Nobel Prize winner Yunnus learned his ‘banking’ and love for the poor at his mother’s knee

In the newspapers the other day, there was an alarming report that civilian volunteers will be armed by the government in a move to cope with "terrorist threats, particularly in troubled areas like Mindanao. The stories quoted Interior Secretary Ronnie Puno as announcing the plan in Cotabato City last Thursday.

Is it true that La Presidenta has signed an Executive Order (No. 465) aimed at mobilizing civilian volunteer organizations or so-called CVOs as police auxiliary units to counter terrorism?

Let me say it loud and clear: This is a dangerous decision and will boomerang in the face of government.

There was a proposal a few months ago to "arm" journalists in order to enable media persons being targeted for murder to shoot back – or shoot first. There are all sorts of media people, including those part-timing as journalists, or posing as journalists. In short, if the government gives everybody a gun, our society will end up more of a shooting gallery than it already is. The pro-Gun lobby in the United States constantly harps on the Constitutional "citizen’s right to bear arms" – a clause inspired by the Minute Men, who were tradesmen, farmers, burghers and villagers in general who were able to snatch up their rifles to resist the British at Concord and Lexington and fight the American Revolution.

In our country in which "rebels" (and robbers) sprout like mushrooms, too many guns available will dramatically increase the homicide and murder rate. Just consider the good old USA, one of the most murderous countries in the world where violent crime at home probably kills more Americans monthly than are slain in Iraq during the same period.

Our gun-lobbyists have imported the slogan from their brethren in the United States – to wit: "Guns don’t kill, people do." This is sophistry of the first water.

Take it from yours truly who grew up with guns, military weapons, and assorted instruments of individual destruction since I come from Ilocos Sur.

When we were Special Agents of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), a category since abolished, we trained for weeks in fast draw, right hand, left hand, swift reload while running, and every position from standing to kneeling to prone. On the firing range we were trained to kill. Then we spent many more weeks learning when not to draw. This was more difficult than the first. Alas, the tendency of anyone who carries a weapon is to use it – in personal arguments or moments of irritation. The heck with dealing with terrorists. An argument over parking space, road rage, or a neighbor’s quarrel – or some drunken encounter – will trigger gun-use.

Mind you, we were Special Agents under the legendary, late NBI Director Jose Lukban, and our gun instructor was one of NBI’s best, Agent Edgar Bond (whom everybody kidded as the kid brother of James Bond). The bottom line was: Don’t draw. But if you draw, don’t hesitate to shoot to kill – otherwise the other guy will kill you.

This happened years ago to a friend, a Balikbayan from Germany who brought his German wife home to visit his family. He had a licensed gun and was a fairly competent shooter, but when a vendor in Batangas "insulted" his wife, he drew his gun. His mistake is that he had drawn it only to intimidate the obnoxious fellow – when he didn’t fire, the other man knifed him to death with a veinti-nueve, the 29-inch fan knife Batangueños sometimes tuck in their pockets.

No, Madam President and Secretary Puno. The idea must be to confiscate all loose firearms, not farm out more firearms to the population. A pipsqueak usually meek becomes a bully when he feels himself "empowered" by a gun. The more guns there are, the more people will die – and I don’t mean terrorists. The terrorist shoots from behind, or plants a bomb in a package, or – but not often in the Philippines – becomes a suicide-bomber.

Firearms must be borne in public only by legitimate soldiers and policemen – not so-called "auxiliaries" or militias – and certainly not by rebel cadres.

I simply don’t understand "peace talks" with insurgents like the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) which do not prioritize the need for the rebels to surrender their weapons. Indeed, the MILF are even "dictating" the terms of the GMA government-sought "peace agreement," with Malaysia giving them a forum for their demands like the "recognition" of an ancestral land right. Sanamagan. We and our Government look like the "losers" – instead of the rulers in our sovereign, secular society in which there is no distinction as to color and creed.

I submit that as long as there is a rebel "army" of 10,000 or 12,000 MILF or a ideologically-disguised blackmail and extortion gang like the "Communist" New People’s Army (which imposes revolutionary taxes even on poor peasants), we are not a strong, secure and sovereign Republic. If we add thousands of government-armed civilian "volunteers," CVOs, and militiamen of various stripes we become a nation plagued by gun-toting bands whose racket is imposing personal or collective "peace and order."

Mop up all those loose weapons. Arm our policemen. Improve the weaponry of our military. Then we’ll have law and order. To refute the bandied slogan, guns do kill people when in the hands of too many in the neighborhood and in the Barangay.

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Everybody’s talking about North Korea’s nukes, and the sanctions slapped on Pyongyang by the United Nations Security Council (although China and Russia, while signing the UN Resolution will veto any military action), and the tough six-months’ sanctions imposed unilaterally by an angry Japan, etc. Russia’s Foreign Minister has just emerged from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) which is what Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s empire preens itself to inform Seoul that the North Koreans are ready to go back to six-country negotiations.

This is good news for jittery Seoul, but surely they cross their fingers about what happens next. The North Korean "emperor" who also styles himself "Marshal Kim Jong-il" may be nutty as a fruitcake, but he’s got the army and the armaments he needs to turn the ROK (South Korea) into an infierno.

