IT looks like there is no more stopping the all-out war being waged by the country’s Commander-in-Chief President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo against the communist insurgents whose obliteration from the face of the earth is timetabled in two years.
While the Philippine National Red Cross, in its call for all-out respect for human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL), i.e. the law on armed conflict, still believes that the best call is for all-out peace, at least a return to the mode of peace negotiations, it seems to concede now that bloody clashes are inevitable where the “unleashed dogs of war can no longer be restrained or pulled back for the foreseeable near future”. In a statement, the Red Cross categorically stated that the talk is already about “unavoidable collateral damage” to civilians who will surely be caught in the crossfire.
In such feared situation, the Red Cross therefore challenged both sides of the impending bloody combats to respect IHL, for the sake of the people and communities in the countryside!
Easier said than done. There is not a battle in recent history where civilians were spared, and battles were confined to armed combatants alone. Blood will be spilled in the mountains, in the streets and even in urban areas, and most of the victims would, God forbid, be the armless civilians. Two years of battle would look like a long war where more innocent bodies are murdered, mangled and butchered like dead meat. And who is President GMA to say that the battle would be ended in two years, where the victors would be her soldiers? Not even Marcos was able to crush the rebels in his over 20 years of overwhelming military and political power. The Americans even lost, and lost miserably despite decades of superior firepower, logistics, and support from the free nations.
The battle would certainly be long and the list of abuses and mayhem would even be longer, the innocent bodies falling like ducks in an open field.
But, look, there’s a gem of an idea from a Nagueño who has been advocating for the establishment of peace zones in all areas of the country as an antidote to “all-out war” that could at least confine the battles in the fields where there are least number of inhabitants or civilians, or none at all.
Lawyer Soliman Santos, Jr., a nationally-known peace advocate, prescribes that one way that local communities may respond to the “all-out war” in case it comes to their areas is to declare and assert their places as peace zones that are off-limits to armed hostilities between soldiers and rebels (Bicol Mail, July 13, 2006). At least two of these places in Bicol have long way back declared their territories as peace zones: Naga City (1988) and Irosin, Sorsogon (1992).
Santos said that the area becomes peace zone by the people’s unilateral declaration that it is such and that its recognition by the armed parties is an objective to be won and not the basis of its existence. He said that it helps if the declaration is supported or even led by the local government concerned which can even pass an ordinance or resolution (which Naga did) to that effect. He said such gesture could be seen as an exercise or assertion of local sovereignty and supremacy of civilian authority to assert a local community’s right to life, security and peace, freedom from fear, and even liberty of abode which, interestingly, are guaranteed by our Constitution. Come to think of it, isn’t it a wise idea, folks?
