An entirely disgusting Easter ‘break’ in Basilan

What's happened to the anti-terrorist campaign?

No sooner had the military received decorations and commendations (plus cash rewards) for having nabbed one of the most notorious Abu Sayyaf leaders, than 53 – yes fifty-three! – Abu Sayyaf pri-soners "broke out" of their prison in Basilan, and scampered off into the wilderness.

Pursuing guards managed to kill eight of the escapees and recapture nine – but think of it: Thirty-six ASG terrorists are now at large. It's as embarrassing a fiasco as the high-profile Al Ghozi escape from Camp Crame in the sense that so many potential Moro "terrorists" escaped from a prison facility, in one fell swoop.

One of the most humiliating aspects of that disgraceful caper is that, while technically the ASG fugitives were not in the hands of the Philippine National Police, but of the Jail Management and Penal bureau, another agency under Interior and Local Government Secretary Joey Lina, NOBODY bothered to inform the PNP Director-General Hermogenes "Jun" Ebdane about the Big Escape until yesterday afternoon – and this person was a columnist of The Philippine STAR, Mr. Babe Romualdez!

Would you believe? Were Ebdane's own subordinate officers trying to keep him in the dark – so they wouldn't spoil the Boss PNP General's Sabado de Gloria? This is criminal neglect, even thwarting of the law.

For even if the police argue, from the legal standpoint, that the escaped Abu Sayyaf bandits were not under police custody, but of the Jail Management bureau's warden and guards, it is the urgent duty of the PNP to now track them down, recapture them, or gun them down before they engage in any violent mischief.

I can't believe such a mass outbreak could have occurred without top collusion – so heads must roll. If any civilian centers are "bombed" because those Moro militants got away, then the blood of the victims will be on the heads of the GMA Administration.

The President and Commander-in-Chief must kick ass on this one, without mercy or remorse – or political waffling.

* * *

"He is risen!"

That’s the greeting all over the Christian world on Easter morning. Even in the old days, when we were traveling through the atheistic Soviet Union (Is Vladimir Putin headed back in that direction?), Russians would greet each other on their Easter morn (the Orthodox church has a slightly different date), "He is risen!"

After Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ, Jesus is risen indeed. The stone rolled back. The tomb empty. The Lord radiantly returning, despite the terrible wounds and horrible Crucifixion inflicted on Him, and walking into the light.

He appeared to the sainted women making a sorrowful pilgrimage to what turned out to be an empty rock-cut tomb, to His Apostles on the road to Emmaus, to Doubting Thomas so the doubter could feel the gashes in His hands, the spear-wound in His side, to Simon (renaming him "Peter") sobbing out his remorse by the lake. Jesus had known from the first that He had to die. "As Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life," Jesus had told Nicodemus.

The New Testament Gospel of St. Mark starts with the words, "This is a Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God . . ."

Yet, there could be no good news about His Resurrection, his vanquishing of death and His ushering in of mankind into eternal life, had Christ not undergone His Passion and Death, the agony of Gethsemane, the cruel scourging, humiliation and ridicule of a thorny Crown, the final denouément on Golgotha, "the place of the skull".

This journeyman journalist briefly covered the Middle East including the Black September War of 1970. I returned to Israel and Palestine several times (though I’m in no hurry to go back there this year, with hellzapoppin’ everywhere).

In 1966, I got a two-hour interview with David Ben- Gurion, the founding Father of Israel, not very long before he died. In his house in Tel Aviv (he lived mostly in a far-off kibbutz), Ben Gurion had quipped: "Your New Testament? It’s a work of fiction written in very bad Greek."

Seeing I was growing irritated, his Old Testament Prophet’s face cracked into a sly grin: "Got you there! I was only joking."

I suspected he had not been jesting.

Yet, everywhere one goes in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and their environs you stumble on evidence of Jesus’ life – and His love.

In Jerusalem, where Herod’s Palace once stood is a church called the "Cock Crow" church. For it was erected on the very site of the courtyard of the former Palace where Simon-Peter had fulfilled Jesus’ prediction at the Last Supper.

"Before the cock crows," Jesus warned Simon the Fisherman, who vowed to follow his Master unto death. "Before the cock crows, you will have denied me thrice." Thus it came to pass. The incident reminds us of our own cowardice, and of God’s forgiveness.

There is an Ecce Homo convent on the spot where the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate – after having Christ cruelly scourged (the movie went to town on this!) – presented Him to the Jewish mob.

"Behold the man!" Pilate said. Yet they took no pity on Him and cried out, "Crucify Him!"

On that site today, you will still find the pavement, as archaeologist Alan Millared correctly described it, "rutted and scratched with the games the Roman soldiers played. On such stones Jesus endured his captors’ rough foreplay."

