On the Kuratong Baleleng and Arab guerrilla warfare

That was a cute photograph of Speaker Joe de Venecia and Maguindanao Rep. Didagen Dilangalen (1st district), their faces covered with sanitary masks submitting their quarantine papers to a health officer on their arrival at the airport from a congressional junket to Shanghai, China. (Wits commented that Sunshine Joe, the maharajah of hyperbole, and Dilangalen should have remained gagged.)

The eleven congressmen who spent five days in the People’s Republic of China "volunteered" to be quarantined in their own residences. If you ask me, they ought to have been quarantined in the Veterans’ Memorial Hospital – not necessarily along with Erap – or some government hospital, including their "inspiration" for going to China, Manila Congressman Harry C. Angping (3rd district) who had put up a trade exhibit in Shanghai. Although China tries to deny it, that country is the epicenter of the raging and virulent "atypical pneumonia" epidemic which is spreading like wildfire around the globe.

In Hong Kong alone, over 610 are ill and 15 have already died of what they’re calling (for lack of a more specific name) Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS. The once-bustling air hub, port city and trading metropolis cum tourism and shopping paradise is devastated by the outbreak of a nasty, still mysterious form of pneumonia which has been killing one in 20 of those infected – and there’s still no known cure.

The Financial Times of London described Hong Kong yesterday as "a city of fear". Markets are crashing, tourism has withered, hotel cancellations have reached mountainous proportions, airlines are reducing their flights, ex-pats are sending their families home, post-haste, to their native countries fearful of their being banned from airline travel in the near future.

"On trams and buses, passengers wear surgical masks to protect them from the mysterious virus. Restaurants are deserted." That’s what FT revealed yesterday.

The city shut down all its schools to prevent the disease from spreading to their one million students, and slapped "quarantine" on more than 1,080 residents, including those in an entire apartment block, the Amoy Gardens in Kowloon, in which 100 residents had gone down with the disease. How penning up the other 200 remaining residents while another 100 potential disease-carriers have already fled the complex will effectively curb the dissemination of the strange pneumonia strain remains problematical.

The virus has already jumped from Hong Kong, the International Herald Tribune said, "to infect more than a dozen countries on three continents".

The quarantine imposed by the government on 1,080 persons thus far is so stringent, here are the penalties for "breaking the quarantine" – namely, "a fine of 5,000 HK dollars (about US$640), obligatory confinement in a hospital ward and, possibly, also six months in prison".

Our Congressmen came directly from China – note that. The disease is supposed to have originated in Guangdong (Canton) province, next to Hong Kong itself where the population is predominantly Cantonese. Shanghai-Pudong is not very far away either.

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On its front page yesterday, The Asian Wall Street Journal, whose editorial offices are in Hong Kong, stated: "China, the enigmatic epicenter of the disease, hasn’t updated its figures since last week, when it reported 806 cases and 34 deaths. The country has been criticized for withholding information about the virulent disease, allowing it to spread to Hong Kong and beyond."

Since the first pneumonia cases, it turns out, were detected in Guangdong last November, Beijing has obviously been trying to put a lid on news about the outbreak in an effort to keep several large conferences and conventions from being cancelled. This puts in grave doubt the "transparency" of the regime. But the bad news is out. More than 1,760 people thus far have been infected with SARS worldwide, with 62 deaths.

And we’re still not seriously worried? Even if Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit claims that the Philippines remains SARS-free, if we don’t put serious quarantine measures in place at all airports we’ll soon be flooded with a wave not merely of returning businessmen and tourists, but of scores of thousands of OFWs, our overseas workers, coming home for Mahal na Araw, Holy Week, and the Easter holidays, all of them from the "infected" areas.

Singapore, where 93 persons have contracted the illness, has also been unsettled. Singapore Airlines has cut flights, just as Cathay Pacific. Hong Kong’s airline has drastically reduced flights. Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, former Brigadier General or B.G. Lee (translated for years, in whispers, there into "Baby God") has griped: "Businessmen are teleconferencing rather than travelling." B.G., the son of former Prime Minister now Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, is expected to be the next Prime Minister after Goh Chok Tong.

