Has our military become ‘Murder, Inc.’ or is Amnesty International just jumping at shadows?

Amnesty International, the human rights group based in London, has attacked the GMA Administration for the growing number of political killings which, it says, could lead to spiralling violence, as the government wages an all-out war against Communist rebels.

The well-known group pointed out that there were 51 "political killings" in the first six months of this year, as compared with 66 for all of 2005. Amnesty alleged that the methodology of the murders, the "leftist" profile of the victims and the "climate of impunity" that has shielded the perpetrators, apparently constitute a politically motivated pattern of killings. Politically-motivated, we all can believe. But is this a state-run murderous agenda, or were the victims set up for assassination by local tyrants or warlords? "Impunity" is a valid description, yet I’m not convinced of a vast conspiracy existing, when the murders might stem from provincial or local vendettas.

The deliberate kidnapping and murder of the desaparecidos, who are still mourned by the mothers and grandmothers of Chile, whose families were marked for death when Chile languished under the bootheel of the rightwing military regime of Augusto Pinochet is a tragedy known around the world. It’s futile to argue that in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, much the same thing went on in that Leftist island paradise. The charismatic Che Guevara and Raul Castro were indeed the enforcers. Murder is murder.

In Argentina, so renowned for its Tango and the Broadway echo of the glamor and chutzpah of Evita Peron (who bitterly hated the rich who had snubbed her, and viciously persecuted them), the years of military suppression known euphemistically as El Proceso were no less murderous. Men and women were plucked out of their homes by the berdugos of the evil generals, the women tortured and ravished, the men cruelly dealt with then flung from high-flying helicopters – their babies and children, in the most cynical form of punishment of all, "adopted" into the families of the very torturers of their murdered parents.

I think Amnesty International was right to blow the whistle anew on the suspicious assassinations now ongoing in the Philippines. But it also has to be reminded that matters could be much worse.

We can and must refer to the Marcos dictatorship which saw our nation in chains from September 1972 to February 1986. In that dark period, the military went on a binge of killings. People were abducted, then found hours, or days later, their hands bound with twine – dead by the banks of creeks and rivers, or in wooded terrain. In an ironic twist of words, this homicidal process was termed "salvage." In sum, sad to say, Amnesty International ain’t seen nothing yet.

Our Presidenta La Gloria must really crack down, as she vowed in Cebu City the other day, on such murders – whether they be politically motivated, or are just plain killings. Murder with impunity stalks our land, and our government and lawmen had better do something about it. Yet, this is an admonition the media, as well as political leaders, have made many times before.

Never mind the matter of ideology. As long as our citizens, of whatever persuasion (even those whose only thought is of daily survival) don’t feel safe, we will be a failure as a nation.

Yet, how can GMA strike fear into the hearts of cold-blooded murderers, kidnappers, and other perpetrators of heinous crimes? She, in connivance with Congress, has already abolished the Death Penalty. Only the victims will now die in our archipelago. Their killers, at worst, can expect to live on, albeit in prison, at the expense of the Filipino taxpayer.

* * *

Everybody’s inviting me to take a trip these days, but my creaky old bones – unlike the old days when I used to jump in and out of airplanes twice a week – are beginning to limit my appetite for travel. A week ago, my friend Ambassador Muhammad Nasem Khan of Pakistan, extended to me a government invitation to visit his country on an extensive trip of a week to 10 days, following a gruelling but fascinating itinerary which would take me to my old haunts there – Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad – and, naturally, my favorite, Peshawar, which borders on the Pukthun "Tribal Territory" (where Osama bin Laden sometimes hides among friendly Afridi and other Pukthun tribesmen) – and where Rudyard Kipling’s fabled Khyber Pass – called Landi Khotal, really – still exists, this time no longer an oriental bazaar, but rather a no man’s land where opium is refined into heroin in cave laboratories.

Indeed, Kabul the Afghan capital is just three hours away by road.

Many a time in Peshawar (we correspondents stayed in the Green Hotel) I used to wander to the Alley of the Story-Tellers, where a coin or two would purchase a tale straight out of the Arabian Nights from the old men who squatted in the sun, swatting away flies, while awaiting customers.

Pakistan, sadly, has recently earned the reputation of being a central station and training ground for terrorists – even more so when the 24 arrested in London and the Thames Valley, accused by Scotland Yard and M-15 of being part of a plot to explode 10 commercial jets enroute to America over the Atlantic, apparently were British citizens of Pakistani origin, although born and raised in Britain. A number of them had even been found to have recently travelled to Pakistan and probably been in touch with Kashmir-guerrilla groups.

What a coincidence.

The British police and intelligence pointed out, in addition, that when suicide bombers exploded their haversack bombs in Central London on July 7, 2005 (three of the bombers in London Underground trains and the fourth on a bus he was riding in Tavistock Square), the terrorists killed 52 commuters and injured about 700.

Three of the four were British born and raised, but of Pakistani immigrant parentage. The fourth suicide-bomber had been a Jamaican by birth, a naturalized British citizen who had converted to Islam. By golly, the Jamaican and one Pakistani-Brit were only teenagers; the third was 22 years old. The leader of the group was an "ancient" 30 years of age. What had possessed these young "Brits" to commit such an atrocity?

