By Ren Jalaluddin Ropeta
MANILA — The brazen declaration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of a heightened war against the Communist insurgency is essentially a war against the Filipino people who have long been calling for her ouster.
Unable to contain the growing peoples movement calling for her ouster, despite such constitutionally twisted presidential orders such as the Presidential Proclamation 1017, Executive Order 464, and the Calibrated Peoples Response, the much-beleaguered Arroyo was quick to respond with impunity against those who are calling for her ouster.
A dictator has risen up in our midst. A despots folly has caused us many dear lives. The regimes preys have been church workers, vanguards of truths in the media, advocates of peace and people who are merely aspiring for their rights to land and genuine peace. The Arroyo regimes enemy is not only the so-called leftist or progressives but the vast majority of the population who is too disgusted with centuriesold poverty, and generations of a corrupt system, as well as the immorality and illegitimacy of a cheating and lying incumbent regime.
What is this war but this regimes folly?
No longer able to avert the moral and political crisis that have been quashing the very core of her regime, Arroyo and her generals have abandoned the negotiating table and opted for tanks, bombs to pursue their spurious sense of peace. Having satisfied itself with the thought that it has pacified the Moro peoples resistance in Mindanao, the Arroyo regime has now turned weapon, artillery and men toward Luzon and other parts of the country, with an ostentatious one-billion peso budget of the peoples money.
Still, apportioning 30% of the billion-budget for so-called development projects does not help resolve the root causes of the armed conflict. How could 330 million pesos augment the suffering of a nation that remains faced with threats of worsening economic and political crisis?
As long as a tiny minority controls the resources and a vast majority suffers because of the whims and greed of the few in the ruling elite, the flames of the peoples resistance will never die down. It will continue to flicker, spread and rage.
War against the people is not the right path toward peace. With her war posture, Arroyo is only fomenting a brewing civil war. This fascist move is but a neurotic outgrowth of a political and moral crisis that the Arroyo regime has long prevented from exploding. Understandably, a regime that is on its last legs will resort to tyranny and state terrorism, which is every dictators instrument of control, and which inevitably becomes the means of its own downfall.
As she is now and has been for a long time, President Arroyo has all the more isolated herself from the people. And the war she is waging is a political suicide, and the people will not be merciful when the time to mete out justice has come.
We have long grieved for the death of freedom and peace in our nation. No matter the cost, the nation must unite to oppose Mrs. Arroyos war.
(The author is the vice-chairperson of the Moro-Christian Peoples Alliance, a nongovernment group advocating for Moro peoples rights.)