The virus has already leaped over to the metropolis of Toronto (where four have died) and elsewhere in Ontario province in Canada. In Europe, Italy has reported its sixth suspected case, France its fourth, while Belgium has its first case. Australia has reported its first suspected case.

The world is, indeed, seeing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping – famine, death, pestilence and war.

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Beware, Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson! The Supreme Court yesterday ruled, by a vote of 10 to 4, with one abstention, to direct the refilling of the criminal case against those involved in the alleged "rubout" of Kuratong Baleleng gang members.

By coincidence – well, seemingly by coincidence – one of those involved in the so-called killings is Lacson who has just announced in Ilocos Norte his bid for the Presidency in 2004.

This will, of course, "politicize" the public’s view of the High Court’s decision. Let’s examine the reasons given in the ponencia as well as the dissenting opinions. The bottom line must be: Is the ruling the correct one, based on law and jurisprudence? There will always be the lingering suspicion, though, it must be said, that Malacañang "pushed" for such a decision

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Everybody, it seems, is becoming an armchair general about the war in Iraq. Only two weeks into the "Anglo-American" invasion of Saddam Insane’s domain, opinions, assessments, and frequent outbursts of hysteria are flying thick and fast. Some, since the blitzkrieg failed to capture Baghdad in two weeks’ time (or bag Saddam and his two sons, his cousin "Chemical Ali", or even blast Radio-TV Iraq off the air), are already pronouncing a terrible "defeat" for the Americans and the Brits.

I can only shake my head and say, using my favorite jibe: C’mon. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor destroyed in one night. Why should Baghdad be any different?

The Iraqi Republican Guard, moreover, veterans of an eight-year punishing war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait, and the 1991 "Operation Desert Storm", are no pushovers.

As for the fedayeen guerrilla attacks being launched, with painful effect, on the advancing and occupying forces, why the surprise? Theirs are the same tactics used by the famous Lawrence of Arabia and his Arab "armies" against the better-armed, well-equipped troops of the Ottoman Turks who had ruled the region for centuries.

I suggest, as a training film, the Americans and Brits review the 1962 movie by Sam Spiegel and David Lean (starring Peter O’Toole, naturally, with Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy and Omar Sharif). Even though the Arab "heroes", outside of Omar, were English rather than authentically

Semitic, that picture captured the rough-cut nobility, as well as the bloody violence, petty squabbling, viciousness, the desire for blunder, and the sordid betrayals of that time. It won seven Academy Awards.

I make no bones about it. As a boy in first year high school, this old journalist read T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and has been a devotee of the legend of Lawrence and the Arab yearning for independence ever since. One of my first journeys was to Jordan to seek out the rift – the Wadi Rum – in which stood, weathered in rock, the original "seven pillars" of which he wrote so poetically.

Winston Churchill, indeed, so movingly wrote of this confused, tragic hero: "I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. His name will live in English letters; it will live in the annals of war; it will live in the legends of Arabia."

"El Aurens" was variously described as the Liberator of Damascus, the Hero of Aqaba; an Uncrowned King and Kingmaker. The Bedouins, it is said, dubbed him "Prince Dynamite" and "Destroyer", both for his destructive raids on the Hejaz railway and his own explosive character. To the Bedu,) he was the brother and comrade of their leader, Auda ibu Tayi, chief of the Howeitat.

There were, of course, many who despised him as a charlatan or a fake, and who tried vigorously to tear him down.

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Michael Asher in his analytical 1998 volume, Lawrence, The Uncrowned King of Arabia speaks of his wanderings in search of the real Lawrence. He was astonished, he narrated, when he visited the tents of some of the Bedu of Howeitat (which he spelled "Hewaytat," since English translations from the Arabic vary according to ear). One of the elders of the group, a descendant of the tribesmen who had ridden with Lawrence, sneered: "Lawrence wasn’t the leader of the Arab Revolt. He was just an engineer who knew how to blow up a railway – a dynamite man – that’s all he was!"

