After half a century of living in hell, they want to try heaven

Maybe it’s time you got your flu shot. A fifth victim, this time a little boy, has died of bird or avian flu in Viet Nam. Five Asian countries have been hit by the "bird flu".

The Thai government has just required all the chickens in one of its southern provinces to be slaughtered by Monday.

In Viet Nam, needless to say, the poultry industry is being wiped out – with chickens galore being disposed by government fiat instead of being devoured during the "Tet" or Lunar New Year festivities.

During the Yuletide season here, our grocery and supermarket shelves ran short of dressed chickens because our poultry raisers resisted and denounced earlier government plans to import chickens for the holiday noche buena and fiesta demands. The motive was wrong, but this deficiency may have been a blessing in disguise. At least – for the moment – it seems the bird flu hasn’t been "imported" But take no chances. All of Asia, including China and Hong Kong, are going on Chicken Alert.

Yesterday I ate a chicken sandwich in defiance of the odds. However, I must confess, I’m beginning to chicken out.

Fish, anyone? Our politics may be fishy, but at least fish, thus far, hasn’t been conduit of mad cow disease or avian influenza.

* * *

The Commission on Elections’ First Division didn’t declare FPJ a true natural-born Filipino. The Division, headed by Commissioner Rufino Javier, with the decision signed by two fellow Commissioners, Luzviminda Tancangco and Resurreccion "Rex" Borra, merely side-shuffled by dismissing the Victorino Fornier petition "considering that the evidence presented by the petitioner is not substantial".

As for ruling on the citizenship of Ronnie Poe, the First Division underscored that this was not a job for the Comelec.

If you ask me, it’s unlikely that this decision will be reversed by the Commission en banc.

It has been alleged that the lawyer who filed the anti-Poe petition, Atty. Victorino Fornier (or was it his brother Andresito Fornier, who had earlier tried to scuttle Fred Lim’s 1998 Presidential bid?) was a batchmate in the Ateneo College of Law of First Gentleman, lawyer Mike Arroyo. Did those Atenistas deny knowing each other? Gee whiz. Perhaps the campus was too big, so they failed to bump into each other while going to Law classes.

During our time, the Ateneo College of Law, indeed the entire college of Ateneo de Manila, meaning Liberal Arts to Sciences, was in Padre Faura, not in the sprawling Loyola Heights (Quezon City) campus. It was a relatively small compound, and everybody knew everybody.

In those days, working my way through school, I was the secretary of the Rector and President of Ateneo, the late Father William Masterson, S.J. It was Father Bill who "bought" the Loyola Heights property – out in the boonies, they groaned at the time. The entire Jesuit community was up in arms at this outrageous purchase.

"Who would go to study so far outside in the provinces?" Masterson’s fellow Jesuits raged. "Nobody will enroll in such a far-out Ateneo!"

They called the entire idea, "Masterson’s Folly". Father Bill was "fired" as Rector and President. He was given a small, humble job out in Mindanao. Would you believe? There, he went on to found the Xavier agricultural college which has come to rival U.P. Los Baños in producing agri-leaders!

As for the Loyola Heights campus – sus, they’re now so proud of it. Truly mayabang. The moral of the tale is that when you see far ahead, people tend to say you’re nuts. I’m not referring to Miriam, of course.

* * *

Going back to the FPJ citizenship issue, it was funny to see officials sniffing at National Archives Director Ricardo Manapat’s microfilm "evidence" to try to discover by scent whether the microfilm was new, therefore fake, or whether it really dated back to the 1960s.

Sanamagan, if Manapat, as his own three Archives employees alleged, had those anti-Poe documents on microfilm forged, it’s not enough for the President to suspend him – even if he works under the Office of the President. Manapat must be investigated, and – if prima facie is established – prosecuted and, eventually – if found guilty – slapped in jail.

This kind of fellow running our records, salamabit, must never be tolerated!

FPJ’s "citizenship" troubles are far from over, I’m afraid. If the Forniers are now looking kinda iffy, other lawyers have begun pursuing it. Three "private" lawyers have now asked the Supreme Court to nullify the Comelec’s decision to recognize Poe on the basis that Poe is not a natural-born Filipino but actually an American.

The High Tribunal, I respectfully submit, might do well to rule on this with dispatch, not dilly-dally over it. Let the issue be resolved once and for all. FPJ an "American"?

Friends of mine had their own reaction to this insinuation yesterday. They recalled the over-quoted assertion of the late, revered Commonwealth President Manuel L. Quezon, "I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos, than a government run like heaven by Americans!"

Well, those I met yesterday quipped: "We’ve been living in hell for half a century (since Independence) now. Perhaps our people would like to try heaven." Joke only, I hope.

* * *

Incidentally, MLQ didn’t dislike Americans. He was a nationalist, but a Quezonian nationalist. Contrary to popular misimpression, Quezon and Gen. Douglas MacArthur didn’t even become chummy with each other. Quezon and MacArthur’s aide, who also detested his own boss MacArthur, were the ones who liked each other very much, namely, Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yep, MLQ liked Ike, and Ike liked Don Manuel.

In his bestseller, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life, military historian Carlo D’Este (author also of Patton: A Genius for War) recounts on page 239 how Eisenhower was incensed to hear MacArthur call Quezon a conceited little monkey.

