Hailing the new Czar

Whatever the carpers say, President Macapagal-Arroyo is right. She’s being accused of spoiling the peace process by doing her duty – meaning, by insisting that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) must "cut clean by deed from terrorists, purge its armories of terrorist weapons and engage in earnest peace talks shorn of deception."

Sanamagan, if the MILF, whether Hasim Salamat or that blowhard Eid Kabalu, who’s now loudly ululating over the Islamic conspirators’ success in, once again, pulling the wool over our eyes in Kuala Lumpur, don’t prove themselves sincere by fulfilling that minimum requirement, what’s the use of wasting time – and lives – yak-yaking with them for the umpteenth time?

Once more we’re hearing the same wimpish words from the Surrender Gang, now joined by former Armed Forces Chief of Staff and Defense Secretary Rene de Villa (recovered from his heart problems, but now suffering from faint-heartedness). We’ve heard those bromides like "permanent ceasefire", "peace negotiations", "constructive talks" and "confidence building measures" before.

As soon as we used to let down our guard in the past, the rebels and terrorists would resume nibbling away at our army outposts, police stations and peaceful civilian communities by staging sporadic attacks, and murders, kidnappings and atrocities of arson and pillage when the army counter-attacked and launched an offensive to curb these intrusions, the government would then get the blame – and international opprobrium on top of that for the plight of the inevitable refugees, many of whom, incidentally, the displaced families of the Islamic rebels themselves.

This "talk-talk-fight-fight-talk-talk-again" has been going on for many decades. "Peace"? It never lasts. As long as there are armed rebels, with links to and support from international terrorist organizations like Jemaah Islamiyah, al-Qaeda, and even Muslim countries (dare we recall Malaysia’s long-standing support?), how can there be any peace in Mindanao?

Outside of the silence of the terrified and terrorized, of course.

Salamabit: How can we even convince the Muslims to become "Filipinos"? Their madrassas or religious schools funded by overseas Muslim "charities" kuno do nothing but preach hatred of infidels (meaning us Christians) to Moro children, even babies. Distrust of non-believers is imbibed with their mothers’ milk. That’s the awful truth and we refuse to admit it – even to ourselves.

The boomerang result is that Christian children, in turn, are taught to be suspicious of their Muslim counterparts.

"The only Moro is a dead Moro," the oldtimers – with Kris-gashes and bullet-scars to drive home their point – intone. "Never enter a room with a Moro behind you. Never show off a beautiful gun or firearm, because the Moro will kill you to acquire it. Never owe a Moro ten pesos, because he will slay you to recover your debt."

That’s what we used to hear when we travelled all over Mindanao in our younger days.

My father brought me to Mindanao for the first time when I was eleven years old. In the initial twenty years in which I used to traipse all over Mindanao, I was fascinated with Muslim and specifically Moro culture, and actually proud of their distinct heritage with their own tradition of bravery passed down from their progenitors among the warrior tribes (even the centuries-old traditions of piracy of the Taosug and the denizens of the Sulu Sea). I had hoped that education, interaction, "brotherly love" and cooperation would make all of us truly One Nation, whether under our God or Allah, both one and the same Deity.

Alas, this has not happened. The Moros have been enslaved by the feudal hold of their own Datus and political leaders, deliberately, and the strictures of religion and sharia law. (Just as, perhaps, Mindanao’s Catholics have been enslaved by their primal fear of the amok, the juramentado, and the Taosug, Maranaw or Maguindanao raider.)

There is blood on both sides. Unless everybody is disarmed, and a strong Republic enforces law and order through a disciplined soldiery and police presence, there can be no cessation of violence, banditry or rebellion in Mindanao.

In this light, GMA is absolutely correct. Unfortunately, she is being slammed for it, by the usual critics and segments of the media.

* * *

"Peace at any price" is too expensive. The price paid will be disappointment, disillusionment and death. The Siren voices of the Surrender Gang must not lull us into a self-defeating, fatal acceptance of any poisonous peace pact.

