EDITORIAL | Trainwreck

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Saturday, March 11, 2017

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THE OTHER day, President Duterte ordered the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police to “flatten the hills” and drop bombs on New People’s Army rebels. The Commander-in-Chief has a colorful language, indeed.

The strong rhetoric, however, along with his threat of martial law in Mindanao, is raising a lot of concerns in the southern island. Do the military and police view the President’s statements as a license to kill?

Previous bombings of Mindanao communities resulted to the forcible evacuation of villagers, destruction of properties, illegal arrests and other forms of human rights violations. It’s not hard to image this happening again.

The present turn of events is interesting to say the least. Here is a President who has professed to be a leftist and opened the peace talks, then cancelling it over recent skirmishes between government troops and the rebels.

The peace talks were supposed to address the root causes of rebellion – poverty, landlessness, institutional corruption, human rights violations, etc. – and hopefully find ways to achieve permanent peace. Even if the Army would drop all the bombs they want, the problems of the poor such as landlessness and lack of jobs will still not be achieved. Peace spoilers will only gain much from this renewed violence and bloodshed.

On Thursday night, the President announced he was ready to go to an all-out war for another 50 years and already apologized in advance for the civilians who will be caught in the violence as collateral damage. Does the government even have a contingency plan for Mindanao’s internally displaced people?

The struggling communities through counter-insurgency programs…the relentless extrajudicial killing of mostly poor people through the war on drugs…the revival the death penalty under a rotten justice system…As days pass, we get the impression that this administration is fast becoming a trainwreck.

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