Pursuit of Peace

For an insurgent group, there are major advantages in pursuing peace. It is spared from military offensives. Its negotiators, who must be identified to the government, are immune from arrest.

Peace negotiations, however, do not stop the military from defensive operations, including the hot pursuit of any rebel who brings harm to anyone, whether soldier or civilian. A peace process is not supposed to stop the state from enforcing laws and protecting citizens from armed extortion, looting, and destruction of property. The government must keep this in mind as the two rebel groups with which the administration is exploring peace escalate their attacks on both military and civilian targets.

The peace process also doesn’t prevent the state from stopping the flow of weapons and funds to rebel groups. Those weapons can come from several sources. Military and police arsenals can be raided or weapons seized from soldiers and cops. There have been cases of soldiers and policemen themselves selling government-issued guns and ammunition to rebel groups. The gunsmiths of Danao in Cebu are also sources, although their products are of poor quality. Many news features have been published about the illegal gunsmiths of Danao. If journalists can find the gun makers, it shouldn’t be too hard for law enforcers to do the same.

Then there’s the funding. Maintaining a rebel army, especially one with families and other non-combatants in tow for use as human shields, requires a hefty amount of funds. They can’t subsist on camote forever; they need supplies for day-to-day survival. They need a lot of money for weapons and ammunition. How are the funds obtained? If they engage in criminal activities such as kidnapping, extortion and burning of private property to raise funds, they must be arrested.

Authorities can also scrutinize bank accounts, foundations and suspected shell corporations that might be used for rebel financing. A few years before the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, the brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden operated a charity foundation in Mindanao through which funding was believed to have been channeled to the Abu Sayyaf.

There are many ways of fighting an insurgency other than the use of military force. A peace process can be pursued without sacrificing the duty of the government to enforce the law and keep the public safe.

Sewer Rat

For a man who ruled his country with an iron hand for 42 years, the end came ignominiously, and as brutally as he treated his people. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, once dubbed “the Mad Dog of the Middle East,” begged for his life as he was dragged out of a sewer where he had hidden after an American drone struck his fleeing convoy.

His captors showed no mercy. Grainy video footage of his final moments showed Gadhafi beaten and bloodied by a frenzied mob before a bullet to the head put him out of his misery. Ecstatic people then posed for photos beside his corpse. “What did I ever do to you?” he reportedly asked.

As with the other authoritarian casualties of the Arab Spring, what Gadhafi did to his people led to his fall. Forty-two years can give someone the impression that he has a divine right to rule and luxuriate in the entitlements of absolute power. Until his final days, the North African despot acted true to form, ordering his own people killed for his own survival.

As in Egypt after the fall of another durable despot, Hosni Mubarak, jubilation erupted across Libya as Gadhafi’s death was confirmed. And as in Egypt, uncertainties are ahead over the fate of Libya after four decades under a man who made no preparations for an orderly transfer of power. For 42 years, Gadhafi’s relatives and cronies flourished, with the regime failing to spread the blessings of the nation’s massive oil production to the grassroots.

This is a key lesson from the Arab Spring: no head of state is invincible in the face of deep public discontent. That discontent can bubble up from many sources: economic hardships, social injustice, the absence of equal opportunities, stifling of civil liberties. Gadhafi’s Libya had all those problems and more: the brutality of his regime made the successful uprising in neighboring Tunisia an inspiration to long-oppressed Libyans.

Those problems will not disappear overnight with the killing of Gadhafi. Egyptians are fully aware of this, particularly the women who braved threats and joined regular protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. For now, however, Libyans can revel in the success of their revolution, and breathe the free air with the death of a dictator.

Warning Signs

The two cases of passion killings recently happened at SM North Edsa and SM Pampanga served as a reminder of the role of the family in the preservation of Filipino values that were obviously damaged because of the incidents.

Had the families of the victims in close monitoring of their children, those two incidents can be avoided, thus, saving precious lives. Yes, parents of those killed, particularly the SM Pampanga violence were two minors perished, were to be greatly blamed resulting in the death of their loved ones.

Lest it be misunderstood that we are tossing the blame solely to the parents of the victims but accounts of respected members of the community including religious groups stress that there are now warning signs that the family, as a basic unit of the society, is indeed in the midst of collapse because of the increasing incidence of crime of passion not only in those two malls but also elsewhere.

It is now clear that there is an urgent need to go back to the basic where children are taught primarily by their parents, values necessary for them to realize the importance of life.

The warning signs are already obvious. Unless proper approaches to restore immediately the core values among Filipino families, there will be more passion killings that will happen in the future.

A collective effort, therefore, of every Filipino family is the ultimate answer in avoiding senseless deaths not the assertions of others of breach of security protocols of mall operators.

No more, no less.

A Matter of Perspective

We live in this world that is full of ego. What matters is all about us, ourselves. We are often, to our own thinking, correct. What we do is correct. We don’t care about others because they are wrong in the first place.

We see things from our own perspective – not from others.

How true indeed were the words of William James. “The greatest discovery of my generation,” he once said, “is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.”

I was reminded of a story written by Valerie Cox. It goes something like this: A woman was waiting at an airport one night. With several long hours before her flight, she bought a book and a bag of cookies. She then found a place where she could sit and do her reading.

She was engrossed in her book but noticed that the man beside her was grabbing some cookies “from the bag between.” She tried to ignore the situation because she wanted to avoid making a scene.

