HERE’s a timely perspective to understand national security (NS) in relation to Executive Order 70, signed by Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea by authority of President Rodrigo Duterte on December 4, 2018, formulating a National Peace Framework that shall include, among others, a mechanism for local peace engagements or negotiations and interventions.
In essence, NS is not just about the military and the police securing the seat of power against the enemies of the State. More than that, it is about having food, jobs, education, health, infrastructure, water, electricity, markets, information, technology, copyrights, public order, public health and safety for the majority of our people, if not for all individuals.
Neither is NS static nor a passive condition. Rather, it is vibrant and contextual, adjusting to situations as they develop or as they can be foreseen, involving the interplay of dynamic and static forces. Nor should NS be treated as an occurrence that we have to take as it is and as it comes; rather, we should shape it rationally, all the time. We should manage it, or its deterioration will control us.
We must constantly monitor it and understand it from the perspective of history and the requirements of the future. And we must invest in its stability, for without such investment, we might lose not just our collective security, but our nationhood as well.
National security starts with nationhood. Officially, it was not until 1946 that the Philippines became an independent nation. Before that, it was neither a nation nor independent. It was just an archipelago of settlements that had to face common enemies for them to develop a sense of nationhood, with some of the patriots seeking not independence but parity with citizens of the colonial master.
It, in fact, was a colony with a population as diverse as it was dispersed, its tenuous national unity vulnerable to the contrarian forces of regionalism and ethnocentric factors.
The Philippines has been invaded four times, by the Spaniards, by the British, by the Americans and then by the Japanese before it attained formal nationhood. She was under foreign rule for around 425 years, and since then, has been formally independent for only 73 years. Our history, therefore, is much shorter as a sovereign state than our history as a colony.
Historical perspective
The country’s history has a direct influence on our national security. More than four centuries of exploitation by colonial masters had depleted much of our resources that could have made us more prosperous today. Our colonial masters had twisted our loyalties and values and skewed our perspectives over this long period of religious, political and cultural indoctrination.
They had deprived us of precious experience in self-rule; their divide-and-rule strategy left a deplorable legacy that continues to keep us divided to this day. Worse, their central authority had left our people in various states of ungovernability: Resentful, skeptical, suspicious, rebellious, fatalistic, irresolute, individualistic, regionalistic and myopic.
This situation did not end with the formal grant of independence to us by the United States in 1946. We continued to be dominated by America, and we remained susceptible to other foreign powers. The Second World War reduced our economy to ruins, and we had depended on American help to recover; but in doing so, we had to grant so-called “parity rights” to American citizens and companies in the exploitation of our natural resources. As a safeguard against non-American invasion, we also had to agree to the establishment of American military bases on our soil.
So, for the next decades after the formal grant of independence, American interests shaped our national security. The end of the Second World War was the beginning of the Cold War, pitting the Western powers led by America against the Communist powers led by the Soviet Union and Red China.
We were drawn into the Cold War because of our alliance with America and because of the presence of the US military bases in the Philippines. The communist powers, to challenge American hegemony in this part of Asia, lent support to the local communist movement, which had then been outlawed by Republic Act 1700 or the Anti-Subversion Law.
It was a period when nationalism was rising among the newly independent states of the so-called Third World. Among many of these nations and former colonies, the common theme was anti-imperialism. The communists exploited this situation.
The late national security expert, Dr. Galileo Kintanar, recalled in a series of interviews with this writer that a leading communist in China at the time, M.N. Roy, described the process as “painting nationalism red.”
“So, in the Philippines, the communists infiltrated nationalist movements and established ostensibly nationalist organizations, in order to broaden and increase their influence,” Kintanar said.
Kintanar said the roster of the Movement for the Advancement of Nationalism on its founding in 1967 included such nationalists as Dr. Salvador Araneta, Teofisto Guingona Jr. and Dr. Sotero H. Laurel, as well as activists who were to rise high in the Communist Party of the Philippines: Jose Ma. Sison, Nilo Tayag, Fernando Tayag, Ibarra Tubianosa, Jose Luneta, Arthur Garcia, Hermenegildo Garcia IV, Monico Atienza, Leoncio Co, Manuel Collantes, Satur Ocampo, Carolina Malay, Julius Fortuna and Milagros Astorga, among others.
The same roster listed “Nur Mizhuarie” as a Charter member, along with Sen. Lorenzo Tanada, Orlando Mercado, Haydee Yorac, Ruben Torres, Felixberto Olalia, Rolando Olalia, Dr. Nemesio Prudente and Renato Constantino, who subsequently distinguished themselves as dissidents, with some becoming government officials.
As a consequence, the nascent Philippine government found it hard to distinguish between communists and nationalists. This was just what the communists wanted as part of their strategy: to bait the government to treat nationalist organizations as communist fronts, and thereby press moderates to turn into radicals and radicals into rebels.
“It was part of the strategy of fomenting a revolutionary situation and of giving depth and breadth to the communist insurgency,” Kitanar said.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.