Just passing through

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf is leaving for Jakarta today after a two-day charm offensive in which he said a lot of things which were music to our ears, but in the end didn’t add much to what we knew already. He addressed a joint session of Congress yesterday – many of the solons were absent, but the empty seats were politely filled with Senate and House staff members and employees, to give the impression that our politicians were eager to hear his words of wisdom.

General Musharraf – he remains chief of Pakistan’s armed forces – called for an end to the "civil war" in Mindanao, et cetera. Okay. He was then feted with a gala dinner in Malacañang. Okay, so the Philippines and Pakistan are friends, and so forth. Mabuhay!

What I don’t understand is why some people are saying he can help us achieve "peace" in Mindanao. For instance, I saw Prof. Benito Lim of the Ateneo de Manila University being interviewed on "Top Story" by Karmina Constantino of ANC/ABS-CBN and the professor said Musharraf could help us in the peace effort in Mindanao, while unctuously declaring that there can be no peace there if the government keeps on trying to impose a "military solution."

In short, Lim growled that we keep on sending generals "to kill Muslims" as if we thought that there could be peace only after all the Muslims had been killed. What an atrocious and totally misleading statement, coming from a supposedly learned professor.

Our Philippine Army and our police aren’t there to kill Muslims but to fight, and if necessary, kill rebels. It so happens that the armed rebels they’re fighting happen to be Muslim insurgents intent on carving an Islamic state out of our Philippine Republic’s island of Mindanao. Other rebels are non-religious, even atheistic Communist guerrillas of the New People’s Army (NPA). Our military’s and policemen’s task is to fight them, too.

C’mon, Professor. As long as there are armed men (and women) in Mindanao, or elsewhere in our country, who don’t belong to our legitimate armed forces, police or law enforcement agencies, we will never have peace. Those illegitimate armies of rebels, terrorists or bandits, will forever be pushing those who are unarmed around.

The law of the gun and the law of the jungle, lex talionis in Latin, are very similar in nature. I don’t believe any special favors should be granted any minority, whether Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, cross-eyed or wall-eyed. The law of our secular Republic, which has no state religion, must be applied without fear or favor to all.

As for Philippine membership in the "Organization of the Islamic Conference" or OIC, what good would it do? We are a secular country, not an Islamic country. We are, in truth, 85 percent Catholic. But all religions, and even atheism which acknowledges no God, are guaranteed equality before the law. Justice for all must be our cry.

So let’s not attack our soldiers and constables for fighting, and dying, to defend our country’s integrity and sovereignty.

Just the other day, Director General Arturo C. Lomibao, Chief of our Philippine National Police, launched a nationwide drive to confiscate loose firearms code-named Oplan Bakal and a crackdown on private armed groups and unauthorized "armed bodyguards" called Oplan Paglalansag. Based on intelligence estimates, the police Chief said, "there are approximately 149,500 loose firearms in the hands of unauthorized persons." He noted that "most likely, a large fraction of these are in the arsenal of gun-for-hire syndicates, organized crime groups, private armed groups, the local dissident movement, the separatist movement, and domestic terrorist groups."

Obviously, General Lomibao’s target list includes both the Islamic separatists and the NPA, not to mention the terrorist Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah.

It’s interesting that peace negotiations are going on between our government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), sponsored by Kuala Lumpur. How can we make a deal with a Muslim "army" which boasts 12,000 armed cadres without insisting on disarming all of its fighters? We cannot have 12,000 armed men and women roaming around imposing their own "law of the gun" on civilians, whether Christian, Muslim or Lumad. This should be as clear as day. Yet professors like Benito Lim assert that our government’s generals are intent only on killing Muslims! Sanamagan.

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As for President Musharraf, he has his own problems as well as advantages.

To begin with, he’s a "general," too. (So why should he be viewed as a better peacemaker than our own generals?) He seized power in a coup d’etat in 1999 in which he overthrew a duly-elected Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, who – it must be said – was no shrinking violet himself and had tried to pass a Sharia Bill putting Pakistan under Sharia law. Although there were so-called "elections" the other year, it’s still alleged in many places that General Musharraf assumed power illegally, by force, and his legitimacy depends on military force. (He argues that he alone can restore democracy to Pakistan, but he insisted, contrary to previous promises, on keeping his post as Chief of the armed forces).

