ego-boosting waiver, this selective-choice prerogative in relation to the implementation of legal must-be’s. Now, most tragically, the common people too have arrogated unto themselves the same prerogative.

Now, a jeepney or bus driver as much as a college professor or a religious leader treats the country’s rules of the road with the same disregard as a senator or a cabinet member weng-wenging his way through Metro Manila traffic. A poverty-stricken squatter considers property rights with exactly the same contempt as a RICO-rich, highly visible pillar of Philippine society. A common tao reflects the same intellectual and moral agility as a president or a cardinal in announcing positions that have a half-life of just about twelve hours, allowing for stunning 180-degree reversals in personal or public positions within the same god-forsaken day.

Now, nothing really rules over most individuals here except their personal convenience and their overly self-centered gains. The just rule of law, the deep compassion for others and the firm commitment to serve the common interest – all of these are markedly scarce among a people long embedded in anarchy. It makes little difference whether that anarchy is monitored by the TV cameras of the CNN and the BBC as in the case of Iraq, or, as in the Philippine case, the anarchy is cloaked so well that its images come blurred except to those whose personal focuses are exceedingly sharp and whose sense of compassion allows for no neutralization of inhuman realities.

In the case of Iraq, as in the case of the Philippines, anarchy brutalizes the best in the human spirit. With Iraqis as well as with Filipinos, anarchy has far too long been a merciless dictatorship. Filipinos, unlike Iraqis, must not wait for alien deliverers to break anarchy’s hold in their society. Far better to free ourselves and be beholden to no alien power – whether of this world or any other – when our day of deliverance comes.