Rough? The Gibson movie doesn’t exaggerate. The critics decry the "blood-soaked nature of the film". Was Gibson true to the Greatest Story Ever Retold? Just visit any of our old Catholic Churches, and you’ll find effigies of Jesus bloodily, scourged, cascades of crimson dripping from His crown of thorns, figures of our Savior hammered to the Cross.

In Madre España, in hundreds of churches you’ll discover the same statues which haunted our childhoods, during those endless Lenten processions (suffering effigies of Jesus, and Mary, and Veronica with blood-stained veil stored in drapes in old family homes to be trotted out to adorn the carrosas each Semana Santa): Ecce Homo! Indeed.

* * *

Appearing on our Impact 2004 interview program last Good Friday (there’s an Easter morning replay on ANC at 8 a.m. today), Brother Eddie Villanueva – aside from his own powerful message that we must return God both into our lives and the Government – recommended that everyone watch Gibson’s The Passion. So that we might be reminded of how much Christ suffered for our redemption.

Was The Passion unnecessarily "gory and anti-Semitic"? That’s what critics have said to the Gibson epic, which was filmed out of faith and devotion – but grossed, I hear, $200 million at the box office in the first week. Faith sometimes has its earthly reward.

Many Jews and Rabbis cried out that the film would provoke a fresh "wave of anti-Semitism". Thus far, I see nothing of this sort. Jesus, Mother Mary, most of His Apostles while they mainly spoke Aramaic, their dialect (as Ilocano is to Tagalog) rather than Ivirt (Hebrew), were Jewish themselves. Didn’t the High Priests and the mob accuse Jesus of claiming to be "The King of the Jews"?

The movie, if you ask me, was tougher on the Romans. They treated Jesus rough. They flogged, kicked, gouged, beat, and scoffed at Him. Pontius Pilate, after declaring Him innocent, ordered His execution anyway.

I didn’t see the Italians, or today’s Romans in Rome, complaining about Gibson’s opus. Cruelty was, after all, the means by which those Imperial Romans kept their far-flung Empire together, and scorched out rebellion with sword and flame. The Imperial Americans in Iraq – being softies – may have a few lessons to learn from them.

Did you know that until 1961 there was no contemporary evidence of Pontius Pilate’s existence outside of the Four Gospels of our Evangelists? Finally, archaeologists at Caesarea found a stone slab containing the name, "Pontius Pilate", and the title-facade of a building dedicated to the Emperor Tiberius. Proof at last. Not a "work of fiction" as Ben-Gurion had chuckled, nor a figment torn from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

* * *

An obviously Protestant columnist, writing in the Financial Times of London (Thursday), Gerard Baker best makes the case for describing Gibson’s film as "not out of step with the biblical narrative or . . . Catholic iconography". His sneers are, at least, sincere:

"Walk into any Catholic Church tomorrow afternoon," he laughs, ". . . and you will see the image of a man nailed to a cross, in the final agonies of a most painful death, usually given graphic representation with blood pouring from hands, feet, head and side. Along the walls will be the Stations of the Cross – 14 gaudy tableaux that dwell in detail on the physical and emotionally agonising last journey of Christ. There might be paintings or statuary what will portray as mother consumed with grief at the sight of the broken and lifeless body of her son.

"Mournful hymns will recall in excruciating detail the whips, the nails, the crown of thorns, the mockery. And, of course, the Passion . . . Stay and you will witness something really weird. Catholics are so fixated on the physicality of Jesus and the bloodstained vividness of his final hours that they will troop up to the altar to kneel before and kiss – yes, kiss – a simulacrum of wood on which he hung."

Baker should have come to Pampanga last Good Friday where 14 penitents and devotees had themselves – a number of them annual volunteers – nailed to the Cross. If Baker had witnessed this, he would have freaked out. Or he might have laughed even harder.

One naughty text I got was to the effect that one volunteer for crucifixion in pursuit of "realism" wanted to be nailed to the cross between Gloria and Mike. Gloria who? Mike who? The nasty texter must have been a new Hawi Boy from the Panday camp.

In sum, there are those who insist that Catolicos Cerrados like those of the old Spanish and Pinoy mode, put too much emphasis on the Passion and Death, when we should be celebrating instead the joy of Easter – the Resurrection of Our Risen Lord. Yet, how could there be a Resurrection, without the agony and death?

Happy Easter! He is risen! The Easter candle of hope reborn is lit today. We, too, will rise again.

* * *

One of our dearest friends passed away last Thursday – Maundy Thursday. On Good Friday morning, I got a call from her daughter, Rosanna.

"Uncle Max," she told me. "Mommy passed away yesterday."

What shock it was. It will be to her many friends here, too – when I say that Marietta Guerrero de la Hoya Jousellin died in the American Hospital in Paris last Thursday.

How fleeting life is. Marietta had appeared fine when she and her husband, who’s devoted to her, consulted two of her doctors last Tuesday. Thursday, she complained of pains in the stomach, and a feeling of swelling. Henri rushed her to the American Hospital. To his dismay and surprise, she died two hour after admission there. It had been her chemotherapy treatment, the doctors surmised later, which had weakened her.