Seventy percent of his formidable military force is positioned just 90 miles from Seoul. He’s got tunnels into the South, ready for his hardware to get rolling towards Seoul which lies just 35 miles south of the DMZ at Panmunjon. Thousands of Sa-5 (range 250 km), FROG-5/7 free rockets (range 50 to 70 km), perhaps 600 Scud missiles capable of hitting any place in South Korea await his command to fire. His 2,000 tanks are geared up. Bluff? Perhaps he’s only kulang sa pansin but when a guy’s a probable megalomaniac, think twice before calling his bluff. War may be a bit like poker, but it doesn’t take any smarts to play it and the results could be terminal.

One of the best insights into Kim’s character is provided by foreign correspondent Jasper Becker whom I’ve quoted before. In his brilliant book, "ROGUE REGIME: Kim Jong Il, And the Looming Threat of North Korea", published by the Oxford University Press in 2005, long before the current crisis, he provided a peephole into Leader Kim’s kirky tastes and culinary excesses.

For instance, his personal train which had 21 carriages, was armored and pulled by two locomotives that swept the track for mines, had coaches for his drinks, cellar, cooks and mistresses, etc. (He even launched in the early 1980s a "project to guarantee the longevity of the Great Leader – his late father Kim Il-sung – and the Dear Leader (himself)." This entailed the Workers’ Party recruiting and training around 2,000 girls for "pleasure groups." Giving all for Dear Leader, Party, and Motherland, is apparently the women’s lot.

Kim took his Japanese-made train almost everywhere even to Moscow (not as I erroneously said in an earlier column to Berlin). According to Becker, as his train traversed Siberia, he had plenty of time to come up with new whims. His retinue of servants and cooks were skilled enough to provide him with Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine at any time.

A sushi chef who first worked for Kim in 1982, the author related, and wrote his own book in 2003 ("Kim Jong Il’s Cook – I Saw His Naked Body") described the extensive efforts which went into pampering Mr. Kim’s tummy. Of course I don’t see how Kim’s naked body" fit into the menu, but the book revealed how the chef, who used the pseudonym "Kenji Fujimoto" was sent to Iran and Uzbekistan to buy caviar, to China to get melons and grapes, to Thailand and Malaysia for durian and papaya, the Czech Republic for Pilsner beer, and Denmark for bacon. There were regular forays to Japan to procure tuna, sea urchin and other fresh fish for sushi, which he loved. Kim ate "eel sushi" (Onagi?) three times a week, and "Toro" sushi by the pound. Fujimoto said he was also fond of Japanese noodles, matsutake mushrooms, and other Japanese stuff. And to think that the Dear Leader gorged himself at the table, while millions of North Koreans, his people, starved.

No wonder an irate Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe included "luxury goods" in the sanctions his government just imposed. But beware. After a week of being deprived of his imported Japanese goodies, Marshal Kim might run amuck. Remember, his Taepo Dong missiles, I and Il, can easily reach Tokyo.

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Our friend Carlson Chan, a son of busisnessman and over-modest taipan Carlos Chan, who helps – along with his siblings – run dad’s OISHI string of plants and factories in China (12 of them!) must have the gift of Prophecy. Carlson and his brother Larry, along with Jameson Wang, took this writer to dinner two weeks ago in Dynasty in Shanghai. The following evening, meeting again in Xintiandi, Carlson had a gift for me. He gave me a book by Muhammad Yunnus, entitled "BANKER TO THE POOR." Its subtitle was "Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty."

Carlson said, "Uncle Max no book I’ve recently read touched me so deeply. He remarked that Yunnus, its author, "deserves a Nobel Prize!" I took the 273-page volume home and read it, becoming just as impressed with Yunnus as Carlson was when he first picked it up in Shanghai.

Surprise! Last Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee – after screening 191 possible laureates – awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Yunnus and to the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh which he had founded in 1983.

Yunnus deserves a full column, but let me just say for starters that he was born in Chittagong, the biggest port of Bangladesh (as he described it "a commercial city of 3 million persons"), and grew up in Boxirhat Road – Number 23. His father was a hardworking, successful jeweler and goldsmith whom he admired, but it was his mother who instilled in him the qualities which were to define his life. He described mother, Sofia Khanan, as a "strong and decisive woman... she was the disciplinarian in the family… she was probably the strongest influence on me. Full of compassion and kindness, she always put money away for any poor relatives who visited us from distant villages. It was she, by her compassion and kindness, who helped me discover my interest in economics and social reform."

Anyway, read the book. It will inspire you and set your in-the-box thinking free. Yunnus found that to help the poor, you had to help them, by "the spark" of personal initiative and enterprise, they could lift themselves out of poverty forever. His idea of how to do it was born on a day in 1976 when he loaned $27 from his own pocket to 42 stool-makers living in a tiny village. These were women who only needed enough credit to buy the raw materials for their trade. "Yunnus’s small loan helped them break the cycle of poverty for good," the blurb for the book said – and it’s true.

What’s interesting is that in a huge Muslim nation of 120 million, he placed his confidence in women most of all. They always repaid their loans. Borrowers of Grameen Bank now own 93 percent of the total equity of the bank, with only the remaining 7 percent owned by the Bangladeshi government. Yunnus kept next to nothing for himself.

The total number of borrowers is 2.6 million, by his account, "95 percent of whom are women." The bank has 1,181 branches, works in 42,127 villages, and has a staff of 11,777. It has loaned out 174.78 billion takas ($3.9 billion). Out of this $3.6 billion has been repaid, with the recovery rate standing at 98 percent. Yunnus proved that the poor can be the most trustworthy of all – and can help themselves, by dint of effort and faith, out of their own poverty.