The situation continued for some time. As she read and munched her cookies, the man was continuing to eat the cookies, too. She also continued to ignore him but she told herself, “If I wasn’t so nice, I’d blacken his eye!”

Then, finally, there was only one cookie left. The man took the last cookie and broke it in half. With a smile on his face, he offered her half and ate the other. She took the other half and thought, “This guy has some nerve, and he’s also rude. He didn’t even show any gratitude.”

Right there and then, she wanted to say something but her flight was called. She gathered all her belongings and headed for the gate, refusing to look back at the “cookie thief.”

She boarded the plane and continued reading her book. In the middle of the flight, she reached her back pack and “gasped with surprise.” She found her bag of cookies inside it.

“If mine are here,” she said, “then the cookies we were eating were his and he tried to share them to me.”

It was too late to apologize. She realized that she was the rude one and the thief.

Life is a matter of perspective. We have to see things from different angles. If someone has done something bad to you, try to see it from his point of view. If you were in his place, will you do the same thing? As they say, there are always two sides of a coin.

Success and failure go hand in hand. You either win or lose. But then again, it’s a matter of perspective whether you emerge a winner or a loser. A winner is always part of the answer while the loser is always a part of the problem. The winner has a program but the loser has always an excuse. The winner says, “Let me do it for you.”

The loser complains, “That’s not my job.”

The winner sees an answer for every problem while the loser sees a problem in every answer. The winner sees a green near every sand trap but the loser sees two or three sand traps near every green. The winner says, “It may be difficult but it’s possible.” The loser dismisses it this way: “It may be possible but it’s too difficult.” Which perspective do you usually follow?

Think positively, Norman Vincent Peale suggests. The Daily Motivator urges: “Use your energy and your time where they can make the biggest positive difference. Being positive is more than just repeating happy phrases.

Being positive means living positive. Being positive means seeing the possibilities for improvement and advancement in every situation, and acting on them.”

There’s more: “Being positive means doing what is necessary and right even if it is not easy or popular. Positive values are more than just platitudes. Sincere positive values result in effective positive actions. And those actions will bring real, lasting and substantial achievement.”

But oftentimes, people choose to think negatively. Two buckets met at the well. One of them looked morose. “What’s the trouble?” asked the second bucket sympathetically. “Oh,” replied the first, gloomy bucket, “I get so weary of being dragged to this well. No matter how full I am, I always come back here empty.”

The second bucket laughed. “How curious! Why, I always come here empty and go away full. I’m sure if you started to think that way, you would feel much more cheerful.”

That is what optimism is all about. The Daily Motivator suggests, “Rather than lamenting what you do not have, make the most of what you do have. Rather than being stopped by what you cannot do, move forward by doing what you can do. Instead of agonizing over the past or worrying about the future, make sure that right now you are the very best you can be.”

It was during the war and the Army was drafting young me by the thousands. A simple farmer boy walked down the street right in front of the draft board office. A neighbor told him, “You better stay away; you might get drafted into the army.”

The boy, who had actually not even heard of the war, did not understand what it was all about. So the neighbor explained the situation. But the boy answered, with these words:

“Well, I always figure that I have two chances: I might get drafted – and I might not. And even if I’m drafted, I still have two chances: I might pass and I might not. And if I pass, I still have two chances: I might go overseas or I might not. And even if I go across, I still have two chances: I might get shot – and I might not.

And even if I got shot, I still have two chances: I might die – and I might not. And even if I die, I still have to chances…”

Carlos Castaneda said it right: “Things don’t change. You change your way of looking, that’s all.”

A Basic Women's Right

It is ironic that while medieval male senators, trying to score brownie points with the male leaders of the Catholic Church, prevent the passage of the Reproductive Health bill not through intelligent arguments but by sitting on it, the Philippines has just hosted the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ human rights conference on promoting maternal health.

Held last week, the conference discussed ASEAN member states’ progress on the achievement of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, particularly Goal No. 5, which aims to promote universal access to reproductive health services by 2015. The Philippines has committed to achieving the MDG. As in many other aspects of human development, the Philippines is lagging behind its ASEAN neighbors in achieving MDG No. 5, and is even going in the opposite direction, according to health and human rights officials.

The ones who need the RH bill in this country are impoverished women. Those with sufficient education and means have access to reproductive healthcare and enjoy the luxury of choosing whether or not to practice contraception. These women include the wives of several of the legislators who are against the idea that all women, regardless of income level, have the basic right to reproductive health.

While millions of impoverished Filipino women wait for access to reproductive healthcare, a Filipino-American midwife has been chosen as one of the Top 10 “CNN Heroes” for providing free maternal healthcare to poor women in Indonesia. Robin Lim is being honored for setting up “birthing sanctuaries” for Indonesians who need maternal and general healthcare.

Lim follows in the footsteps of Efren Peñaflorida, who was named CNN “Hero of the Year” in 2009 for bringing education to the poor while pushing a kariton or cart. Peñaflorida, who grew up in the slums, addressed a need that he knew was acute among the impoverished communities in the Philippines. There is another acute need waiting to be addressed, and which lawmakers living in Forbes Park and other posh villages cannot be expected to understand: poor Filipino women need reproductive healthcare. The RH bill has to be passed. Reproductive health is a basic women’s right, and a basic need.