The United States, of course, likes Musharraf – because it needs him to help hold the line in Afghanistan, keep the Islamic radicals at bay within Pakistan itself, and help them just in case they decide to move against nearby Iran.

Before 9/11 and the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Washington DC frowned on Musharraf as a military dictator. After Musharraf – browbeating his own reluctant generals – announced Pakistan was casting its lot with the US and against the Taleban in next-door Afghanistan, he become one of the Americans’ and Europeans’ most valuable allies. Perhaps part of his motive was to beat Pakistan’s traditional foe and nuclear-rival, massive India, in a bid to curry favor with the US. Who knows?

In a pecuniary sense this move reaped huge dividends. In January 2002, Pakistan got US$3 billion in help, in the form of debt relief and the rescheduling of interest payments, as well as military assistance.

It has been asked why Pakistan gets far more benefits from our old pals, the Yanks, than we, Little Brown Brothers, do. It’s simple. The US needs Pakistan more than it does the Philippines – at this time. It’s not Pervez’s sunny smile, or negotiating ability alone, but Realpolitik.

In fact, nobody probably trusts us anymore. In Iraq, to save one OFW from being beheaded by Muslim militants, our government withdrew an already puny and ridiculously mission-confused 63-member contingent of soldiers and cops from the "coalition of the willing," leaving the Americans, Brits, and our other coalition allies in the lurch in the desert.

Professor Lim did have a valid point yesterday. He pointed out that Musharraf has cleverly gotten military and other kinds of aid from both China and the US. Of course, we must try to do the same thing, and not be bothered by what Washington DC will say. There’s only one bottom line, our national self-interest.

But again, no matter who’s giving, we must examine, to use the corny but sensible American expression, "every gift horse in the mouth."

Or, if you prefer the Greek epic poet Homer, or saw Brad Pitt in the movie "Troy," we must examine every Trojan Horse before we wheel it behind our walls.

When all is said and done, as a sardine swimming in a sea of sharks, we need all the friends and all the help we can get. But not at the cost of trusting any particular shark and thus ending up as shark feed.

We thank General Musharraf for his visit and his expressions of renewed friendship. (Would you believe, Pakistan and the Philippines, Thailand, etc., were once allied with France and the US in an organization named the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization or SEATO, aligned against the military threat to the region of Communist China? SEATO had been created by the Manila Treaty and used to have its headquarters in Bangkok).

Let us not get swell-headed, however, over President Musharraf having come here. We are probably, in the end, just a stopover for him – his having just come from talks in New Delhi, India – and now headed for Jakarta and a meeting with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, preparatory to joining the Asia-African talks in that capital.

President GMA herself will be heading for the same meeting in Jakarta this Friday but she’s reportedly not going onwards to Bandung, in West Java, for the 50th anniversary of the 1955 conference there which led to the creation of the "Non-Aligned Movement’ as an advocate for third world interests. Foreign Secretary Bert Romulo will be representing us at that "nostalgic" conference.

If you’ll recall, it was at that historic Bandung Conference that Indonesia’s late President Sukarno, India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, China’s Premier Zhou Enlai, our own General and Foreign Affairs Secretary Carlos P. Romulo, etc., met to try to out-perorate each other and organize the Non-Aligned nations. In the years that followed, however, most of the nations joining the group were, far from being non-aligned," mostly aligned against the US and the West.

There is one threat on the other hand to this happy home-coming event – and it’s not political. Tangkuban Perahu, a smoking 2,075-meter high (6,930-foot tall) mountain near the city of Bandung has been grumbling and sending out ominous smoke signals, discomfiting the Indonesian organizers of the meeting. Indonesia, like us, belongs to the "ring of fire" and has more than 130 active volcanos – while we have 22.

Among the 50 heads of state intending to head there are China’s President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan. We hope that, in the aftermath of the violent anti-Japanese riots erupting in most of China’s biggest cities, the two will finally meet to resolve – or at least try to paper over – their differences in less than volcanic fashion.

Anyway, President Hu Jintao is scheduled to come to Manila next Monday. We can hear from his own lips what transpired if that face-to-face "confrontation" ever takes place.