Taken out of context, of course, pegging MacArthur to such a petty and unfair remark is unfair. MacArthur esteemed Quezon in his own way, egotistical as Big Mac himself was. As for Ike, D’Este observed that "few officers of any rank ever dared to defy MacArthur, much less with Eisenhower’s flaming temper and his own considerable ego made him a match for MacArthur’s imperiousness." Each of the two was "too stubborn to give in to the other," D’Este concluded.

Ike was summoned home to America on December 12, 1942, just after Pearl Harbor. He little knew he was destined to go to Europe, subsequently to become Supreme Commander of all the American and Allied Forces in the offensive to destroy Adolf Hitler.

In Chapter 27 (page 308) his biographer recounts: "Before he left Washington, Eisenhower was briefly reunited with Manuel Quezon who had fled the Philippines after the fall of Manila to establish a government-in-exile in the United States."

Would you believe? D’Este wrote that "Quezon offered his friend a lavish stipend of some one hundred thousand dollars for services rendered the Philippines during his four years there which Eisenhower courteously rejected."

D’Este said that Ike had told Quezon that "while it was legal for him to accept, it would likely be viewed unfavorably in Washington. Whether Eisenhower knew (as he should have known) or not, acceptance would have been a clear violation of a War Department regulation."

Did our politicians, even in the 1930s and 1940s, believe that friendship must be recompensed with money? Or lo-yalty be bought by cash?

In any event, there’s another famous speech by Quezon – delivered when he returned to Manila in triumph from Washington DC, brandishing a copy of the new Jones Law. He declared in that address: "Seven years in the United States have proven to me that America is the best friend that the Filipino ever had or could ever have."

Politicians are the same everywhere, I guess. They have a saying to suit every occasion.

* * *

In the airport lounge on my way home from Hong Kong last week, I picked up a copy of The Weekend Australian (January 18). The big banner headline was: "US Push to Base Forces on Our Soil."

In the lead story by John Kevin, the newspaper revealed that "the US has asked Australia to develop a permanent military training camp for Australian and American forces which could act as a launching pad for operations in the Asia-Pacific."

The article averred that "the US’s highest-ranking military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard Myers, made the request during meetings with John Howard (prime minister) and Australian Defence Force Chief General Peter Cosgrove."

Defense sources told Kevin they believed "the development of the joint training facility is likely to be a precursor to the US storing military equipment in Australia in case its troops need to be rapidly deployed in the region."

The US, of course, already conducts regular exercises with Australian forces in such places as Shoalwater Bay in North Queensland and Delamere Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) bombing range in the Northern Territory.

They don’t mention the "base" the Australians share with the Americans in Alice, not far from the Birdsville Track – an airbase capable of taking aircraft as heavy as the Galaxy Starlifters.

The Americans would dearly love, I must add, to gain "access" to the use of General Santos City’s US-built airport for their USAF emergency operations, and Saranggani Bay which is as deep as Subic’s and as large, capable of playing "host" simultaneously to three or four aircraft carriers. No, no. Why, that’s against the Constitution . . . well, that’s what lawyers would say. They would reject the very idea, like the idea of FPJ.

Would GenSan welcome such an American "invasion"? I don’t dare ask.

* * *

We’re not alone in being plagued by criminal gangs and drug trafficking headaches. A report from Sydney, Down Under, says: "Arrests to Crack Gang War, say Police."

Sydney police arrested six men, including four brothers, linked to a crime gang believed responsible for "a spate of shootings and murders that have paralyzed southwestern Sydney".

In the report, in the Australian daily’s "The Nation" section, Elizabeth Colman recounted that "the men were arrested during 13 simultaneous raids on homes and businesses across southwest Sydney in which $2.7 million worth of amphetamines and more than $3 million in cash and personal property were seized."

The newspaper stated: "Drug manufacturing and dealing and car-rebirthing were the catalyst for the drive-by shootings and murders that had terrorized Sydney’s southwest in recent months, police said yesterday."

The perpetrators turned out to be young. Two of the brothers aged 25 and 26 were arrested at Sydney’s Star City Casino Hotel, while a younger brother, aged 22, was nabbed in a butcher’s shop in Punchbowl. A fourth brother, aged 29, was found at home in Chipping Norton. Two other members of the syndicate, a 20-year old and a 35-year old man, were arrested in their homes in Croydon and Roselands.

Five will be charged with manufacture and supply of prohibited drugs and two of the brothers with kidnapping, following the December abduction of two young men in Greenacre, who were held for 24 hours before a ransom was paid.

The drive-by shootings in Sydney, by the way, weren’t small-time. Last October, Mervat Hamka, 22, was killed in her Lawford Street house when gunmen sprayed more than 100 rounds into a side wall of her home.

What about trying the Death Penalty, Australia?

In the meantime, the Singapore government has dismissed as "absurd" an Amnesty International report saying that country has the "world’s highest per capita execution rate".

The Singapore government did not dispute, however, the human rights group’s assertion that more than 400 prisoners had been executed since 1991 in that city-state of four million people.

According to the Financial Times (Jan. 18), the London-based group’s allegations "echoed the United Nations Secretary General’s 2001 report on capital punishment, which said that Singapore had by far the highest rate of executions" between 1994 and 1999, with 13 executions per one million people.

But look at the results. Don’t you feel safe, day and night, in Singapore?