Mayaen’s gambit on peace

READERS’ CORNER
Edison L. Baddal

BONTOC, Mountain Province -- When Gov. Mayaen first broached the idea of Mountain Province as a peace zone in one of the provincial peace and order council meetings last quarter of 2010, many attendees including me, thought it was just a facetious remark.

I assumed then that it was just wishful thinking on his part which I even perceived could have just sprung up from the blue while the meeting wore on. As the event happened to be a PPOC meeting ( the PPOC is an adjunct body of the provincial government whose main function is the formulation of peace and order measures as provided by Republic Act 7160 aka Local Government Code of 1991), one of the agenda naturally gravitated to the ambush on July 9, 2010 aside from other encounters prior thereto .

The said PPOC meeting was then conducted on the heels of that ambush which wiped out a seven-man military medical team in the vicinity of Samoki, Bontoc. Then as now, every ambush, as shocking and spine-tingling as it is, always evokes gut-wrenching sentiments of those woebegone days in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

During that period, the NPA dissidents staged a series of ambuscades in Mt. Province that palpably marred its peace and order. President Cory Aquino’s kid glove policies then towards the insurgents seemed to have emboldened them to launch vicious, small-scale attacks against the military which also included nerve-wracking raids on municipal halls.

There were also frequent harassment raids - Vietcong style- against military encampments in different parts of the province capped by a hostage-taking incident sometime in the second quarter of 1991. In that incident,a bunch of cops were taken hostage from the Regional Strike Force Camp at Babalaan, Kayan East by the dissidents.

The hostages were eventually released after local officials (left-leaning or otherwise) and some upstanding civilians intervened for them. Mayaen was then an upstart politician (he was a board member from 1988 – 1992) when the ambuscades and harassments occurred.

At that time, the MP provincial government was virtually tottering towards becoming an NPA sanctuary as the latter seemed to have achieved strategic stalemate with the military then. Although they had not yet achieved numerical equality with the military at that time, their number was such as to create unsettling instability in peace and destabilization in the socio-economic spectrum of the province.

Nevertheless, the NPA cadres were repulsed when several military battalions launched a series of tactical operations against them that culminated in the destruction of a vast training camp at Mt. Sisipitan which straddles the boundary between Sagada and Besao. Scuttlebutts have it that the training camp was approximately as wide as Camp Aguinaldo which operated as a dissident stronghold unscathed until its discovery in 1991 by military operatives.

Its destruction proved to be a huge setback to the dissidents’ operations in Mt. Province. An upshot of the undisturbed operation of the camp then was that several gut-wrenching encounters occurred in the environs of Sagada. This was one of the fundamental reasons why Sagada was declared as a peace zone in the early decade of the ‘90s.

Obviously, past and recent insurgency-related incidents within Mountain Province anymore than the fact that Sagada successfully nourished and maintained its status as a Peace Zone to date could have directly factored in Mayaen’s toying with the idea of a peace zone for Mt. Province which eventually morphed into a plan.

During a PPOC consultation at Sabangan on Aug. 17, on the peace zone, Mayaen stressed that that the project is not his alone but that of the PPOC as a collegial body. He said this following the pros and cons posited for the project by the attendees. He narrated that he started toying with the idea of the province being declared as a peace zone when several sectors approached him and propounded the proposal to him last year.

This was on the heels of concatenated encounters and skirmishes between the military and the insurgents capped by the July 9, 2010 ambush. He underscored that such bloody encounters negatively impact on the socio-economic development of the province with the most telling dip on tourism, one of the major economic drivers of the province.

He emphasized that the province as a tourism area could not afford to lose the tourists, local and foreign, who come in droves. These include Igorot expats who occasionally come home for relieve from pangs of homesickness . Saying that the armed conflict definitely has no place in the multi-spectrum landscape of Mountain Province, he assured that a peace zone will greatly enhance the development of the province.

He lamented that the province is invariably being stalled in its development efforts due in part to the occasional military-dissident encounters which always negatively impact on the lives of the civilians. It goes without saying that socio-economic development of the province is always at the receiving end of any military-dissident encounter anytime.

Meanwhile, the strong remonstrations of the military and the PNP against the peace zone during the said consultation is par for the course given the fact that the dissidents will have much to gain from the prospect. They aver that the dissidents will surely up the ante of their activities provincewide under the very noses of the PNP contingents.

Anyhow, the role of the military and PNP will be stifled in Mountain Province if it becomes a peace zone as they will be virtually helpless in regulating the activities of the dissidents.

At face value, the idea itself is worth considering as peace is definitely a huge catalyst in the attainment of socio-economic progress for the province. It could not be denied that a wild and woolly peace will surely stifle development and a big drag for the province’s graduation from being one of the poorest provinces of the country.

This dishonorable tag has been attached to the province for two decades already since the Ramos watch. The wild and woolly peace of the province during the Cory presidency may have dampened interest of investors to develop the natural endowments of the province.

Be it so, the road to peace zone is not that easy if implemented provincewide. It is at most risky even as it is fraught with several humps, potholes and furrows which have to be cautiously navigated. Many things should be taken into account before such will be realized as it is a relatively novel concept in itself even if some LGUs have already adopted such set-up.

Although the absence of armed encounters between elements of the military and the dissidents is surely a big plus in the advance towards socio-economic development, it is not the be-all and end-all as a factor in the march towards progress. There is a big question on the integrity and credibility of the local authorities in the prosecution of development projects. It should be borne in mind that graft and corruption is among the major issues that give impetus for insurgency to thrive in the Philippines anymore that it thrives anywhere, anytime in any part of the world.

If political officials will continue to deny the people of the kind of service that they deserve, much more if they continue to rob them of them of their money, insurgency will continue to nurture hope among the destitute of the people. In my mind, it is not enough that a declaration of the province as a peace zone be made but that the officials should walk the talk in all their public actuations so as to deny the insurgents any humongous issue to slam against them.

This is also to preclude any myopic individual from entertaining thoughts of joining the insurgents. It is good, if effective, local governance that will obviate most humps in the implementation of the peace zone. The ball is in the hands of the public officials who will be implementing the general framework, much less the operational guidelines, of the peace zone once it becomes a reality.