The trouble with this over-hopeful, desperate planet is that everywhere men and women refuse to accept the bitter truth: That the 1,400-year-old struggle between the Crescent and the Cross, the pejorative word they use is "crusader", has been tragically resumed. Radical Islam has hijacked what was supposed to be a more upward-looking, semi-modern Islamic faith dedicated to peace. The fanatics are marching Islam backwards into the darkness of fundamentalism and Wahhabism – the latter promoted, by golly, by our pals in Saudi Arabia!

Take next-door Indonesia, the archipelago with the world’s biggest Muslim population – 218 million people, 87 percent of them professing Islam.

In the many years this writer covered Indonesia, from Sukarno to Suharto (including the insanity of the GESTAPU coup of September 1965), in which we saw, to our horror, half a million slaughtered in an orgy of mob action), the violence was not religious, but racial in its mindlessness.

The Indonesians (45 percent Javanese) were the most tolerant, easy-going Muslims of them all. The women did not dress immodestly, but neither were they compelled to war the hijab or Muslim headcovering which is the trademark of "traditional" Muslim women spotted in increasing numbers, even in Brussels, the very capital of the European Union.

Surely, they were not forced to put on the black abaya, which is the covering robe all women must don in Saudi Arabia (even our Filipina OFWs), nor the black head-scarf plus the black veil, and even the burqa or stiff black mask with slits only for the eyes.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the burqa is the overall covering, which is put on the women, covering everything from head to toe, with a mosquito-netting or gauze portion only to enable the eyes to see.

Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times (who trashed us when he was reporting from Mindanao) just sarcastically reported from Basra, Iraq, that he had "still no luck in my quest to help the (Bush) administration find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction".

Kristof did, however, find something more disquieting. As he wrote: "An iron curtain of fundamentalism risks falling over Iraq, with particularly grievous implications for girls and women." I must point out, parenthetically, that we see this happening in once-tolerant Indonesia, to the unexpressed consternation, I’m sure, of their woman President, Megawati Sukarnoputri.

"Already," Kristof notes, "almost every liquor shop in southern Iraq appears to have been forcibly closed." He adds: "Here in Basra, Islamists have asked Basra University (unsuccessfully) to separate male and female students, and shopkeepers to put up signs like: ‘Sister, cover your hair.’

"Many women are giving in to the pressure and wearing the hijab head-covering.

"Every woman is afraid,’ said Sarah Alak, a 22-year-old computer engineering student at Basra University. Alak never used to wear a hijab, but after Saddam fell, her father asked her to wear one on the university campus ‘just to avoid trouble’."

As one who’s covered the Middle East, too, for many years, from Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon, to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, I can testify that with temperatures soaring to 50 and even 60 degrees Celsius, girls and women wearing the hijab, and, worse, the body wrapping abaya, are in for a great deal of discomfort.

In my camel-riding heyday in the Sahara, even the chequered male keffiya as white ghutra, or shama’agh, the head covering of Arab men, on top of a taqiyah (skull cap), was a very hot experience. Some years ago, an elderly English lady exclaimed over how quaint it was to see all the men wearing tea napkins on their heads!

Well, from London to Paris to Dusseldorf, you see those women’s hijabs on every sidewalk, and now even in Istanbul, where the Turkey of the great Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (who abolished the fez) was supposed to be in the forefront of the secular movement.

And today, where Saddam, for all his butchery and tyranny, had fostered a drive towards modernism, the Ayatollahs, mutawwahs (religious guardians of moral standards), and fist-shaking clerics are back in force – compelling subservience to Islamic strictures and the toughest tenets of shariah law.

Let me put it plainly. This trend is alarming. This return "to the past" puts Islam on a collision course with Christianity. As for the Jews, well – as Hamas declares, its suicide-bombers and sniper brigades will not rest until every Israeli is eradicated from the land. Need more be said about the impending death of the Bush "road map" to peace in Palestine and Israel?

