From ‘’Daang Matuwid to “Change is Coming,” the rhetoric of failed promises has made the road to progress in Mindanao uneven and torturous.
Approximately 26 million children trooped to major public and some private schools during the opening of classes today nationwide. But the annual event did not hog the headlines as it would normally do. This, as the country was gripped with the attack by a lone gunman at the elite Resorts World Manila last dawn Friday. Foremost in the minds of the many was the question whether the attack was a terrorist assault grave enough to precipitate a martial law declaration nationwide, and graver still, that it would impede the school opening today.
While the farmers’ demands were unquestionably just, the powers-that-be have in the instant answered them with astonishing indifference.
The most recent clashes between the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and Moro armed groups in Lanao Del Sur and surrounding areas have forcibly driven around 6,000 to 10,000 Moro people out of their homes, and resulted to the deaths of yet unaccounted number of civilians.