"NDF ‘peace consultants’ ought to leave their firearms at home."
"NDF ‘peace consultants’ ought to leave their firearms at home."
Last Saturday on the anniversary of the local communist party, I stumbled across a lengthy exhortatory message written by one Jose Maria Sison, who therein claimed to be the “Founding Chairman, CPP and Principal Consultant, NDF”.
Whaaat? That guy must be delusional. As far back as I remember, the CPP has always been chaired by one “Amado Guerrero”, who’s so elusive that I never had the pleasure of meeting him. And Sison is nothing more than a doddering old English professor who retired to the Netherlands because, I guess, the weather there really agrees with him.
As for the NDF, that’s just a product of Sison’s imagination. Nobody, but nobody, has ever ‘fessed up to being a member. And that includes all those leftist congressmen who refuse to condemn the NPA, even if their oath of office as law-makers might reasonably be construed to require from them some show of loyalty to the Republic.
For that matter, even the NPA might be another Sison concoction. How else to explain why all those NPA leaders captured in battle turn out to be nothing more than NDF “peace consultants”, just like Sison? If the NDF is real, it might want to caution its “consultants” against lugging around all those firearms and subversive documents, otherwise they’ll become victims of red-tagging. Tsk tsk.
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The biggest story over the holidays was the videotaped killing of a mother and son by a high-ranking PNP non-commissioned officer—Jonel Nuezca, a senior master sergeant no less—over some personal grudge. Incidents like this give the NPA a perfect excuse to distract the public from their own crimes and attempt to claim the moral high ground.
Unfortunately, the current PNP chief, General Debold Sinas, has been digging the grave even deeper for his organization. In quick order, he has (i) advised people against videotaping police activities, a practice that tripped up his own mañanita escapade earlier; (ii) defended Nuezca’s “character” for turning himself in, as if the guy had any other choice; and (iii) asked the 16-year-old girl who took the video to testify in court. Perhaps the general thinks the video was photo-shopped?
These inexcusable statements contrast sharply with what we’ve heard from DILG Secretary Ed Año, a former AFP chief of staff who administratively oversees the PNP. Ano has flat-out called for restoring the death penalty against police criminals like Nuezca, whom he clearly considers no better than the drug lords whom he also called to account for State-sanctioned executions.
My social media icon is the patch of the PNP Special Action Force (SAF), 44 of whom were slaughtered in Mamasapano years ago. There are hundreds of thousands of other policemen and women like them who must now labor to restore their good names from the onus created by Nuezca. I’d like to think they’ll be a lot less forgiving of him than their chief seems inclined to be.
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Let me close my last column for the year with a more pleasant topic: the freebies handed out by the generous folks at San Miguel. First was the two hours of free gas offered by Petron last week. The lines were so long that I missed my free full tank by a good 15 minutes.
Then came the toll-free hours offered on all SMC-run toll roads, last Christmas Eve and this coming New Year’s Eve. In the wake of such corporate generosity, I’m now just waiting for the offer of free beer to come up.
People still remember how much SMC’s Ramon Ang (“RSA”) helped out from his personal and corporate resources at the height of the lockdown this year. This kind of open-handedness—obviously sincere from a man who’d just lost a much-loved child—will rightfully create the public goodwill he’ll need in order to buck the enormous odds stacked up against his next big project, the Bulacan mega-airport—one that is, in and of itself, long overdue.
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Nuezca and RSA both came to mind, oddly enough, when I reflected on the first reading in today’s Mass (1 John 2: 3-11). “Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness.” The man in uniform turns upon those under his charge. “Whoever hates his brother is in darkness; he…does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”
But the apostle also reminds us that “whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall”. The Biblical footnote describes this as an admonition to the charitable life, “mutual charity in Christian experience”. We may not have RSA’s resources, but there is nothing to stop us, this coming new year, from matching his largesse of spirit.
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