Yet it was Lawrence who had striven to make Faisal, the third son of the Sharif of Mecca, the true leader of the Arab Revolt.

Asher describes their first meeting: "He (Lawrence) was impressed by the Sharif’s stately appearance, which, he said, reminded him of the monument to Richard the Lionhearted – the hero of his youth – at Fontevraud in France. He found Faisal more regal and imposing than his brothers . . . this was important . . . to appeal to the British, the Arab Revolt should have a leader who at least looked like the European idea of the ‘noble Arab’."

In her own book, The Reckoning, Sandra Mackey (page 105) relates how Lawrence ("a young British eccentric educated at Oxford") arrived in the autumn of 1916 at Arab headquarters in Hama in Syria.

There he encountered Faisal. According to Lawrence: ". . . this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek – the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory."

Lawrence proved right. Faisal, the tall dark scion of Islam’s most distinguished family, "wooed the Bedouin tribes of Arabia into revolt against the Ottomans, while Lawrence, the small blond Englishman, hit Turkish rail lines and garrisons in lightning raids that would immortalize the guerrilla fighter". Thus wrote Mackey.

Here’s more: "What was in essence a Bedouin army immobilized thirty thousand Turkish troops strung out along the railway from Amman to Medina; prevented Turkish forces from linking up with the Turkish garrison in Yemen; and interfered with the Turks in Arabia from linking up with the Germans in East Africa to shut off the Red Sea to Allied shipping."

Fast forward to April 2003. Now, do you see why the Iraqi Fedayeen and the "suicide-bomber" volunteers – even if they’re not 3,000 in number from several Arab countries, including the Palestinians as Saddam’s propagandists brag – are so bothersome and worrisome to the Coalition Forces?

The Arabs, even the Shi’ites who dislike Saddam, it has to be said, in the light of history have since those days been wary of European – especially Anglo and French – betrayal, as well as of the perfidy of Americans.

It’s not just the fact that, when the Shi’ites and Kurds rebelled against Saddam at the tail-end of the Gulf War in 1991, they were abandoned by the elder George Herbert Walker Bush and the original "coalition" to the fate of being massacred by the vengeful Saddam and his Republican Guards.

Lawrence of Arabia, in his time, had pledged the Arabs "independence". When they got, victoriously, to Damascus, they had encountered only double-cross. Lawrence wept.

Unknown to the jubilant Lawrence and the Emir Faisal, the fate of the Arabs was decided by the British and the French in the smoke-filled backrooms of Paris, culminating in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The British and French mapmakers divvied up the Turkish Ottoman Empire into their own spheres of control. They drew up the boundaries of Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan (now Jordan). They also tinkered with the boundaries of Egypt, Palestine, Kuwait, and the other Sheikhdoms of the Gulf. In every instance, "boundaries met the needs of European colonialism."

Mackey recalls: "When Mesopotamia’s turn came, the British once more rolled out the map. Skipping over Mosul with its large Kurdish population and historic tie to Syria, the mapmakers quickly drew a line around the Ottoman vilayets of Basra and Baghdad, the core of British interests. A wooden ruler laid across the northern Arabian peninsula set the southern boundary, bisecting a region in which large and powerful tribes had historically moved unchallenged by any authority except submission of the weaker tribe to the stronger. Thus, Mesopotamia re-entered history as a creature of its fragmented past."

This contrived political entity was Iraq.

The Brits of today are, quite clearly, fighting a more idealistic kind of war. I don’t doubt Tony Blair’s sincere desire to help "liberate" the Iraqis from despotism and remove a threat (according to his lights) to his own country, Europe, and the United States. But the doughty British troops, commandos, marines, cavalry and airmen – now in Iraq – are haunted by the sins or the indifference of their forefathers. The Americans for their part have no idea about the geography and human fault-lines of Iraq – and how their own idealistic President Woodrow Wilson, weakened and drained by debilitating influenza, had failed to prevent the rape of Arab interests that occurred between January and March 1919 in the Palace of Versailles.