Any struggle to save lives reminds us all of the brotherhood of men

Forgive me for disgressing from the daily media overdose of jueteng exposés, perjurers turning tail on their testimonies, diatribes on impeachment, chatter about "cha-cha", and dire pronouncements or one big yawn on the just-concluded ARMM elections.

The endless prattle about politics, the dreary diet of charges and counter-charges, the relentlessly piecemeal revelation of results from the seemingly bottomless Ulat ng Bayan Pulse Asia Survey of July 2005, surely have begun to numb the public. This is unfortunate, because the overkill of a constant barrage of bad news leads to a "what’s-the-use" feeling of weariness among our population.

Even the radical Leftists with their angry rantings have become a bore – especially when everyone recalls that their Party List members of the House of Representatives, who have been the most vocal, did not give up but insisted on retaining their "pork barrel" allowances amounting to P65 million per annum for each of them. Susmariosep, each of those "protesters" have P65 million per year at their disposal, outside of their regular salaries, perks, and emoluments.

While we continue to obsessively focus, to our nation’s detriment, on insular issues, the world moves on.

True, there are many deaths, disappointments, disasters, bankruptcies, and debacles in other countries and continents.

True, there are many deaths, disappointments, disasters, bankruptcies, and debacles in other countries and continents.

True, there is widespread terrorism or fear of terrorism elsewhere. As yesterday’s Financial Times of London put it, "Britain faces the reality of homegrown terror," by finding that in the past four years Britain "produced" 13 suicide bombers, "palpable evidence that the country has developed a significant homegrown terrorist problem."

Investigators established, as you already know, that the July 7 suicide-bombings in the London Underground trains (the Tube) and on that exploded bus in Tavistock Square, to quote one international security expert, "poster children of the multicultural society", not terrorists smuggled in by al-Qaeda or imported from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Bob Ayers, the expert mentioned above, pointed out that three of the four "were born in the UK, were educated in the UK, had reasonably good jobs in the UK. These guys had accomplished all that the multicultural society expects to be accomplished by the children of first generation immigrants. And (yet) they turn on society. Why?"

Three of the four were of Pakistani origin. The fourth had immigrated from Jamaica, spent his teenage years in West Yorkshire, then converted to Islam. Their bombs killed 54 hapless commuters, and wounded hundreds. The five bombers on July 21 set off devices that failed to detonate. This time they were from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. All of them Muslims, too, they had immigrated either as children or young men, and had been given asylum and later citizenship. Why did they make their bombing attempts? Many Brits are now regretting to their policy of tolerance which allowed Islamic radicals and hardline clerics to move about freely, preach aggressively and organized without hindrance on the unexpressed but "implicit understanding that (in exchange for this) they would not attack their adopted home."

Alas, this unfortunate policy of granting "license" to radicals backfired – and, to their angry surprise, Londoners discovered that a so-called "Londistan" had developed within the very heart of the British homeland.

Didn’t they remember that famous line of Winston Churchill who warned that appeasing Adolf Hitler by betraying the Poles and the Czechs was like throwing others "to feed the crocodile" in the hope that the crocodile would eat you last.

* * *

Another event grabbed the frontpages yesterday abroad (not in our own newspapers) which restores ones faith in mankind. Again, the Brits figured prominently in the drama.

I’m referring to the heroic rescue of seven Russian Navy submariners from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean just as the air inside their trapped submarine was giving out. The sub, an AS-28, had been participating in a Russian military exercise last week off the Kamchatka peninsula in the Pacific maritime provinces in the far east of Russia. The 13.4 meter rescue sub’s propeller got entangled in a fishing net, plunging it to rest in a depth of almost 600 feet.

Alerted by the Russians, who had no recovery vessels or facilities, Britain, the US, Japan and other countries rushed to help. The Brits got there first, flying in a British Scorpio underwater robot, which was then secured to a Russian ship which brought it (steaming six hours from the port of Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky) to the area where the AS-28 Priz was helplessly submerged. The unmanned British rescue vehicle, remote controlled by English seamen, cut the entangle sub free and enabled it to surface – from where the exhausted men who had endured a terrible three-day ordeal were recovered. The operation was effected despite worsening weather, with fog enveloping the scene, and the seas rising to more than two meters.

