Whoever masterminded the Zamboanga carnage

However historians portrayed the Roman Emperor Nero in relation to the burning of Rome should have an eerie resemblance to the recent man-made calamity that befell Zamboanga City. The manner barangays were intentionally torched and razed to the ground found its precursor in the conflagration that leveled the city of the seven hills. Was it Nero, through his ruthless cadre, who set the capital of his own empire city afire? If that be the case, was the emperor sane then? It remained a historical rumor that the emperor ordered the burning of the city for the terroristic purpose of flushing the Christians out of their dwellings. Indeed, what madness moved him to destroy the city he professed to love so dearly?

To make the comparison appreciably understandable, let us try to identify who could be the person who stood the plausible chance of being considered as the present-day counterpart of Nero. There was absolutely no way the raiders could just have suddenly acted in conspiracy with one another and in that one moment of insanity decided to foray into parts of the city. They should have a leader who conceptualized the pillage and that commander should be so charismatic as to generate an equally mindless following.

Well, the initial reports mentioned the name of a Nur Misuari to be behind the plot.  While he was not physically seen in the area where the terrible carnage was inflicted, there were bits and pieces of information indicating that it was Misuari who masterminded of the siege. Those reports, though, were to the discredit of the armed forces, at best, nebulous.

 At the onset of the Zamboanga war weeks ago, I wrote in this column that lawless elements descended upon that city. That was how I described the raiders. They were as simply lawless as any day murderer.  Sadly, the military did not do a good job of particularization. As it unraveled, the intelligence arm of the Armed Forces was so clueless on the raid that it did not deserve to be called intelligence.

Anyway, television accounts of the day-to-day skirmishes lasting until the other day were so grimly graphic. Live coverage terrified me no end. The most brutal amongst the footages that I saw were those consisting of black smoke billowing from a distance and the raging fire that lapped each helpless home it gobbled along the way.

If it was true that a Nero, of years long gone, delighted upon looking at such a fiery holocaust, was that the same degree of sadistic satisfaction that a Misuari, of the modern times, could have felt?  In the case of the former, how I wish we had accurate historical facts more than conjecture to understand the real situation. With respect to the latter, it becomes mandatory that investigative agencies string the data to reveal who engineered and who participated in the Zamboanga raid and for our police forces and the prosecution service to bring them to justice.

While we wait for these results, I must ask now, whoever led the Zamboanga raid, to visit two persons, namely his spiritual adviser and his doctor. With his priest, imam or pastor, whoever is appropriate, he has to see, with his own eyes, the scorched barangays, touch, with his own hand, the ash of burnt homes, and breathe an air dusted by the smoke from dying embers. If he feels no pain, the fires of hell, I am sure, will not harm him. But should his gut feel some wrench, there is still a faint hope that his spiritual adviser could offer an immediate help before he is hanged.

The leader of the Zamboanga raid also needs his psychiatrist as he sojourns that part of the city which was laid desolate by his criminal cohorts. If the anguished cries of the children looking for their dead parents do not bother him and if the famished look of starving mothers do not affect him, there is definitely wrong with his psyche. Putting him before a squad of musket men is most helpful to him. But, should he see the wrong he did, his doctor must whiz him to a dungeon where he should be locked without possibility of being set free. There, I hope, he regains his humanity.