Into the teeth of danger: That's where real newsmen must go

It's no surprise that 11 foreign journalists went "missing" in Sulu. Yesterday, nine of them -- mostly French television mediamen -- stumbled back from the brush. Two others, still "unaccounted for" at this writing, and their Filipino guide, hopefully will emerge unscathed.

It's clear that the French media, more than the others, are making a big thing out of the hostage crisis, particularly two French nationals -- a man and a woman -- who were snatched last April 23 from a Malaysian resort island off Sabah by the cut-throat Abu Sayyaf. Perhaps it's the drama involved. If anything, the French love drama and "escape from the wilderness" stories, such as that famous tale of "Papillon" (Henri Charriere's best-selling book made into a movie starring Steve McQueen), the only man to successfully escape from Devil's Island in French Guyana.

In the case of the Abu Sayyaf, it seems, the newsmen and cameramen -- this time -- didn't seem to have gotten to the hideout where the 21 hostages, seven of them Europeans, are being held. This is because, as the Abu Sayyaf scoffed, they didn't ask "permission" first.

But the journalists had to try. At our just-concluded 50th world congress of the International Press Institute in Boston, one of the main items of discussion was the escalating threat to the lives of journalists worldwide. According to our Vienna-based IPI secretariat, deaths of working journalists soared last year to their highest level since 1944: 65 journalists and 21 support staffers were slain in 1999.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Reporters produced slightly lower figures, but it also confirmed a sharp upswing in killings of journalists since the mid-1990s.

The Boston Globe (May 1) interviewed our IPI permanent Director, Johann P. Fritz, and he explained: "It's not like the old movies. People nowadays are deliberately targeted. If you use an armband or marked car that says 'press', this will insure they will kill you!"

In countries where corruption and civil strife are rampant, Fritz continued, "Drug dealers, corrupt military men, corrupt persons in public administration or government -- they all really fear the investigative journalist. It starts with harassment, proceeds to intimidation, and if that doesn't result in suppressing the newspaperman, it ends up in murder."

Fritz, to emphasize his point, revealed that since the breakdown of the Soviet Union more than 200 journalists have been killed, compared with about 100 killed during World War II."

In the case of the Abu Sayyaf bandits, who style themselves Islamic mujahideen (trained by fellow Moros who fought in Afghanistan, and Afghan and Pakistani instructors, and financed by rogue terrorist-backers like Osama bin Laden), they've learned the uses of international publicity. Foreign journalists are safe with them (although the same isn't true of Filipino newsmen). The peril faced by French and other foreign correspondents who brave the Patikul area is that they might be shot by mistake, or cut down in the crossfire between the insurgents and encircling army troops.

It's typical that the Abu Sayyaf chieftains dangled the prospect of releasing two hostages, one a German lady seriously in danger of suffering a stroke, the other a sick Frenchman, then -- at the last minute -- trotting out other extra "impossible" conditions for the prisoner exchange.

The rebels' insistence that the military cordon around them be lifted and our government forces withdraw from the surrounding area in Sulu cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be granted. If our armed forces and police paramilitary withdraw, the Abu Sayyaf will escape from the noose and reemerge to kidnap, murder, and burn. And, as usual, their victims will be Filipinos, not just that handful of hapless foreigners. This trade-off in hundreds of Filipino lives is too exorbitant a price to pay for the rescue of a few Europeans (they don't even mention the nine Malaysians and the Filipinos, abducted from the same Semporna Resort off Sabah).

Another thing I've noticed from the international coverage is that both Cable News Network (CNN) and British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) keep on mentioning the Filipino government "negotiator" and even exhibiting footage showing him. But they never mention his name. Why? Isn't Secretary Robert Aventajado important enough? (He's crucial enough to the negotiations as President Estrada's personal envoy, with a long track record of dealing with Muslim insurgents, including the Moro Islamic Liberation Front).

Perhaps those foreign correspondents can't spell Aventajado's name which means (in the original Portuguese), "God-given advantage."

But to return to my query: why isn't his name important enough to be mentioned?

This reminds me of how our hero, Chieftain Lapulapu of Mactan, slew the Conquistador and Explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, in pitched battle. (Magellan never got to circumnavigate the globe, dying in Mactan at Lapulapu's hands, and therefore the voyage had to be completed by his lieutenant, Sebastian Elcano). However, if you peruse all Western history books, they simply say that the "great Magellan was killed by natives." We haven't treated Chief Lapulapu, admittedly, with much more respect. We simply named a tasty fish after him.

Senator Rodolfo G. Biazon rang me up the other day to correct my misimpression in this column that he had been questioning the expenditure of funds of the Armed Forces or "the cost of war in Mindanao."

Biazon pointed out that the newspapers, from which I had picked up the information, had misquoted him entirely. "Far from what is being alluded to," he underscored, "I am even proposing the deployment of additional funds."

"If additional funds cannot be made available, through the passage of a supplemental budget, the P4.5 billion Modernization Fund for the acquisition of equipment can be used to support the current military operations successfully," he asserted.

He urged that the AFP and Department of National Defense quickly procure helicopters and other equipment "needed for internal security operations."

What he had complained about, Biazon (a former AFP Chief of Staff himself) averred, was the lopsided allocation of intelligence funds for the government's security forces. For Year 2000, the Defense Department and AFP, he emphasized, received only 17 percent of the total intelligence funds of the government -- or only about P194 million. In contrast, the Senator said, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force (PAOCTF) received P579 million, "on top of the Philippine National Police's P169.5 million."

He added: "The Office of the President's intelligence budget is P120 million, and the rest of the government intelligence budget is distributed to other agencies including P10 million for the MEAT Inspection Unit."

"I wanted to inquire," the ex-General said, "into the low percentage of intelligence funds allotted to the Defense establishment, not question how the Defense department has been spending these funds."

Biazon explained he raised the question because he found it amazing that the armed forces had not even detected in imminent advance an MILF attack on eight towns in Lanao and Maguindanao, the Abu Sayyaf kidnappings in Basilan and Sulu. "Why," he exclaimed, "they even failed to learn of ten kilometers of tunnel dug by the Moro rebels along the Don Narciso Ramos Highway in Mindanao!"

Biazon is right. How could our military have failed to detect the construction by the MILF rebels of a concrete-lined tunnel -- would you believe? -- two meters in diameter along a ten-kilometer stretch! If anything, it seems that the same materials utilized to complete the highway might even have been siphoned off by the insurgents for use in constructing their tunnel.

Incidentally, Muslim warriors had been digging tunnels since the pre-war days of the juramentado.

This latest inability to detect the MILF tunnels indicates that (1) intelligence funds are being funnelled towards the wrong priorities; and (2) that a major portion of these funds may be going astray.

The escalating "war" in Mindanao and its mounting casualties (not to mention the black eye it's begun to give the Estrada administration abroad) can no longer be prosecuted like a schoolboy's game of Blind Man's Bluff. I don't agree with those who keep on crying that we must stop fighting and negotiate "peace." We've been negotiating "peace" with Moro rebels for the past half-century. Under the Ramos regime, the government even paid them off and "gave in" to them (but poor FVR didn't even get a Nobel Peace Prize).

It's only when the insurgents are licked, and they beg for peace that "peace talks" will have any meaning. John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address that "we must never negotiate out of fear, but we must never fear to negotiate." On the other hand, before you negotiate, you must put the fear of God or Allah into the hearts of the bandits, pirates, and troublemakers. Otherwise, they'll believe it's us, the "good guys", who've been defeated -- not them.