After Bali, Boracay should be on high alert

In three years, Bali has been bombed twice – in 2002, a Bali nightclub was bombed; last Saturday, it was three restaurants. It is obvious that the main target of the terrorists are the tourists and not the local people. In that way, they get maximum publicity abroad. Some people say that the next target will be the Philippines. We believe that if it will follow the Indonesian pattern, the next target could be Boracay. The police should put Boracay on maximum alert.

As for the rest of the country, the most disturbing news is the revelation that some groups who want the President out of Malacañang by October 15, have plans to resort to kidnapping or assassination after that deadline. Actually, the President is not the only high official who has been receiving death threats. House Speaker Jose de Venecia has made public the fact that last year, he had been the target of seven assassination plots by certain groups who wanted to prevent the proclamation of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as the winner of the 2004 elections. The good thing is that all the would-be assassins have been arrested by the National Bureau of Investigation. We wonder if and when all of them would be formally charged in court.

We sincerely believe that at this point in time, the main problem the nation is facing is terrorism. What makes it a very complicated problem is that we are not dealing with just local terrorists, we are dealing with world terrorists, many of them from the Muslim world and the Philippines is the only Christian nation in this part of the world. So far, we have been lucky. In Metro Manila, the only attack we remember was the Valentine bombing and relatively speaking, it was a very minor incident. All these, of course, is because of the fact that our National Police Force and our Armed Forces have been on high alert against terrorists. We hope that what happened in Bali will not be duplicated here. Bali is one of the most peaceful places in the whole world.

One thing our local officials can do is discourage public demonstrations at this time. Sad to say, there is a Metro Manila Mayor that has been behind most of the demonstrations asking the President to step down. The danger there is that peaceful demonstrations can be infiltrated by terrorists. There are also activists who insist on having rallies without seeking the necessary permit from the municipality. Last Tuesday, members of a civil liberties and human rights group led by Rep. Satur Ocampo had to be restrained from marching to Malacañang.

We respect people’s right to rally. But they must comply with the law. We believe permits are necessary if only to tell the rallyists where they can hold their demonstrations. Certainly, not on major thoroughfares where they will stop the flow of traffic. We also hope that demonstrators make sure to take the necessary steps to ensure that they will not be infiltrated by terrorists. That will be a lose-lose proposition. Both the administration and the rallyists stand to lose. We are still not clear on what calibrated pre-emptive response means but we assume that it re-enforces maximum tolerance.