Shoot first

Editorial
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:10:00 12/05/2010

WHO IS the enemy, exactly? The New People’s Army, of course, according to the Philippine Army. And who is the NPA? Again, according to the Army, it could be anyone, particularly if he has already been killed in an Army operation. More importantly, anyone who gets caught in the crossfire is just unlucky—and none of it is the Army’s fault.

On December 2, Army soldiers in San Francisco, Lucena engaged in a gun battle with gunmen who had hijacked a bus after robbing a hardware store. Three civilian passengers on the bus were killed and in the immediate aftermath, the Army actually identified those three casualties as—you guessed it—members of the NPA, armed communist guerrillas.

Except that they weren’t. The police would make the correction later on, but the Army still maintained that NPA operatives had indeed been spotted in San Francisco. The Army seems to think it was an understandable error. The three civilians were unlucky enough to have been mowed down in the crossfire, but the military almost turned them into enemy combatants; it was a good thing that the police sorted it out, and maybe the military has gotten too used to identifying anyone it kills as communist insurgents, as if that is reason enough to forgive the killings.

Maybe we have let the military get away with using the red scare card just one time too many. Not only have we been slow to ask questions about the identity of casualties but perhaps we also let the Army shoot first and ask questions later.

Another recent tragedy involved one of our best and brightest: botanist Leonard Co was shot dead, along with two others, in yet another alleged crossfire between the military and communist insurgents on November 15 in Leyte’s Kananga town.

In the aftermath, the local Army commander, Lt. Col. Federico Tutaan, said he regretted the deaths but justified the government soldiers’ presence in Kananga—they were, of course, hunting communist rebels in the area. “It was just too unfortunate that our men, the NPA members and the civilians were in the same place at the same time,” Tutaan said. “It was a legitimate military operation. But we are very, very remorseful over what happened.”

Again, the hunt for the bogeyman that is the communist NPA is carted out to explain away what may actually be another lapse in judgment on the part of the military. Maybe it is time to ask the questions again. Does the act of identifying the deadly encounter as a legitimate military operation make up for the fact that civilians are killed? Are we so used to the idea of innocent people dying as collateral damage every time the Army allegedly engages the insurgents? When will the numbers add up to action on our part?

The Commission on Human Rights has been keeping itself busy, looking into the often bloody result of encounters between the Army and the NPA. But the impunity, the sheer brazenness of the military classifying each and every encounter resulting in civilian deaths as a legitimate military operation may have been a product of our own indifference.

Perhaps it is our fault that the military gets away with this kind of thinking. We live in our own world, untouched by the idea of immediate danger or the loss of loved ones by accident, so we are content to let the military do whatever it deems necessary for its primary objective: to protect the people—even if it results in the death of those same people, as long as it is, of course, a legitimate military operation.

We have neglected those questions for way too long. Perhaps it is something inherent in us. So we have been taught to trust and support our authorities, even if we occasionally have to turn our heads and hide our disbelief in some of the military’s more implausible explanation. Much is expected of those we have entrusted with the duty of defending us, and it is required that they meet those expectations, perhaps even surpass them. We must not make excuses for them. Too many people have gone missing without proper accounting. Too many people remain in military custody. After all, if you ask the military, every town is crawling with insurgents and every casualty is an NPA agent.

The military serves an important purpose, but it must achieve that purpose without subterfuge or recklessness. It must admit errors when errors are committed, and stop hiding behind the ambiguous menace of the communist movement. We rely on the military for this, but we must learn to ask the right questions and it must give us the unobscured answers. The military must defend us, yes, and it must start by telling us the truth.