Go tell the world…

The President was furious yesterday in reaction to published criticism over the disgraceful "escape" of Jemaah Islamiyah bomb-terrorist Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi and his two terrorist cellmates from their porous prison in Camp Crame.

I’m glad the President is mad. But she mustn’t get mad at those who cry out in anguish, Nakakahiya! (It’s shameful!). She must get good and angry at the police officers and ranking officials who were walang-hiya (without shame) and literally waved al-Killer merrily out of his poor-excuse-for-a-jail and, surely, even escorted him out to freedom.

They dumped him and his violent confederates right into our midst. This is why the people shout, Nakakahiya! They’re not worried about whether or not US President George W. Bush comes to the Philippines on his now somewhat iffy state visit – they’re terrified for themselves and the safety of their loved ones. They’re ashamed of the international bad image we’ve acquired in one fell swoop. Their millions of relatives, including the eight million Fi-lipino OFWs who live and work overseas, will certainly suffer contempt as well as suspicion owing to this deplorable, inexplicable and totally embarrassing incident.

It can be argued that there may still be thousands of cops who’re honest, put their lives on the line daily, earnestly "police" our neighborhoods, defend justice, and bring criminals to book. Yet, by the same yardstick, our people no longer know whom to trust. Even before the al-Ghozi caper, even before the escapes a few years ago of two Abu Sayyaf chiefs, Khadaffi Janjalani and Juvinal Bruno, alias Abu Jihad, from their detention cells in Camp Crame, even before last year’s fantastic getaways of the Pentagon Chief Faisal Marohombsar and his two kidnapper-buddies, or the Chinese Drug Lord Henry Tan, the public had little faith in the Philippine National Police.

Today, sadly under the President’s watch, the people appear to have completely lost faith in the PNP. Sinverguenza is the old Spanish word our fathers would have invoked – somehow it stings with even more conviction.

* * *

As I’ve said, I’m happy the Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief is mad. Let her direct her fury, then, in the right direction. Crack down on the police altogether. A few days ago, I proposed that she do an amok, lop off heads and kick ass – turn the fire of her wrath on the rot-ridden PNP from crown to bottom even on those who’re busily intriguing so they can themselves grab the top slot and replace the shell-shocked PNP Director General and Police Chief Hermogenes "Jun" Ebdane. The faction-riddled PNP seethes with betrayal, and former PNP Chiefs disgustingly continue to meddle in police assignments and promotions. What a stinking, rotten barrel of sour apples the police establishment has become. It’s time it was dumped among the other garbage of this Republic.

A friend of mine agreed with this idea yesterday, but voiced a caveat: If the cops are "fired" and kicked out of their jobs, "they’ll turn to crime." That’s a real dilemma. The cynical will retort that they’re already engaged in crime, anyway. Others will remark that many of them are already on the payroll of the drug lords and other criminal syndicates.

The only answer is that we’re in crisis, and the sooner we admit this, the sooner we’ll resolve to tackle it, whatever the cost. We must bite the bullet. We must begin fighting back.

The government says that 5,000 troops – army and police combined presumably – are now combing the country for the vicious al-Ghozi. What expense, what effort! To compound their disgrace, the police are coming up with the wildest and most ridiculous excuses. Some of them, as always asking not to be identified, are claiming the political opposition for having "engineered" the escape (ha, ha, ha), the most persistent "intelligence" report actually pointing the finger of blame at Senator Panfilo Lacson, a former PNP Director General himself; while others hint that the American Central Intelligence Agency did it (yep, as usual, rack it up to that naughty CIA).

They’re even calling on the country’s 300,000 security guards to keep an eye out for al-Ghozi et al., so they can grab him. Sus, they couldn’t even guard him when he was in their prison. And how can anybody recognize that murderous cretin? All he has to do is shave his head, and shave off his beard and moustache, and pose as a Pinoy playboy, which is what that al-Qaeda terrorist did, the Osama bin Laden lieutenant called Sheikh Muhammad who was terrorist-by-day, playboy-by-night when he spent a spell in Manila with Ramzi Youssef. When the Number Three al-Qaeda coordinator was nabbed in Rawalpindi, Pakistan last year, other detainees pointed at him as the man who had slit the throat of kidnapped Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in Karachi.

Now we have another bomb-maker and terrorist at large in our archipelago. I don’t buy the theory that al-Ghozi has already fled the country. Why should he leave? This is the safest place for him – for he obviously has many friends in the police and in the government. How could four lowly police officers and jail guards have let him "go" otherwise – so blithely into the night?

* * *

If you’ll recall, when former Police Major General and National Bureau of Investigation Director Alfredo Lim was elected mayor of Manila, one of his first initiatives was to propose that a separate and totally independent Police Force be set up for Manila and its three million population – after all, that’s just a million or so less than the population of the city-state of Singapore.

