Not a new war, but an old confrontation

VIENNA, Austria – The terrible bus crash in Quezon in which 33 persons died – including the driver – and six or more were injured is all over television here in Europe. I spotted the story on Cable News Network (CNN) and British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) when I got up yesterday morning.

From the rather sketchy report which came out in the overseas media, the driver of the bus seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel, therefore, with his vehicle going out of control, it plunged down a ravine.

This should be a wake-up call to our Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) and its subordinate agencies, the Land Transportation Office (LTO) and the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB), which deal with the bus companies. For starters, it’s time we got rid – without mercy – of the junk 10 to 15 year old "second hand" buses our greedy operators "imported" from Japan and South Korea’s scrapyards. Not only are these dilapidated vehicles obsolete and unreliable, but they’re the worst smoke-belchers. The trouble lies not with such junk vehicles alone, but with the underpaid, undernourished, and low – IQ drivers the bus companies hire.

Can you imagine entrusting the lives of unsuspecting commuters and travelers to such ill-trained and sloppy drivers? Equally at fault is the system, which should have been jettisoned long ago, by which drivers and conductors are paid on the basis of how many passengers they get and how many trips they make. This "forces" drivers to take reckless short-cuts and work incessant hours in order to meet the "boundary" required. No wonder buses cut into each others’ paths to snatch passengers waiting at the curb away from a competitor.

In order to stay awake, and thus make more back-and-forth journeys, it’s no secret that some drivers resort to taking shabu or other uppers. We won’t know until a full inquiry is completed what caused the driver of that ill-fated bus to lose control of his vehicles – thus bringing 33 or more to their painful deaths. Perhaps, we’ll never know.

One thing we do know is that the present careless, uncaring, bahala na way of doing things in land transportation cannot continue. DOTC Secretary Larry Mendoza, being new at his post, is unburdened by the unwise decisions and even suspicious choices made by his predecessors in the past. This is his chance to modernize our bus fleet, upgrade our commuters, safeguard the lives and convenience of the quality of our professional drivers, better their working condition, and safeguard lives and convenience of our commuter.

Let him who is still without sin cast the first stone. And it had better be a big one.

* * *

It’s cold and fog-bound here in Vienna.

The other night, the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, a lady, Mr. Benita Ferrero-Waldner, addressed our International Press Institute delegates in the most unlikely of venues – at a dinner (accompanied by a Woodwind musical ensemble, Akademischer Orchestervereign) in the Kunsthstorisches Musum Mein Gott, those German nouns are kilometric jawbreakers!

That museum was housed in a splendid palace, glittering with chandeliers, and hung with luminous Rafaels, Tizanos, Vermeers, Rembrandts, and Rubens (with those fleshy and voluptuous Rubenscque nudes cavorting across the canvas in delightful profusion). There were also marble statues of heroes, bulging with muscle, or goddesses languid with passion. At the dramatic head of the entrance stairs was a mighty Theseus, helmeted but naked (of course) slashing an evil Centaur’s throat with his trusty sword.

Everywhere one goes in Vienna, he is reminded that this city of only 1.7 million, in a country of only eight million Austrians, was once the capital of an immense empire – which vanished in a puff of gun smoke in 1918. Imagine that: There are only eight million Austrians, or less than the population of Metro Manila. But they get 14 million tourists a year – or at least that’s what they used to attract until the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and the Pentagon.

The Austrians, like us Filipinos, are already embroiled in election matters – with almost no regard to the Christmas spirit, although there is a charming outdoor Christmas market between Parliament and City Hall. Elections for Parliament (and, therefore, for Prime Minister) were due on November 24 – yesterday! The center-right People’s Party and the Far Right Freedom Party on the one hand were running neck-to-neck in the polls up to the end with the challengers, the Social Democrats and the Greens. The once rabble-rousing, neo-Fascist Jorg Haider of the Freedom Party has taken a more subdued role – but let’s note that he still exerts great influence in his group from his stronghold in Carinthia, where he reigns as governor.

