Nimble

The Sultanate of Sulu is in fact a makeshift operation composed of the ailing Jamalul Kiram, his articulate daughter Jecel and his “secretary-general” Idjirani. The three operate out of a humble home in Taguig.

Notwithstanding, they have kept all of us enthralled for weeks now, providing the latest news from the ground and keeping two governments on a kilter. Last Thursday, this ragtag operation impressed us all by demonstrating nimbleness in diplomacy.

No less than UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon issued a call for all parties to refrain from violence and commence dialogue. A few hours after Ban issued that call, the Sultan ordered his “royal army” in Sabah to observe a unilateral ceasefire.

Recall that the week before, Sultan Kiram wrote the UN, asking the international body to intervene in Sabah. Fortunately, the UN does not lose letters to the secretary-general, even if they come from kings who have lost their kingdoms. After Kuala Lumpur poured in troops in what seemed to be an effort to annihilate the small force of Tausugs in Lahad Datu, the UN secretary-general issued an urgent call for negotiations in place of fighting.

Expectedly, the Malaysian prime minister quickly rejected the Sultan’s unilateral ceasefire. He demanded that the “intruders” simply lay down their arms and surrender. It was his turn to enforce the hard line.

On the same day that Ban Ki-Moon called for negotiations, the Malaysian prime minister flew to Sabah, presumably to oversee the military operations against the “intruders.” That day, according to the Sultan’s spokesman, 31 Filipinos were killed in what he described as a “massacre.” If this claim is proven true, the prime minister has set himself up for international censure.

Restrictions on media coverage prevent the rest of the world from looking in at events on the ground. The Malaysian security forces have not won accolades for strict observance of human rights. The conduct of this operation against the Sultanate’s men will be scrutinized in the days to come. There are horror stories told by Filipinos residing in Sabah. Those stories will be told to the world eventually.

The Malaysian prime minister, like the Filipino president, might muster enough legal arguments to justify a harsh response. After all, a band of armed foreigners entered Malaysian territory. That is intolerable under any jurisdiction.

However, before throats were slit and a lightly armed band was bombed to kingdom come, the record will show that the Sultan opened a door to a negotiated resolution of the conflict. Perhaps, it was a door opened too late.

Nevertheless, when the time comes to do the final body count, two governments will bear the moral burden for the blood shed after negotiations were offered. This is the blood of hungry people finding solace in an ancient (and probably unrealistic) territorial claim. The claim might be an opiate for desperate men — but it was an enthralling vision of a path out of poverty.

Recall the Lapiang Malaya, a band of hungry peasants who believed their amulets protected them from bullets. They marched down Taft Avenue with their bolos, keen to seize the prosperous future promised them. They were cut down by a hail of bullets from the armed forces of a fearful state — if only to assure the duly-constituted authorities the amulets (and the dreams they fostered) were no match to the armed might of the modern state.

The parallelisms are evident. There was no way this puny group of Tausug fighters at Lahad Datu could possibly pose an existential threat to either the Malaysian or Philippine state. They were simply willing to put their lives on the line for an impossible dream.

The two nation-states, driven by political narcissism, simply had to crush a puny challenge, with all the brutality they could manage, to extinguish a misguided vision. This is just so tragic.

Hare-brained

No, this postscript is not about our diplomatic establishment. It is about the “solution” that captured the imagination of the MRT management.

Last Wednesday, the MRT, on the basis of some truly imponderable calculation, decided to charter buses to woo passengers from the rail service and convince them to use the road. The lines of people wanting to commute by rail are incredibly long and the wagons are incredibly packed.

The chartered buses managed to attract a few commuters. All of them eventually regretted the decision to ride the bus for the same price as taking the train.

MMDA constables flagged down the buses for veering out of the bus lanes and using the underpasses. It turns out those indulging in this crazy “experiment” did not coordinate with the MMDA.

In the end, the commuters who took the buses needed an hour-and-a-half to complete a journey that required only half-an-hour crammed into a rail car. But of course! Whether one is on a chartered bus or a regular rolling coffin, traffic on Edsa is always at a crawl. That is exactly why the light rail system was built and why they are patronized heavily.

The only solution for the passenger overload is to buy more trains and more wagons, run the service more intermittently and improve on the inhuman design of the stations. The need for more trains to cope with the passenger volume was recognized years ago. Today, the MRT tells us it will take two more years before the supplemental rail cars are delivered.

This “experiment” involving chartered buses to add to the excess buses plying the route was laughable from the start. It should have been forgettable were it not such a fitting icon for the idiocy that burdens management of our public transport.