* * *

Looking elsewhere, Russian President Vladimir Putin – the leader of 150 million Russians – has been received with all the trappings of pomp and pageantry by Queen Elizabeth II of Britain and the United Kingdom. He’s been driven through the streets in a royal carriage, accompanied by the Blues and Royals (or was it the Queen’s Household cavalry), like a visiting Czar (they prefer sometimes to spell it, "Tsar"). Did you think when I wrote the headline of this piece, I was referring to that silly squabble over who’s to be out Philippine drug Czar? The sad answer is, no Czar, no war on drugs even. Just our lawmen split up into warring factions.

It was Queen Elizabeth, in truth, who went to Moscow in 1994, to symbolize the end of the Cold War by shaking hand with Russia’s former President Boris Yeltsin in Red Square, with one of the most famous backdrops in the world, the candy-cane and lollipop towers of St. Basil’s church sparkling behind them. I remember what the BBC’s royal correspondent, Jennie Bond, said of that occasion: "In the late afternoon of a chilly autumn day, the Queen set foot on Russian soil. A moment of history, meticulously planned, designed to set the seal on the most senior level on post-cold war relations."

When we met Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin ourselves in 1998, little did we dream that his anointed successor would be an ex-KGB spook named Vladimir Putin. I must say that Putin has functioned very well as Russia’s new "Man of Steel" (reminiscent of Josef Stalin’s monicker, but with far more finesse and street smarts). He’s popular with the people, even while he cracks down on free speech and the media (he shut down the last independent television station the other week on some – er, technicality).

But what the heck: If the people love ’im, and sing songs to his greatness, and portrait painters do oil canvasses depicting him in Czarist robes and colors, under the Romanov Double Eagle of old, let Putin be Czar.

Certainly, that’s how he appeared when he waved at the proletariat lining the sidewalks of London, and reviewed the red-coats in Beaver hats with all the aplomb of a Royal. Even dashing Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, looked plebeian when shaking the hand of the Grand Commissar.

Putin has brought Russia back into the councils of the Great, from the G-7 (now "G-8"?) to the spectacle of George "Dubya" Bush, still sore with Jacques Chirac and virtually snubbing Gerhard Schroeder, back-slapping Vladimir in St. Petersburg (P-Baby’s hometown) at the 300th anniversary bash he gave last May 31 for 24 world leaders.

Putin hasn’t aligned his vast country with the West (upmarket, but still impecunious), nor brought it back to its lost "superpower" status, but he’s brought it a long way.

Why, he’s even gone to London (like Dick Whittington) "to visit the Queen".

* * *

It’s sad that in this politics-ridden country, the newspaper headlines mourned the death of our compañero and friend, Senator Renato Cayetano at 68, but immediately trumpeted that this didn’t mean there would be a shake-up in the Senate. Rene doesn’t deserve a diminution like that, for he was a good man and true.

We seem to be saying "goodbye" to so many friends this month. I can only say that Rene was full of life, a brilliant and hardworking lawyer (he defended Louie Beltran and represented us pro bono during the Cory libel suit), a dashing gentleman, and an enthusiastic golfer. He had not merely verve but substance. I recall that day he was appointed Presidential Chief Legal Counsel (replacing Tony Carpio, who’s now in the Supreme Court), Rene had rung me up. "There we were," he reported, "swinging at balls in the Malacañang golf course, when suddenly FVR asked me to be his Chief Legal Counsel!" I retorted, facetiously perhaps but in a stab at humor: "From now on, Rene, you’ll have nightmares."

"Why? "he asked in surprise. I laughed: "You’ll think: What if I had taken up tennis instead of golf?"

Rene wasn’t a sober-sided, stuffy guy. He’d, from time to time, drag us off to a karaoke joint where he sang with gusto, but always off-key. He could never carry a note, but, by gum, he sang with confidence. We’ll miss you, Rene! Keep on singing, Compañero, in that Great Karaoke in the Sky! We bid you a fond farewell – and hope to join the chorus later.

Forgive me, if I add, I hope much later.