Don’t be deceived by the term "Pacific". Having been caught once, in my younger days, in a Pacific squall on board a freighter in mid-ocean where the waves looked alarmingly like those terrifying ones in the movie Perfect Storm I can attest to the widespread misconception, although the storm we went through, luckily was not perfect.

Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov who had flown to the site of the accident last Sunday accosted his British counterpart John Reid to pay tribute to the Brits. He said: "For six hours the team worked without interruption to save our Russian submariners. The UK were the first to come, they played a crucial part and we do appreciate that. This was an ordeal for seven families and I send my thanks to the Royal Navy."

It was the photograph of the rescued seamen, a wonderful photo taken by Tatyana Makeyeva of Agence France-Presse, however, which demonstrated once again the proverb that one good picture is worth more than 10,000 words. It portrayed Vyacheslav Milashevsky, commander of the sub giving a weary but grateful salute, his crew behind him, exhausted yet relieved, on one man’s weathered and craggy features, a glisten of tears. Brave men saved by the prodigious efforts of other brave men.

The incident spoke more eloquently of the brotherhood of man than a hundred sermons and speeches.

Captain Milashevsky, even as he saluted, knew, of course, that his career is in tatters. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, silent for most of the affair, issued an order directing an "investigation".

It was a happy ending for a change, though. When the giant Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, had sunk in the Barents sea five years ago (in the year 2000), although many of the 118 crew members survived the blast which had torn holes in the hull of the vessel, the Russians kept the accident under wraps and refused to call for international help. All the submariners perished – the survivors succumbing in their submerged "coffin" when oxygen ran out.

This time, Vladimir Ryzhkov, a member of the Duma (Russia’s parliament) said, "unlike in the situation of the Kursk, Russia’s military commanders thought about the people first, and only then about their own prestige, and made a timely call for international assistance . . ."

* * *

Everybody knows that Secretary Roberto "Obet" Pagdanganan is chairman and chief executive of the Philippine Southeast Asian Games Organizing Committee (PHILSOC), but not everybody remembers that those games involving 11,000 athletes and participants from 11 SEAG member countries will begin here in Metro Manila on November 27 and, with 41 sports being contested in 41 events, in venues here and in the provinces are going to last until December 5. While currently engrossed in political fun and games, let’s not forget that we’re hosting that grand and expensive, almost P1-billion international event.

Obet Pagdanganan, as head of the Philippine International Trading Corporation, is also tasked with another major mission, the job of reducing the prices of commonly-bought medicines by "one half by the year 2010." When President GMA gave Obet that assignment and he went to work on it, he was shocked to discover that the prices of those medicines were 5 to 6 times "higher than those sold in other countries."

Pagdanganan told me the other day that the pharmaceutical industry in the Philippines is an P80 billion business "while nobody can blame the drug companies for protecting their ‘gold mine’ of profits," he said, "the poor simply cannot afford what they’re selling."

This is why, he asserted, the government had to step in to redress a situation in which "only one out of four Pinoys has access to affordable medicines."

Obet points out that "branded medicines" account for 97 percent of total sales; generics only 3 percent. Not surprisingly, he notes, the Philippines has the second highest "drug prices" out of nine Asian countries according to a survey of Health Action International.

"Take a peek," he said, "at the price differentials between some pharmaceutical products sold in India and those sold in the Philippines: Bactrim, for instance, sells 620 percent higher in the Philippines than in India; Augmentin, 79 percent; Betaloc, 340 percent; Adalat Retard, 803 percent; and Diamicron, 36 percent."

It’s also astonishing, sez Obet, that 80 percent of drugs sold in this country are distributed by only one "group." No wonder, he complained, drug distribution and pricing are, to a large extent, at the mercy of a cartel.

Pagdanganan’s partial answer has been to set up 505 Botika ng Bayan drug outlets in several provinces to provide low-cost but quality medicines. But this is far from enough.

"Parallel drug importation," Obet maintains is not a permanent response (nor does the government have enough resources). "In the long term," he says, "the solution lies in strengthening the local pharmaceutical industry, encouraging competition and the interplay of market forces, and eventually allowing the law of supply and demand to prevail."

Sounds great but such things have been said before. But the monopolists seem to keep the upper hand.

This is a country where promises and rhetoric are usually mistaken for action, and both lead to eventual disappointment. Infinite patience, despite our verbosity in complaint, is the Filipino’s strength – and his undoing.