Enabling environments for violence (3)

Bloody incidents in Maguindanao del Sur and other parts of Mindanao, including the island province of Sulu, where another fierce gun battle occurred in a barangay in Maimbung town on June 24, are just among the many violent incidents in the past few weeks and months.

Alleged in-fighting between members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in several rural areas in Sultan sa Barongis, Datu Saudi Ampatuan, and Shariff Saydona Mustapha in Maguindanao del Sur has also left a trail of fatalities since late last year. Newspaper reports cite long-lasting “rido,” or vengeance fighting caused by land disputes as the main cause of the eruption of violence there. But reports from local media sources cited some informants who claim that the other protagonist in this spate of gunfights is the private army of one of the mayors there whose relatives are also members of an MILF command. This private army has allegedly burned the houses of MILF members who have fought against them.

The June 24 incident in Maimbung was a gun battle that erupted after joint forces from the military and the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group as well as from the Special Action Forces’ 7th Special Action Battalion were reportedly fired upon first by the armed group associated with the former Maimbung vice mayor, Pando Mudjasan, a suspect in several murder and double murder cases. A former member of the Moro National Liberation Front, Mudjasan is accused of violating Republic Act No. 10591 or the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act, and RA 9516, which punishes those possessing illegal explosive devices.

Peace agreements do not mean an end to violence; they may silence the guns of war (between state and nonstate groups engaged in a peace negotiation), but they have not created environments to enable peace to thrive. Instead, several enticements, however flawed they may be, continue to exist, alongside weak government regulatory mechanisms, supposed to be carried out by military and police authorities.

The Philippines is known to be a country with a lot of laws (and lawyers) for almost every issue, big and small, that is supposed to protect its citizens from transgressions of their fellow citizens, or even from those who are supposed to protect them, like our officials, both from civilian and the security sectors. For example, we have laws against the illegal possession of firearms, explosive devices, among many others. But why are these shooting incidents happening, usually involving “guns for hire” (people hired to kill), and even local government officials keeping their own private armies? Wasn’t there a law against it in the past, and even a dismantling of private armies, too?

The perennial claim to a certain level of entitlement, however flawed among our officials, is also another reason for creating an enabling environment for violence. This distorted notion of entitlement that they can do anything they like if they are mayor, governor, or even president of the country has become a motivation for many people to aspire for government positions. The power from a political position can slowly change the mindsets of politicians, making them weak in the face of overwhelming possibilities of leveraging this power to amass enormous wealth and even more power. To do this, they need to create an armed following of foot soldiers who are willing to kill the perceived “enemies” of their bosses, but not of the state. This is how this erroneous sense of entitlement can slowly and dangerously snowball into a culture of impunity, bereft of a moral compass for good governance.

In his famous Gettysburg address on Nov. 19, 1863, the late US President Abraham Lincoln eloquently spoke on the basic elements of a thriving democracy: “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth …”

Unfortunately, we have seen that such democratic ideals remain to be unreachable. I’ve heard of a pun on these Lincolnian ideals: the government “off” the people; “buy” the people, and “poor” the people.

No wonder the enabling environments for violence thrive.

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