National disgrace

Next to Philippine National Police officials, who will have to prove that the PNP can handle hostage situations better than it did at the Quirino Grandstand, the official who is also nursing a splitting headache has to be new tourism chief Alberto Lim.

Before that disgrace to the PNP named Rolando del Rosario Mendoza went on a shooting rampage, people following the news could still afford to make jokes about yet another only-in-the-Philippines incident.

People tried to look on the bright side, noting that the bus carrying tourists from Hong Kong was only hijacked and did not plunge into a ravine. 

Still on the bright side, people noted that the children and some of the other hostages who were freed earlier in the day made it to their return flight, which managed to take off in the evening, as scheduled, from the NAIA in the absence of visibility-obscuring smog.

But after that carnage, all the sense of humor vanished, although it resurfaced later in the night, mainly to pillory the police Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT).

As far as tourism is concerned, breaking into a smile will be painful for some time for Philippine tourism officials. In Hong Kong, the image of the Philippines looks as bloodied as Mendoza as he lay dead over the shattered glass of the bus door, his brain literally spilling into the pavement.

Earlier in the day, Bertie Lim put on a brave face, expressing optimism that the hostage incident would soon be forgotten. But after the shooting rampage, he admitted that the incident would affect the country’s aim of increasing annual tourist arrivals to about 3.3 million.

That figure is modest compared to the large numbers of visitors attracted by our Southeast Asian neighbors Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Even Cambodia is seeing more visitors, thanks to Siem Reap.

In Hong Kong, government officials and travel industry executives initially expressed grave concern and noted that their citizens had never encountered anything like a dismissed cop hijacking a bus full of tourists. Yesterday, as their flags flew at half-mast for their dead, residents stormed the Philippine consulate in Hong Kong and said they were “furious” over the “unprofessional” handling of the hostage situation by the Philippine government.

According to reports the other night, about 250,000 Hong Kong residents visit the Philippines every year. We can kiss that figure goodbye at least in the next six months. The Hong Kong government has issued a “top-level black travel alert” for our country, which includes advising its people who are now here on vacation to leave the Philippines ASAP.

We can recover from this latest national disgrace. The crucial question for our tourism industry is how quickly recovery is possible.

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The massacre of the Hong Kong tourists, which played out live like a badly directed movie on TV, came close on the heels of the deaths of 21 Iranians, whose tour bus flew off a mountain road and plunged into a ravine in Cebu last June 13.

Our commercial planes can’t take off when visibility is bad, our ships sink in the slightest weather disturbance, and our buses keep losing their brakes and falling off cliffs. Only last week, 41 people on their way down from Baguio City died when their bus also plummeted into a ravine in Benguet.

Tourists must guard against snatchers and muggers, and worse, those tasked to keep the public safe could turn out to be torturers and insane murderers.

It didn’t help our tattered national image that the perpetrator of the carnage at the Quirino Grandstand was a man dismissed from the police service for making a young hotel chef swallow shabu to extort P20,000. Rolando Mendoza’s relatives can trot out all his medals as a police officer, but there are many other good cops who turned rotten late in their career, just as many politicians start out honest and end up as world-class crooks.

After murdering at least eight people because he had lost his job, Mendoza managed to make his beleaguered Manila police colleague, accused torturer Joselito Binayug, look good.

How do you reassure the world that in this country, not all cops are like Mendoza? And that even if there’s more where he came from, the government is capable of keeping them on a leash to prevent mayhem?

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The hostage incident is on top of the many other problems hobbling our tourism industry.

As the hostage incident was unfolding, an expat was telling me how she gave up trying to visit Sagada upon learning that there were no ready tour packages available, and that she had to pay a steep price if she wanted a special tour arranged for her. Sagada is supposed to be one of our top tourist destinations, but maybe the residents prefer to keep out visitors.

Tourism industry players have their own complaints. Airline executives say our hotels are too expensive compared to regional rates; hotel operators complain about inadequate tourism infrastructure.

Those engaged in outbound travel have their own beef. Ma. Paz Alberto, president of the Philippine Travel Agencies Association, which handles outbound ticket sales, said they were “outraged” over being bypassed by airlines in selling tickets at rates that PTAA members could not match.

“This is a total affront to the agency-airline relationship which we have nurtured for decades. They cannot just do away with their partners who have stuck with them through thick and thin,” Alberto said in a press statement.

Now comes the hostage incident right in Manila. Bali has not yet fully recovered from deadly bomb attacks from 2002 to 2005. How long will it take for us to recover from the murderous rampage of one ex-cop?

It will depend on how quickly the government can show its resolve to prevent a repeat of Mendoza’s caper.

We will just have to wait for another hostage situation to give the PNP an opportunity to show that it can do better than the other day’s performance.

The government must play up efforts to improve training and provide better equipment for cops, especially the SWAT.

When misfits like Mendoza are purged from the PNP, they must be divested of their police badge and must never be allowed to own any type of gun.

Bert Lim has said he wants to focus on tourism infrastructure development, which is correct. Just consider what the international airport in Siem Reap has done for tourism in Cambodia.

But now Lim has a more urgent task: convincing the world that the Philippines is a safe destination. It’s an unenviable job.