Indeed, the Governors of the nine strong provinces of Austria are almost feudal lords in their own right – thus weakening the power of the federal government. This was not evident, though, when the Federal President of Austria, His Excellency President Thomas Klestil, addressed our gathering at a reception he tendered in the Hofburg, the former Imperial Palace. Looking a bit like France’s Jacques Chirac, with his nose, like his Gallic counterpart, a bit up in the air, Klestil was nonetheless more engaging. He chided the media "for worshipping the golden calf" and giving in to the tyranny of numbers and surveys. Gee whiz, Herr Klestil! If we don’t crunch the numbers, our journalists and employees don’t get paid. Of course, we don’t worship the golden calf, but I dearly wish we could melt it down and distribute the gold ingots among our staffers.

Since they give so many speeches in Austria (as we do in the IPI), nobody really takes those speeches seriously. Pardon me while I yawn… politely, I hasten to add. Everything in Vienna is polite, even when they cut your throat. "Form" and etiquette are everything.

* * *

The "war against terror" seems to have been established by US President George W. Bush at the just-concluded summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Prague, the Czech Republic. Bush turned on the charm, disarming his critics, and even shook hands with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder twice (although he’s really not forgiven him). He got his NATO allies, plus the seven new "invitees" to go along with him – somewhat. Then he visited Russia’s Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg to assure him that he’s not only NATO’s best friend, but his own personal pal.

Oh, well. We’re all for the war against terror. For us, in the Philippines, it’s not new. We’ve been fighting terrorists for more than half a century – as for the Islam versus Christianity bit, if we’re frank enough about it, this has been going on in our archipelago for more than 350 years.

For the Austrians, too, this confrontation is old hat.

Western Europe – Christian civilization, in fact – has never properly acknowledged its debt to Austria. Were it not for the fact that the irresistible tide of Turkish advance was stopped short at the gate of Vienna, who knows? The Muslim janissaries might have rolled on to the banks of the River Seine in Paris – and beyond that to the English Channel.

The Spaniards, who were conquered and ruled by the Moros (the original Moorish armies of the Arabs and Berbers) for eight centuries, barely managed to shake off the Moorish yoke in the early 16th century. They were rescued a second time by Venetian, Austrian, and other "Christian" galleys in the great sea battle of Lepanto in which the Muslim fleet was sunk or routed by the Christian phalanx under the leadership of the royal "bastard", Don John of Austria (who later died fighting for the Habsburg dynasty in the Netherlands of "Low Countries").

It was in 1529 that the armies of the Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, came charging across Hungary towards the West. Suleiman hurled 300,000 men against the walls of Vienna, only to be held at bay by Count Salem with only 18,000 men. Many of these heroic pikemen and soldiers, by the way, came from Graz and the province of Styria – the home province of Arnold Schwarzenegger. They must have been as big as Conan the Barbarian.

When the Austrians, who were Catholic, were not fighting Moors, they were bitterly contending with their Christian "Protestant" brethren. The same Emperor Ferdinand I wh defied Suleiman had to beg St. Ignatius of Loyola to send another "army" – a battalion of Jesuits – to his own country to stop the conversion of many of his nobles to the Luterhand Church. Finally, he made the compromise of dividing his succession between his three sons – two of them staunchly Catholic, while the third, Maximilian II, was inclined to Protestantism.

In 1683, the Turks came again. Another antlike horde of 300,000 warriors, this time led by Kara "The Black" Mustafa threw itself against the Vienna walls. This time, Mustafa was accompanied in his westward march by his 3,000 concubines. (How did he summon up the strength to fight the next morning?) The Emperor Leopold I called for help from King John Sobieski of Poland. Prince Charles of Lorraine was commissioned to raise and lead an Austrian Army. Rudiger von Starhemberg was designated to direct the defenses of the city.

The Turks surrounded the city with thousands of tents, and sent their wild cavalry under the command of Pashas to assault the fortifications. Turkish sappers and their cannon pounded the walls unrelentingly.

Finally, Sobieski arrived, his army has pounded to the battlefield night and day on horseback. The two armies, with Sobieski, Charles and Starhemberg in front, rendezvoused not far from the besieged city. Their 75,000 men came storming from the rear to rout Mustafa’s legions. The fleeing Turks abandoned their tents, their cannon, and even their treasure. Nothing is said about what happened to their women.

The day after the city was saved, Poland’s Sobieski met with the Emperor Leopold on horseback on the blackened field of recent combat. The two sovereigns conversed in Latin, for want of a common language.