The more I think of the politically-motivated massacre of 57 unarmed civilians in Maguindanao on the 23rd of November 2009, the more I think of how we Filipinos have so much in common with the alleged mastermind of this heinous crime – Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr. The guiding concept at work in this conclusion I’ve arrived at can be described in a three word phrase:
Regard for human life.
Right now the Philippine Media – and presumably the larger Filipino public – is abuzz exchanging factoids on the atrocities that have been gripping Filipinos in the hinterlands of their country’s southern island of Mindanao. Just weeks after the massacre in Maguindanao, more than 100 people, including children, were taken hostage by armed bandits in the province of Agusan del Sur. Indeed, 2010 is an election year. And election years in the Philippines have typically been marked by violence – almost to the point of banality:
1988 elections – 188 dead
1992 elections – 89 dead
1995 elections – 108 dead
1998 elections – 77 dead
2001 elections – 98 dead
[Source: FES 2004 Study]
With regard to the above figures it seems that, at 57 dead so far this year, we have a contingency of another 19 more dead Filipinos to ensure we come out of this election year slightly improved over the 1998 figure! Considering that death at such magnitudes in Philippine elections is not only not unprecedented – it is almost always expected, why then does the Inquirer.net Editor see it as something to be “shocked” and to be “awed” about? Surely the Ampatuans’ mansions and monstrous SUV’s have always been in plain enough sight to elicit the same sort of speculation around ill-gotten-wealth and lust-for-power that our traditional pundits and journalists normally reserve for Manila’s who’s-whos.
Perhaps, to be fair to the honourable Chief of our country’s premier mouthpiece, the Maguindanao massacre is unprecedented in the scale of how it was perpetrated by a single person in a single incident. That is why the Maguindanao Massacre makes headline news (and elicits so much “outrage”) today – in the same way that tropical cyclone Ondoy did after causing the unnecessary deaths of more than 250 people in September this year, and in the same way that the MV Princess of the Stars did in June of 2008 when it sank and took 800 people with it. Shocking indeed. Oh the humanity!
Humanity.
Let’s step back and understand the underlying issues that are less talked about by the people who take their emotional cues from the venerable Mainstream Media of the Philippines (and its boys’ club of Establishment bloggers).
A single company – Sulpicio Shipping Lines -- accounts for an immense proportion of loss of civilian life at sea over the last two decades.
The sinking of a Sulpicio vessel, the MV Doña Paz, in 1987 resulted in the loss of almost 5,000 lives – the worst peace time maritime disaster in recent world history. Yet the shipping line went on to oversee three more of its ships figure in accidents that killed thousands more. And what constitute the most recent developments as far as holding someone accountable for these tragedies to date? I searched and found no more than a news snippet about implementation of “mandatory marine insurance for pollution and wreck removal”, reported by The Business Mirror on 08 Dec 2009, and one about the honourable Senator Francisco “Kiko” Pangilinan gracing the occasion of a memorial service held in December this year to commemorate the victims of the MV Doña Paz disaster reported by the Philippine Star on 13 Dec 2009 (Pangilinan’s publicist is obviously working overtime nowadays). Interestingly enough there was one news report published also by the Star on the 5th of December about a Sulpicio ship, the MV Sulpicio Express Siete, winning second prize in a cleanliness contest conducted by the Bureau of Quarantine – yet another irony that escapes our vacuous faculties for picking winning insight.
Yet there are certain simple questions that seem to be routinely skirted in the coverage of an on-going affair that has had a clear impact on thousands of lives and continues to put thousands at risk to this day: Who is in charge of certifying that seafaring vessels in the Philippines are seaworthy and routinely clearing them for departure given that they do not exceed their registered capacity? Who is in charge of Sulpicio Shipping Lines?
Oh well. Moving on…
A handful of clearly-identifiable factors account for the occurrence of deadly floods and mudslides that kill thousands in the Philippines.
An official account of the carnage in this year’s storm season puts the number of dead Filipinos at 956 resulting from the combined destructive force unleashed by cyclones Ondoy and Pepeng over October and November. But then before that there was the 2006 mudslide that killed 2,000 people in Barangay Guinsaugon in the municipality of St. Bernard in Leyte, and then another one that killed 5,000 in Ormoc (also in Leyte) back in 1991. There were many more of these “natural” disasters in between.
If we look into that handful of factors that routinely contribute (in varying degrees of intensity) to these rain-and-storm-induced disasters, we can see that, like the issues with safety compliance and corporate responsibility that plague the Philippine maritime industry, they are things that hardly make headline news today and are barely within the radar of the “expert” analysis of our highest profile pundits and columnists: de-forestation, irresponsible land development for human habitation, inadequate drainage and waste management infrastructure, lack of coordinated emergency and relief services, and poor road and transport infrastructure to get those services to where they need to be when they are needed.
* * *
These shipping disasters, killer floods and mudslides and, yes, incidences of election violence made and make headline news in their own times. That is because they are newsworthy at those times when public outrage over them were at their highest. Furthermore, most of these have a political angle – they are often convenient tools wielded by the “Opposition” of the time for making the incumbent administration of the time look bad (never mind that the underlying issues in their occurrence transcends administrations).
Indeed, these news stories are sensational, but are they necessarily more important than the stories that don’t make the front pages?
Sensational “news” should never be confused with important information. And if it is useful information we seek, it seems that no amount of the “press freedom” our society supposedly gained since 1986 helped us identify the relevant issues that determine what our calls to action should prioritise. In the same way that irresponsible property development and garbage disposal failed to make headline news — until Ondoy did it for us — warlords in Mindanao and the rest of the Philippines’ hinterlands amassed their wealth and arms under the radar — until the Maguindanao Massacre turned it to today’s talk of the town. Like everything else in the Philippines, whether it be disastrous flooding, or armed-to-the-teeth warlords, the Philippine Media — that supposed bastion of enlightenment, truth, and (get this) “information”, simply fails to lead the way in helping the public focus on what is important.
In the same way that Andal Ampatuan Jr is an individual person who oversaw the death of 57 innocent people, we are also a people of one Nation that have overseen preventable deaths numbering in the tens of thousands if not the hundreds of thousands. What we choose to focus our attention on – and what is glaringly absent from our national “debate” – is a revealing indictment of our claim to be a civilised society. The fundamental issues that underlie recurring disasters and accidents as well as chronic election violence – safety, environment, infrastructure, and security – are by themselves newsworthy in truly civilised societies. A routine focus on these issues is the hallmark of a society that truly cares about its lot. To put where I am headed here in the right perspective, I cite the following succinct version of what are many variants quoted by a who’s who of historical figures spanning a century or two:
The measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members.
Taken in this context, trying to see Andal Ampatuan Jr as someone fundamentally different from us becomes trickier, doesn’t it?
We need to undergo a serious re-thinking of what we consider to be important in our society and in our efforts to build a strong and just nation. Obviously this is an initiative where we can no longer rely on those custodians of our society’s information dissemination infrastructure – the Philippine Media – for useful and insightful information. Now that is ironic.
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