THE sobering fact is that this early, the Duterte administration is already locked in a cycle of peace talks and cease-fire agreements with the leftists and various separatist groups without a clearly defined policy on how to protect the state and its four elements: people, territory, sovereignty and government.
This intractable cycle, now compounded by the upsurge of terrorism and the threat of mass destruction worldwide, has been moving in this country without a concrete solution since the revolutionary ferment in the 1960s, “taking off from the launching in 1959 of Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in Cuba against the profligate Batista regime. Thanks to Che Guevera’s marketing, the Cuban uprising captivated the world, and inspired a string of less successful revolutions in Latin America, Africa and Asia, including the Philippines.
A very rare book, Lost in Time, published in 1999 by the Truth and Justice Foundation, Inc., authored by Dr. Galileo C. Kintanar and Pacifico Militante and edited by J. Augustus Y. De La Paz, has extensively recorded these national security problems, including the birth of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military arm, the new People’s Army in the late 1960s.
What is shocking is that, up to now the country is still using the archaic 81-year-old National Defense Act, or Commonwealth Act 1, enacted around this month in 1935.
Worse, the Ramos administration on September 22, 1992, only a few months after he took the presidency from Corazon C. Aquino, naïvely repealed the antisubversion law on Republic Act 1700, the only edict designed to check the expansion of insurgency and separatism in the country.
Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile initially supported Fidel V. Ramos in the Senate but when he realized that the repeal created a national security vacuum, he subsequently crafted the Human Security Act, or the anti-terrorism law, but leftists in both houses of Congress, supported by human-rights advocates, torpedoed it, brought it to the Supreme Court and when the High Court finally released it for implementation, what came out of it was a highly questionable law as some provisions protect more the violators rather than those tasked to implement it. As a result, no one among the law enforcers wanted to use the law.
In 2010 during the 15th Congress, Sen. Jinggoy E. Estrada, with the help of Enrile, Sen. Ramon Revilla Jr. and security and public-safety experts, introduced Senate Bill 675, known as the new comprehensive National Defense and Security Act to replace the obsolete Commonwealth law, bearing in mind that national security is all-embracing, dynamic, interactive, multidimensional and situational.
Thus, assuming the Duterte administration succeeded in breaking insurgencies and organized crimes, but if there’s no comprehensive law to protect the republic and if plunder and corruption are rampant, that means we have not fully attained national security and public safety.
“Also,” said the late Dr. Galileo C. Kintanar Sr., a distinguished national security expert, “we cannot fully enjoy national security and sustainable economic growth if we tolerate habits of indiscipline among our people, such as treating our creeks, rivers and seas as receptacles for solid and liquid wastes; crossing streets under footbridges constricting waterways by building on their banks; practicing illegal logging and destructive-fishing methods; and vending on sidewalks, as well as in the middle of streets and footbridges.”
How about ethics in education and law making? Obviously, the education department and Congress (the House and the Senate) are locked in an impasse on how to apply ethics, particularly on what to do with Sen. Leila M. de Lima, Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV and other lawmakers, while some teachers in private and public schools and universities found more time to teach students how to hate the Marcoses rather than preach love, unity, good manners and right conduct.
“But unless ethics education, like the moral-recovery programs of the recent past, is matched by the vigorous prosecution of the real plunderers or corruptors, these ethics classes will likely be seen as a lip service. Unless laws are vigorously and uniformly enforced, violators will continue with impunity,” Kintanar said.
In the final analysis, the achievement of national security as a necessary partner of sustainable economic growth is a task that pertains not only to our military and the police, but also to the entire citizenry. For who else are obstructing the road to national security and economic growth but our fellow misguided citizens?
Talking not only of misguided citizens but also of people in high places, especially those with conspiratorial hidden agenda, just look at what they did to Senators Estrada, Enrile and Revilla, then groomed to become the next president, who wanted to come up with a comprehensive national security and public-safety law?
Instead of rewarding them, they ended up in jail while the real people involved in the plunder and corruption of public funds, particularly those authorized by law to release pork-barrel funds from the Office of the President, are free, oftentimes traveling abroad and strutting in self-importance in the lobbies of first class hotels and golf courses. Our laws are very clear that senators and congressmen have no authority to release pork-barrel funds.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.