IF we are not winning the war against communist insurgency, don’t only blame the police and military generals in Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo, but also the inept members of Congress for their failure to provide the right combination of national security and public order policies.
Members of both houses of Congress—the Senate and the House—cannot deny this because every year the police and military budgets pass through them.
In the crucial arena of national administration, which is how the police, soldiers and the people feel the presence of government in their lives, it is actually Congress who are on the front lines of the entire bureaucracy, with powers, funds and policies to stifle insurgency, separatism and maintain peace and order.
The police and the military are just implementors of policies. They are not in control of the levers of power.
Under the Constitution, it’s the Congress. They control national security, contract debts, decide government priorities and shape the budgets.By looking at the budgets, past and present, one would easily conclude that they had merely wasted a lot of resources, creating and managing crisis, instead of shaping an environment of peace, where people can work and pursue their economic agenda without interference and intimidation from terrorists and criminal elements.
The police and military organizations operate, in large part, under a system where there is no real and formidable national security law to protect the State, and there are no clear delineation of functions and responsibilities between them, resulting in confusion, turf war and finger-pointing.
The only national security law, Republic Act 1700, better known as the anti-subversion law, was repealed on September 22, 1992 by the Ramos administration. Its repeal created a national security vacuum that saw the expansion of the leftist organization, the resurgence of separatism in Mindanao by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front, and the birth of the fundamentalist Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.
The anti-insurgency campaign of the military is most often just a conceptual and theoretical plan, devoid of strategic substance, that doesn’t make sense to many people. The truth is that the military and police organizations are now stuck to the body-count syndrome that is quite misleading because what is merely reported in the media is the number of terrorists killed, wounded, captured, or surrendered.
What is not reported is that the terrorists produce more warm bodies faster than the military and the police could attrite them. This is so because for the leftist terrorists, the most important battlefield is not the military one but the political, social, and economic fronts where they built their foundation and have made tremendous gains over the last three decades.
The law available but insufficient to stifle communist insurgency is the antiquated Revised Penal Code. Article 147 of the Code penalizes subversive and rebellious acts for only six years in prison and imposes a fine not exceeding P1,000 for founders, directors, and presidents of associations totally or partially organized for the purpose of committing any of the crimes under the Code.
Many internal factors in the armed services also made them a threat to society, and external factors have also contributed to both the military’s disunity and the inability of the civilian government to control them. For instance, the problem of a continuing economic decline and the threat of Communist insurgency and terrorism in various parts of Mindanao have made the armed services inordinately very large and indispensable to the orderly conduct of public affairs.
Where in normal times the military is a sword kept in the scabbard in preparation for external and internal enemies, it is a sword now perpetually unsheathed because of real and formidable challenges to the state.
No matter how one looks at the problem, it cannot be denied that the problem is a political one in which the military is only one factor among many.
When may we expect our national security to become truly and sustainably stable? Our people—not just our leaders—must answer that question collectively, with the proper mix of attitudinal and behavioral changes. The answer will not be of specific date in the calendar; rather, like national security itself, the answer will be situational.
For as long as illegal drugs, lewd tabloids, pornographic movies, pirated intellectual property and smuggled goods proliferate on our sidewalks; for as long as bickering rather than public service dominates our political and bureaucratic landscapes; for as long as graft and corruption deter our people from developing confidence in our leaders; for as long as we compromise our sovereignty; for as long as we are unable to develop a truly national culture that transcends regional and ethnocentric loyalties; for as long as our industries remain globally uncompetitive; and for as long as the masses of our people remain mired in poverty, we cannot enjoy the kind of national security that we need to sustain a quality of life that our people would find worth defending.
Citizens who are vigilant against crime and who testify in court; vendors who stay off our streets and sidewalks; households that dispose of their garbage properly; employers who give workers their dues; civil servants and workers who perform their jobs diligently and properly; priests who serve our spiritual needs and not the political agenda of dissidents or rebels; journalists who report accurately rather than opinionate, speculatively; an educational system that inculcates national identity, patriotism, discipline and values among our youths—these and not just political leaders, the military and the police, are the components we need to build national security.
We must realize that it takes a nation to build true national security, just as it takes majorities to build democracy.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.