We are what we are

Blame the hostage taker!

The deadly hostage incident that took place last Monday evening was wholly and totally the fault of the hostage taker. No one can justify that what he did was valid or acceptable. He caused the death of 9 people, he fired upon his former colleagues and he used the element of surprise and experience to create a tactical advantage. It was he who shot the hostages, not the police.

Let us not make presumptions of knowing better because none of us do. What we can do now is to tell the world that this happened because “We are what we are”.

We are a real country in a third world reality. We have brave law enforcers who don’t have all the technology and equipment to deal with “made for TV police drama”. We have policemen who disregard personal safety and real bodily harm in order to save a busload of foreigners and actually got shot at with automatic rifle fire.

We have law enforcers who are culturally correct and so they adopt a policy of peaceful resolution and negotiation but who also abide by internationally accepted practices of assaulting a hostage taker when lives have already been jeopardized.

Because it was not the policy, the SWAT team did not take down the rogue cop with sniper fire earlier in the day. Those who do not live with the consequences of pulling the trigger should similarly stop from shooting their mouths off. We live in a real world not reality TV.

We are a nation that has not invested on necessary equipment and training. Our police don’t have enough guns or bullets or bullet proof vests, nor do they have sophisticated battering rams, assault vehicles with window grapplers, they don’t have surveillance or flex-tube cameras that could have helped monitor the movement of the rogue cop and made the difference in the final assault.

We are a nation with an abundance of SWAT teams with very little special weapons and not enough logistical tactical advantage. Rather than having one or two well-supported and trained units for Metro Manila, each and every city seems to have one SWAT team that does not fully meet international standards in terms of logistics.

We are a democratic society that gives great power to a “Free Press” that has been allowed to govern itself. We are a people still immature about the danger and the damage that a “live coverage” of Monday’s carnage can directly cause to a hostage situation.

We are a people that have quickly forgotten a previous hostage situation where an undercover Makati policewoman was exposed and subsequently killed by a hostage taker, because a radio reporter talked about the tactic live on national radio.

We are millions of TV viewers who “enjoy” the vicarious experience of watching a hostage “drama” unfold, as we collectively annotate or give our armchair opinion. We are viewers who forget about the family members of those hostages who were forced to watch and listen to the gunfire and the carnage.

We are a nation that does not exercise internationally accepted policies of restraint or self-censorship, nor do we refrain from doing “live broadcasts” during potentially violent situations such as hostage takings. Unlike the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN, our local media outlets believe in showing even the worst in us.

So now we are a country called “The Slaughterhouse”, a nation to be avoided by tourists and a place where even Korean missionaries and relatives of Philippine government officials are shot at, kidnapped, robbed or simply killed in cold blood.

We are a nation dealing with an imperfect justice system where the law is not in order therefore we cannot claim to have law and order. Time and again, the judicial system has been twisted or subverted to the frustration of law enforcers as well as litigants or defendants.

We are a people who have submitted our will and our resources to an ever so slow judicial system under a leadership that has yet to recognize that some of them have equally bloody hands for delaying justice by omission or collusion.

We are a nation now confronted by the question if one agency namely the Office of the Ombudsman should finally be terminated and put to sleep because of their connection to two incidents that have caused defendants to join a rebellion or start a violent personal war.

We are a nation of gun owners that see nothing wrong in thousands of deadly assault rifles lying around in peoples’ houses in Metro Manila. We pay very little attention to injustice in the same way we have little concern for disgruntled or homicidal people having automatic rifles. So we are a nation that regularly deals with massacres, road rage and hostage situation. Sadly we are also a nation that lives in denial and the lie that all these are “isolated cases”.

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It may be an isolated case as Tourism Secretary Bertie Lim put it, but last Monday’s case is one that will effectively isolate the Philippines away from the stream of tourists in the region.

Secretary Lim was quick to reassure the public that efforts will be made to try to repair our tattered image and to promote the country through promotional efforts and packages.

Having been a resort developer and operator of a resort during the decade of kidnappings, we quickly learned that it was money well spent and a wiser move to focus on local tourists. Rather than spend millions of pesos or dollars sending promotion teams and paying for “adverts”, the DOT will have to work smart and let things heal first and concentrate on what’s here already.