A catastrophe in the minds of defeated pols!

When Sen. Panfilo "Ping" Lacson delivered his "True State of the Nation Address," he said that the reign of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was "catastrophic" for the country. Indeed, President Arroyo’s election victory was catastrophic for the losers of that presidential elections and since people like Ping refuse to accept defeat (who was it who said that in this country there are no losers... only winners and those who were cheated?) with honor, the only recourse left for them is to discredit President Arroyo. For sure, they’re doing a great job in that.

But like what we’ve been saying all along, the problem with the people who want President Arroyo out is they do not check what’s going on in the rest of the Philippines. If there was a catastrophe in Metro Manila, I’m sorry to tell them that there’s none here in Cebu and I was in Mindanao last month and I didn’t see any catastrophe there either. No doubt, the catastrophe is in the minds of those defeated candidates like Ping. I’m sorry for them.

Well, my brother Rene was in Davao City for the weekend and he bumped on that rally orchestrated by the opposition who brought FPJ widow Susan Roces there and he told me that the rally wasn’t huge at all. Well, I guess Susan Roces got a taste of how people in the South think what this fuss is all about. Whatever calls for unity for this nation are being concocted, I hope those groups would include development for the rest of the Philippines.

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The National Democratic Front (NDF) has unilaterally scrapped its peace talks with the Philippine government because it believes that the Arroyo presidency is "crumbling" and won’t last very long. That is according to Fr. Luis Jalandoni, chief negotiator of the Utrecht-based NDF panel. So what does this mean? For people like me who’ve long exposed the truth about the locally bred communists, this unilateral act of scrapping the peace talks means there will be no peace to be settled in the negotiating table and I don’t have to expound to our readers that this means more bloodshed! Sir Max Soliven said it rightfully last Friday in his column... that those peace talks were a "bad joke" in the first place!

Let me point out that many of us have never believed that the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the New People’s Army (NPA) and the NDF were sincere in talking to the government... I would even dare to say that the government panel merely used the "peace talks" to be in a semi-vacation state in Norway while the NDF used it to give legitimacy to exiles like Jose Maria Sison and Fr. Jalandoni.

The main objective of their 30-year struggle is to establish a communist government in this country or die trying (actually, the lower-ranked cadres are the ones dying in the field, while Joma Sison and Fr. Jalandoni are enjoying peace and freedom in the Netherlands). This is why decades later the CPP-NDF-NPA has never achieved anything near a strategic stalemate which would have forced the Philippine government to grant them concessions in exchange for peace. Peace talks, for the communists, mean a respite for R&R, then to rearm and restock their armed cadres.

So now it’s back to banditry, pillage and more killings as far as the communists are concerned and I guess it is time for the military to ram home the message that armed elements, whether they are underground communists or Muslim separatists, should be dealt with a serious blow. For too long, the military has been complacent with no visible military victories in sight, while the NPAs get propaganda mileage when they kill our soldiers in ambush. It is time to turn the tables on the NPA, but is the military prepared?

Let me rephrase the doctrine set forth by the late President Ramon Magsaysay and his four "F’s" in fighting the communists... find them, fool them, fight them and finish them... then offer them the hand of peace! When the Philippine government sat down with the communists in the peace table, they were merely bloodied, but not finished. Hence, it was a great advantage for the communists to be talking with the government. But now all that is gone because they have perceived the Arroyo administration as too weak and the military even weaker.

So now we can expect innocent blood to flow once more in the countryside, thanks to people like Joma Sison and his ilk who complain that the CPP-NPA has been tagged as international terrorists. But aren’t they? If one conducts an armed struggle killing and pillaging villages from Utretch, what is it then? As we’ve learned from the recent bombings in London, terrorism continues to be a worldwide threat and since the CPP-NPA is considered an international terrorist organization, it is time for the Philippine government to demand from the Dutch government to take positive steps in removing from their comfort zones people like Joma Sison who wage a remotely controlled war from their shores.

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Last Friday, we wrote about the Argao Beach Resort which was virtually run to the ground by incompetent bureaucrats of the Philippine Tourism Authority (PTA), making me remember about a once playable 18-hole, Gary Player-designed Kang-Irag Golf Course up in the mountains of Busay in Cebu City, just a few kilometers from the Cebu Plaza Hotel.

In the past so many years, we’ve written lengthily about the financial debacle that happened at the Kang-Irag Golf Course, which was at that time 80 percent complete and already used by many Cebuanos and tourists. However, since the PTA awarded the contract to operate the Kang-Irag to the Gotesco Group, they destroyed the Gary Player golf course to build their own design and today, we can only see tall grass growing there.

All I can say is Gotesco made matters worse. Years back, we asked them not to destroy the golf course and instead finish it... but as pride would have it, they destroyed it! The PTA gave this golf course to the Gotesco Group because they were losing P20 million a year in operating it. Of course, no one from the PTA mentioned that someone had profited handsomely from the thousands of fruit-bearing mango trees that surround the golf course. Worse of all, they are still getting those mangoes and the PTA is only mum about it.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talk show, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, at 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.