The government in Islamabad – while striving to remind everyone that Pakistan cooperated with the United Kingdom, and the United States in the several-months-long intelligence operation which had unearthed the London-based terrorist conspiracy to plant liquid bombs on aircraft crossing the Atlantic – is trying to wrestle internally with that conundrum. As Ambassador Khan noted, his government arrested about 700 terrorists and al-Qaeda operatives over the past five years. Yet, despite those arrests, I parried, Pakistans keep on producing extremists.

As a matter of fact, ranking members of Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai’s government insist that militants operating in their country are receiving training in Pakistan. Experts believe that elements of the Pakistani intelligence service keep in close and friendly contact with the militant groups.

Since September 11, 2001, in exchange for his cooperation and support, American President George W. Bush has given aid and military hardware to the once-demonized Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who came to power by military coup. Recently, the US government approved the sale of F-16 (Fighting Falcon) jets – the same utilized by Israel’s IDF – in exchange for Musharraf’s approval of US military operations in Afghanistan and assistance in arresting al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan’s Northwest and the Tribal Territories.

General Musharraf, of course, has himself survived two assassination attempts since 2003, including a harrowing ambush of his convoy not far from his own home and military headquarters. In both instances, reliable sources reveal elements of his own military collaborated with radical Islamic groups to eliminate their own President.

In sum, what will the terrorist-haunted world do with Pakistan – both an ally and a threat simultaneously? Most importantly of all, what can Pakistan do about itself? Already, next-door India’s 140 million Muslims (in a population of 1 billion) feel targeted by suspicion – and are being blamed, with "Pakistani-supervision" for the July 11 train bombings in Mumbai (Bombay) which killed more than 200 people, many of them in the first-class executive coaches. Being blamed for that atrocity is the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-taiba.

When the late Mohammed Ali Jinnah, obstinately and obsessively hating Jawaharlal Nehru, created Pakistan for the Muslims, forcing the hastily-departing British Raj to tear a chunk out of vast colonial India in 1947 and gift it to him and his dream of a Muslim "Land of the Pure," what occurred was not just Freedom at Midnight, but the nightmare of partition and communal violence which claimed thousands of Muslim and Hindu lives. The great Mahatma Gandhi was appalled at the partition. He mourned that instead of glorious freedom – for which he had sacrificed and labored – "I see only rivers of blood!"

For Gandhi’s insistence that Hindus and Muslims could live – and should live – peacefully with each other, a Hindu fanatic shot him dead with a bullet between the eyes. His own blood became part of the river which he had sadly predicted.

In India, Muslims still make up 15 percent of the population, but claim discrimination on the part of the dominant Hindu society. Oh well. Most of the action stars of Bollywood happen to be Muslims – so, I can remark – although flippantly – that the discrimination is not total.

"It feels like the whole world is against Muslims," groused a young man in Mumbai, as quoted in yesterday’s The Wall Street Journal.

On the other hand, it feels like the Muslims are against the whole world. That’s, unfortunately, the other side of the coin.

Once upon a time, they even lived in harmony with Christians and Jews. Nowadays, in Osama-lingo, the Crusaders (Christians) and the Zionists (Jews) are the greatest enemies of Islam, whose battlecry is Allah Akbar and whose creed is that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.

Being one of the infidels, I can’t help but feel uneasy about the situation – where Muslims blow up airplanes, crash planes into Twin Towers, suicide-bomb cafes and restaurants – and bomb (but not suicidally) buses and LRT trains, in Metro Manila, or in Mindanao, and sink SuperFerry boats right in Manila Bay.

Again, what a coincidence.

* * *

My second invitation to travel came late yesterday afternoon. An old friend, Lebanese businessman Joe Bicharra – who’s related by the way to our Ambassador to Beirut, Al Francis Bicharra – rang me up to tell me: "Quick – Max. Please inform the President to order a stop to the evacuation of OFWs from Lebanon. We want them to stay – and we need MORE Filipinos immediately!"

I asked him to explain this strange attitude. Bicharra, who has strong government connections back home, replied: "Now that there is a ceasefire, we are going to rebuild Beirut and Lebanon! We need Filipino construction workers, plumbers, electricians, engineers, the whole works. I’d say we’ll be needing not just the present 30,000 but 200,000 OFWs!"

You’ve got to give the Lebanese an "A" for optimism. No sooner had a fragile ceasefire taken effect last Monday, than thousands of South Lebanese who had fled to safety, or been evacuated from their endangered villages in the embattled south, jumped into every vehicle they owned or could commandeer to rush back to their abandoned (and perhaps bombed out) homes to pick up the threads of their savagely-interrupted lives.

But will the ceasefire "hold"? Already, the Hezbollah and the Israel Defense Forces (slowly pulling out of South Lebanon, but still entrenched at the border in full force, with tanks and 30,000 called-up reservists waiting at the frontier) have begun snarling at each other. It would take only a spark to provoke a resumption of the fighting.

Yet, my friend Joe Bicharra expresses the Lebanese mood. Their country – bridges destroyed, highways cratered, infrastructure smashed – must be rebuilt immediately. What chutzpah. Oops, that’s a Yiddish term.

Expansively, Bicharra added: "Max, the Lebanese government will soon be sending you an invitation to visit Lebanon. But give us time to fix our airport."

The invitation, truly, to use the trite but inescapable expression, warmed the cockles of my heart. However, I won’t hold my breath. That international airport was pulverized by the Israeli Air Force. It’s in worse shape than Heathrow.

Making those runways usable again will take weeks, if not months. Anyway, good luck and God bless the Lebanese. I admire their spirit, which is not in ruins like their war-wrecked land.