Bad faith

Barely had the winds left and the floods subsided in Mindanao in the wake of storm “Sendong” than the CPP-NPA was hard at work turning the disaster into yet another opportunity to earn brownie points for itself. In a statement, it blasted Malacañang for a litany of sins: not raising the alarm bells enough, allowing the degradation of the environment and thus aggravating the impact of the devastation, being slow to come to the aid and rescue of the victims, and “being extremely callous” in blaming the people’s “complacency” for their sufferings.

Before this, Undersecretary Benito Ramos of the National Disaster Coordinating Council explained that the high casualties were attributable “partly to the complacency of people because they are not in the usual path of storms.” That hardly sounded like a statement of blame, and more like an acknowledgment that, in the unpredictable age of climate change, the freakish nature of this storm passing over typically typhoon-free Mindanao appeared to have caught everyone off-guard. Many survivors themselves have said the typhoon was unlike anything they had seen in their lifetimes; that lack of experience with big-time disaster precluded, for many, any urgency for heightened and thorough preparation before the storm’s calamitous landfall.

But trust the NPA to politicize the issue—right squat in the middle of the disaster when survivors, their eyes glazed over in sorrow and disbelief, were still staggering through the muddy, debris-strewn streets of Iligan and Cagayan de Oro cities—by finding malice in innocuous remarks by government personnel already hard at work alleviating the suffering on the ground, by the way, the better to cast its sworn enemy in the worst possible light and itself as the unfailingly do-gooding, know-it-all alternative who could, with a cheap Internet connection and the click of a mouse, sanctimoniously harrumph, “I told you so.”

The latest word is that, after deriding Malacañang’s declaration of an 18-day unilateral ceasefire in observance of the Christmas holidays, the NPA has issued its own two-part ceasefire bulletin, running from Dec. 24 to 11:59 p.m. of Dec. 26, and at midnight of Dec. 31 until 11:59 p.m. of Jan.  2. One might think the communists are responding in kind to the government’s gesture of a welcome cessation in hostilities, to give the country its once-a-year breather from the never-ending violence between the two sides. But there is bad faith in the arrangement, and it lies squarely with the NPA. Specifically, it has used the time leading to the start of the government’s announced ceasefire to step up attacks on government and civilian targets, obviously to gain the perceived upper hand before the silence of the Christmas truce.

This, even as the rebels continue to be engaged in peace talks with the government, the negotiations merely suspended for now on the issue of the release of political prisoners, but with both sides still professing sincere commitment to the process. The NPA continues to insist it is after peace as much as the government is. Yet its actions on the ground betray its cynical, cold-eyed manipulation of the process to rack up battlefield successes on the one hand while waving the olive branch on the other.

Only a few hours after the effectivity of this year’s ceasefire declared by President Aquino, which started at 12:01 a.m. of Dec. 16 and lasting until midnight of Jan. 3, 2012, five soldiers were killed and two others were wounded in an NPA attack on a military outpost in Tandag, Surigao del Sur. A day earlier, rebels had raided the town hall of Lianga, Surigao del Sur, carting off several firearms. And less than two hours before the Lianga raid, at least 40 guerrillas were also in a clash with soldiers in another village of the same town.

The latest attack, on Dec. 16, is a noteworthy date, because on that day, Sendong was already churning inexorably toward Mindanao, to slam into the region in the early hours of the following day. In effect, even as the south of the country was about to be engulfed by catastrophe, and its people—including the soldiers and civilians targeted by the rebels—needed to concern themselves with preparing for the worst, the NPA was intent only on inflicting its own brand of mayhem on those it deemed sitting ducks for its bloody muscle-flexing.

For it to accuse the government now of callousness is laughable. Its track record, especially of late, belies any hint of sincerity or goodwill to be a reliable partner for any peace deal. Caveat emptor.