When I received the news, with my wife away in Hanoi, attending a UNESCO conference there as UNESCO Sec-Gen., I rang up Paris to find out what had happened.

The only number I had in my memory chip was that of their cellphone. I was startled to hear Marietta’s voice asking the caller to leave a message. I did. Henri, checking her cellphone, rang me back an hour and a half later, to tell me what had happened. You could audibly hear the tears in his voice. For many months she had tried to conceal her suffering, he said, by courageously being her usual elegant and outgoing self. I can believe it.

Less than half a year ago, when we were walking along the Boulevard Les Capuchines, Henri had inexplicably turned to me and remarked, out of the blue: "You know I love Marietta, but it was when she got sick that I realized how very much I love her!"

I realized now how God was so kind to us, to have enabled us to fly to Paris from Madrid last March 19 to have dinner with Marietta and her husband Henri in a funny little Vietnamese restaurant on the Rue Donau, right beside "Harry’s Bar".

Precious and I had been in Madrid for an investiture ceremony when the March 11 train bombings suddenly took place. Paris had not been on our homebound itinerary, but since our Air France flight back to Manila entailed a change of planes at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport (Roissy), I had said to my wife, "Why not two nights in Paris, so we can visit Marietta and Henri, and you can talk UNESCO business, too, with our Ambassador, Hector Villaroel." So we did it.

Marietta and Henri came to our hotel, Le Grand, the Intercontinental on the Place de l’Opera. We opted for Vietnamese. Would you believe, Marietta walked the two blocks on her usual exuberant style, and had been as witty and beautiful as ever, despite her serious illness – the cancer which had been tormenting her.

We had been with her, too, last November in Paris, then she had visited our home in Manila. We thought she was on her way to being cured!

How we merrily exchanged jokes and anecdotes at that dinner in Paris. The night before we left, there was supposed to be a farewell dinner, this time given by Ambassador Villarroel. At the last minute, Marietta phoned us. She had been counting on being with us, she sadly said, but she had a stomach upset. So, she cheerfully remarked, she would have to say "goodbye" on the telephone – but she was sending Henri to join us, as originally planned. "you’ll be back here before you know it," Marietta had remarked. "Or I’ll see you in Manila!"

Now, we’ll have to see her in heaven. If I’m lucky enough to get there.

Rosanna, and her brothers, Luis Jr. and Lorenzo, will be flying to Paris for the sad ceremony. The two boys will have to get visas from the French Embassy here urgently, so I hope this can be accomplished quickly for the funeral rites. Rosanna, who’s got her Schengen, will be off immediately.

Henri told me on the phone that a Mass is being arranged at St. Joseph’s Church, that wonderful little chapel not far from the Arc de Triomphe where they would go to church every Sunday. Marietta had been especially close to the Irish priests there, belonging to the Passionist order. We had a heard Mass with them there some months ago.

What can I say? Marietta had always been brave and true. Her passing leaves a void in our lives. But it will be filled, in consolation, with fond memories of happy times shared. Adieu, Dear Friend! Tell we meet again.

How fitting to go home on Holy Thursday. It was Jesus who promised Dimas, the good thief, "This day you will be with me in Paradise!" Marietta only stole hearts, but truly she is now with Him in Paradise.

* * *

THE ROVING EYE . . . What do you make of this? Last Tuesday, two helicopters in a row (Alikabok reports) swooped down on Camp Capinpin where former President Estrada is incarcerated (this was before Holy Week "furlough"). Out of the first chopper came no less than candidate FPJ himself, accompanied by ex-Senator Ed Angara, Horacio "Boy" Morales and businessman Melo Santiago. Erap was inside his bedroom in the "prison" bungalow watching television when the group got there – but he didn't immediately go out to greet them. A second helicopter arrived, this time with former Caloocan Congressman Baby Asistio, an Erap pal, and Asistio went straight into the bedroom while FPJ, Angara, Morales and Santiago waited at the rectangular dining table in the room outside. Finally Erap emerged. Interestingly enough, FPJ didn't say much, but Angara, Morales and Santiago "reported" to Estrada that the campaign was not going well, and funds were running low – no big contributors seem to have ante'd on their promises. The Opposition, the visitors (with FPJ again not saying much) complained, ought to get together – or else GMA, with every resource and the "Comelec" at her command, would win. Yet nobody could explain how Ping Lacson, Raul Roco or Brother Eddie could be convinced to give up and throw support behind a United Opposition. Were those matters really discussed at that meeting? Did the meeting take place? Alikabok and other sources say it did. Anyway, this is something to chew on this Easter Sunday. Our Lord Jesus is risen, truly – but can the Oppositioin rise again? . . . Senator Tito Sotto has reportedly resigned as FPJ's campaign manager. Jejomar Binay has taken over.