Feat

By the latest report, about 500 Filipinos have been extracted from the civil war in Sudan. This is an impressive feat.

The extraction of Filipino nationals is spearheaded by the Philippine embassy in Cairo. DMW Secretary Toots Ople flew to Cairo days ago to personally supervise the rescue effort. Our brave diplomats in the Egyptian capital have moved closer to the border with Sudan to more effectively carry out the rescue mission. Two of them figured in a vehicular accident in their rush to get closer to the border.

The distances here are astounding. Evacuating Filipinos need to travel 1,000 kilometers overland to get to the Egyptian border. Cairo has been cooperative with the effort of several countries to extract their nationals from the chaos in Sudan.

We do not have journalists on the scene in the war-torn country. Because of this, we do not get detailed and updated reports about what is happening on the ground. Reports about our extraction efforts are sketchy at best.

We are assured, however, that our diplomats are doing their best, given the odds, to accomplish the extraction mission. This should reassure the millions of Filipino migrant workers that their government will not abandon them in the direst circumstances. They have a homeland that cares for them.

Despite scattered clashes across the country, it appears the ceasefire arranged between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) appears to be holding. This is the best window we have to rescue our nationals trapped in the conflict.

No one sees the conflict in Sudan subsiding anytime soon. The generals leading the rival militaries in Sudan are out to eliminate each other. In their struggle, they devastate whatever is left of Sudan’s state. It will be a challenge to rebuild the nation from here.

Both armed factions involved in this struggle have blood on their hands. They were both engaged in the bloody suppression in the Darfur region. The RSF was precisely organized as part of the suppression campaign of the Arab Sudanese majority against the African Darfuri minority. It was formed out of the Janjaweed militia that terrorized Darfur.

The suppression campaign was conducted with unbridled cruelty, animated in part by ethnic cleansing and genocide. To this day, the terrified people of Darfur prefer to live in camps for fear of being attacked.

Ordinary Sudanese have nothing at stake in this power struggle between the generals. But they have lost all means to be heard in the country’s politics after three decades of dictatorship and the past three years of military rule.

As the power struggle drags on without clear resolution, the Sudanese people are in peril of being forgotten by the rest of the world. After foreign nationals are evacuated, the ordinary Sudanese will be left stranded in a hell hole.

This will be the final tragedy of this conflict.

Precarious

We are teetering on the brink of serious shortages of two items basic to our subsistence: water and power.

The other day, a major power generating plant conked out. That depletes available power reserves. Brownouts appear likely.

We know from the past few years that our power plants, especially the aging ones, tend to conk out during the hottest months when power demand is highest. If another power plant conks out over the next few days, power rationing by way of rotating brownouts will be certain.

Meanwhile, we are told the water level in our major dams are dropping quickly. Last week’s short-lived rains brought about by a stray tropical depression did nothing in replenishing our water stocks.

President Marcos ordered the creation of a Water Resources Management Office under the DENR. That office will be an important one, although it cannot produce the miracles we need to improve our water reserves. We did very little the past years in terms of building water impounding infra to support our water supply.

Meanwhile, the Kaliwa River project that will divert fresh water flowing out to the Pacific Ocean will need a few more years to complete. This project has been opposed by closed-minded environmentalists for years. The financial package needed to undertake this vital infra project was put together only recently.

The month of May will be particularly difficult. In this El Niño year, many parts of the country could experience drought. That will adversely affect our farm output and cause shortages.

We are expecting the inflation rate to slow down significantly. Shortages of agricultural goods, however, could force up the inflation rate once more. Rice, grown on submerged paddies, appears most vulnerable.

The severity of the droughts and the stability of our energy system will determine how much misery we will have to endure in the hottest and driest month of the year. The outage of a major generating plant and the rapid depletion of water in our dams are not encouraging signs.

The precariousness of both our energy and water supplies underscores the need to rapidly improve our infrastructure backbone. For too long, government dragged its feet in addressing our infrastructure deficiencies. It took too long to put together the financing required to modernize.

Now we have to move double time to improve both our energy and water infra. If we fail in that, our precariousness will be magnified. Life for all Filipinos will become even more miserable during the hot months.

We are already paying the price for many years of failure to invest in long-term strategic projects.