Viral

The last few days, street protests broke out in key cities of Syria demanding regime change. The democratic idea is an irresistible virus spreading across the Arab world.

Like other strongman regimes in the region, Syrian authorities responded with wanton violence. They hoped to cow the crowds by firing into them. Scores were killed in a few days of street marches. But the demonstrations bloomed instead of thinned.

Only a week ago, it seemed the Assad regime in Syria was immune to the democratic contagion sweeping the region. The repressive apparatus put in place by Hafez Assad was ruthless and efficient. When protests broke out in a major city several years ago, ten thousand people were believed killed in the course of a repressive campaign.

Last week, however, a demonstration against corruption was held in a town south of Damascus. Police opened fire on the demonstrators, killing 15. The people responded by escalating their demands and conducting even larger, more determined, protest actions.

As in Iran, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, the international media is kept out of Syria. But that does not keep the truth from filtering out. Video clips of the violent repression of peaceful protests taken by mobile phones seep out to the world through YouTube. As in the other Arab societies, the protests are organized through social networking technologies.

As in Iran, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, the protests are led by the young: those whose futures are in peril of being stolen by regimes rooted in the past. They are driven by the ideals of individual autonomy and economic freedom. They will not be satisfied by minor concessions yielded by regimes bent on recycling themselves. Only by reclaiming their countries will they reclaim their destinies.

It is remarkable that the slogans of those courageously marching in the streets across the Middle East are not about Islamic fundamentalism or against western imperialism. The old discourses of the traditional religious elite or the nationalistic rhetoric from the sixties hold no resonance among young Arabs.

The young Arabs want individual rights strengthened. They want to be able to make personal choices, choose their leaders themselves and demand accountability from them.

These revolutionaries do not want their revolution to be intercepted by medieval clergymen, as the Iranian revolution was, leading to the establishment of a totalitarian regime. Neither do they want another cycle of authoritarianism, such as those that entrenched themselves in the sixties and seventies by expropriating the nationalist rhetoric of the secular liberation movements then in fashion.

Today, remnants of the Old Left, reared in the obsolete paradigm of national liberation, remain suspicious of the democratic popular movements sweeping the Middle East. They fall back on their outdated nationalist framework, interpreting the action of the coalition forces for instance as yet another imperialist conspiracy.

By sticking to their facile nationalist paradigm, they echo the wild claims of Gadhafi and Assad and all the other autocrats in that neighborhood facing the specter of democratic revolutions. That obsolete nationalist paradigm fails to account for the fact that the deposed Mubarak regime in Egypt was America’s staunchest ally and that Gadhafi himself, before his people began marching in the streets, was trying to reinvent himself as an apostle of Tony Blair.

Overpaid

Last month, I commented on the collection suit filed by RII Builders against government. The company claims government owes it some P1.803 billion in “residual value” for the failed Smokey Mountain housing project.

“Residual value”, it turns out, is the amount of money RII estimates it might have made in profits had the project not fallen through. The project, to remind the readers, fell through because RII failed to raise the financing necessary to complete the undertaking.

Scandalized by that humungous claim for “residual value”, Mr. Romeo Lim filed a citizen’s complaint at the Ombudsman charging RII Builders for graft.

In response to this development, I received a letter from Mr. Jimmy Sarona, vice-president of the Home Guaranty Corporation (HGC). The letter was accompanied by a detailed accounting of how much RII and the government-owned and -controlled corporations put into the failed project and how much each party to the undertaking were subsequently compensated.

The accounting reveals that RII Builders was, in fact, overpaid by the GOCCs that had put money into the project. Of all the GOCCs, it is the HGC that has the largest exposure to the asset pool put together for the joint venture. By Sarona’s account, the HGC is still trying to recover its exposure of P4.407 billion from whatever is left from the asset pool.

P4.4 billion is a lot of money. It could go a long way in supporting the construction of low-cost shelter units that would close the yawning housing gap we are experiencing. The poor, most of all, have an interest in the provision of lower cost shelter that can only be provided with the support of the government agencies.

How the HGC intends to recover its huge exposure is a major headache. Whatever assets have been recovered from the failed project has been distributed to RII Builders, the National Housing Authority and other government agencies involved in what once upon a time seemed a commendable deal.

Sarona, on behalf of the HGC, states in his letter that his agency does not intend to pay RII any more money on this strange claim regarding “residual value.”

We can only hope the other housing agencies party to what has become a jam of litigation will be as adamant as the HGC in rejecting this atrocious claim.