As a former cop, Lim’s rather undiplomatic but earnest argument was that the existing police organization (and its predecessor, the Integrated National Police) was so full of dishonest and untrustworthy cops that it couldn’t be regenerated. Any police cadets or rookie cops, he pointed out, would be speedily corrupted by the rotten apples already in the barrel. What the then Mayor Lim suggested was that a Manila Police Academy recruit college graduates, rigorously train each recruit as a civilian-oriented policeman, then put him or her on the beat armed with the most sophisticated equipment, communications gear, and transportation available. You know, a sort of (in the name I coined for them at the time) Komandong Kidlat or "Lighting Commando" – a rapid-response commando force.

Since President Fidel V. Ramos had come from commanding the Philippines Constabulary (which is the PNP’s progenitor) for more than 15 years, he was naturally importuned by his old PC officers, then running the police organization, into rejecting Lim’s proposal. The Secretary of Interior and Local Government, Raffy Alunan, indignantly declared that Lim’s idea was illegal and could not be approved or implemented. In short, it was shot down out of hand.

One wonders: If Lim had his way, and if an independent Police Force had been recruited, trained, mobilized and put into action then, the country would now have an experienced, well-armed, and disciplined police team to take over the duties of the . . . uh, discredited oldies. Life, alas, is full of "what-might-have-beens". Sayang!

Once upon a time we had a great Manila Police Department. The police beat was my first assignment as a "cub reporter" in the now defunct, but, at that time, influential Manila Chronicle, and my senior police reporter, though he was younger and still a law student, was today’s Quezon City Mayor S.B. (Sonny Belmonte). In those days, cops pounded the beat. The Police Chief – it was all he could afford – rewarded pesky police reporters like us, at Christmas, only with a handshake – though we were all jealous of the fact that he gave Sonny a Christmas card (wow!) and the late Ray Veloso of The Manila Times a cheap cigarette lighter!

The cops proudly bore their sobriquet of "Manila’s Finest" (plagiarized from the Big Apple’s "New York’s Finest") with élan. The detective bureau under the late Enrique "Iking" Morales really solved crimes with dispatch. (Like the Canadian Royal Mounted Police, their motto seemed to be "We always get our man!") Oh well. Nostalgia, it’s rightly said, is the kingdom of the old.

Of course, the police were not perfect – but they could be counted on. Mamang Pulis (Mr. Policeman), like the fabled Japanese police of the Koban, knew everybody in the neighborhood, including the toughs (bambrauns), the drunks, and "the usual suspects". We drank beer and siyoktong, that Chinese-made rotgut, because those aguas de taranta were all we could get on our meager paychecks. But those were happy days, with each day bringing the promise of adventure and achievement.

What impressed me most was the little panel in front of the old MPD headquarters on Isaac Peral (now United Nations Avenue) – gee, it wasn’t even marble – on which were inscribed the names of the brave policemen who had died in the line of duty, defending our citizens, fighting for right and justice. Okay, it was corny, but it was glorious. On the face of it were written (I quote from faulty memory) the unforgettable lines: "Go tell the world . . . tell every passerby . . . that in this world, men knew how to die."

When I pass that old police station nowadays, I notice that the weathered and serried panel is still there, but what of the meaning of those words?

The noble lines, of course, were culled from the exclamation of Leonidas, the king of Sparta, when he and his 1,000 bravest warriors in the year 490 BC made a heroic stand at Pass of Thermopylae to stop the advance of hundreds of thousands of Persians hurled against the Greeks by the Emperor Xerxes. This was earlier recorded by the historian Herodotus, who was born in the year 484 B.C. in the Greek city of Halicarnassus on the southwest coast of Asia Minor (he wrote in his own Ionian dialect), and supplemented in detail by the later historian Thucydides, an Athenian. (The Athenians were no slackers either, although far outnumbered in warships, they crushed the Persian fleet at Salamis.)

Athens and Sparta, alas, subsequently went to war for many years, with terrible results. Sad to say, the ancient Greeks, whose civilization enlightened the world and who gave mankind its buzzwords, such as "democracy" and "tyranny", were too often also as quarrelsome as we Filipinos.

Yet, when I was a small boy, my father told me something which I was not to understand until much later in life. He said: "Think like an Athenian, but fight like a Spartan."

How went the Spartan code? Every wife or mother would send her man off with the admonition: "Come home victorious in battle, or dead upon your shield."

The al-Ghozi escape was worse than a Greek comedy.

The shield of our police is now badly tarnished. One wonders whether it will ever shine again.

Which is worse than a Greek tragedy.