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With
well-deserved pride, President Hu Jintao of the People’s
Republic of China opened the Beijing 2008 Olympics on
August 8 in a blaze of glory as it showcased its history
from ancient civilization to its rise as a strong and
modernizing power in an unprecedented extravaganza
involving 15,000 performers and flag-carrying children
from China’s 56 ethnic groups.
The
spectacle was directed, no less, by renowned Chinese
filmmaker Zhang Zimou and highlighted by a roaring
fireworks display which will definitely serve from
hereon as the standard for such world events in the
future.
The
opening ceremonies in China’s National Stadium,
popularly known as “The Bird’s Nest,” was participated
in by 10,000 athletes, close to 100,000 spectators and
90 heads of state, and watched by billions of people
worldwide. It was, in the words of seasoned observers of
world events, the “greatest show on earth” which, this
early, should already justify the time, resources and
efforts poured in by the Chinese government to make this
quadrennial event truly a “dream come true.”
As
Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee chief Liu Qi said
in his speech, “It has been a dream of the Chinese
people for a century to host the Olympics.” Beijing did
not disappoint. In just a little over half a century
after the “New China” was established in 1949 that dream
has now come to pass. It was truly rare and glorious.
That the
world press joined in the accolades could not be lost on
the Chinese people and, yes, even the most strident
critics of the Chinese government. That was true in
Britain, where many anti-China, “Free Tibet” protesters
converged at the start of the “Olympic flame” run some
months back.
It was
even truer in the United States, where the heat of this
year’s elections somehow entered its ugly head into the
2008 Olympic Games as both presumptive presidential
candidates and their parties weighed in with President
Bush in pricking China for its “human-rights record.”
But those protests were drowned out by the praises
across the board and the record viewership worldwide.
The
British Daily Mail intoned not with a tinge of dry
sarcasm that “…the age of Chinese power dawned in a
spellbinding and futuristic curtain lifter which
featured 15,000 different types of costumes and 14,000
performers, 9,000 of them on loan from the People’s
Liberation Army.”
Another
British paper, The Guardian, noted in an editorial that
the ceremony “outdid all of its predecessors in numbers,
color, noise and expense, demonstrating to the world
that the new China intends to make its presence felt. .
. .”
Even
more pointed and gratifying was the response of US
viewers as recorded by Nielsen Media research. The
outfit noted that “the colorful Olympic night ceremony
from Beijing on NBC averaged 34.2 million viewers,
making it the biggest television event since the Super
Bowl… and the biggest audience ever for an opening
Olympic ceremony not held in the US, and even eclipsed
this year’s Academy Awards and the finale of American
Idol.”
The same
research noted that the most recent Olympics in Athens
in 2004 averaged 25.4 million viewers for its first
night. Prior to that in Sydney in 2000, a slightly
higher 27.3 million viewers. Even more daunting was the
registered traffic on the NBC Universal network’s
NBCOlympics web site which got 70 million hits, its
heaviest ever, for the opening ceremonies on August 8.
Similar
astounding numbers greeted the opening of the Beijing
2008 Games in other countries even as Olympic and
Chinese officials struggled with the stringent rules
especially on the blocking technology they had to put up
for those outfits or entities which had exclusive rights
over the airing of the Games, not to mention those held
in place by the authorities over regular media coverage
of Chinese life and its people.
Indeed,
only the crude attempts by some “activists” to embarrass
the authorities and the fatal stabbing of the father of
a former US Olympian in Beijing stood in the way of this
otherwise jubilant “coming-out” party for the “New
China,” which auspiciously carries the theme “One World,
One Dream” for this year’s grand show. Let the drums
roll on.
That MOA
is a big step backward
We are
referring here to that innocuous “memorandum of
agreement on ancestral domain” (MOA-AD) between the
government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, whose
signing in Kuala Lumpur last week was aborted at the
last minute by a Supreme Court temporary restraining
order (TRO).
That MOA
should now be scrapped and the panels advised to go back
to the negotiating table to discuss a new one. For, as
things now stand, that MOA does not stand a chance of
being implemented even if—in the remotest of
possibilities—it is declared legal by the High Tribunal.
In a
very real sense, it is not, as claimed by the
proponents, a document to promote peace and prosperity
in Mindanao or even in the entire country, but a
document of surrender and political mischief. It is a
big step backward for that elusive peace and
long-dreamed- of stability and progress in Southern
Philippines, as it lures people across the board into
believing that a “win-win” solution to the years-old
secessionist movement is at hand.
That is
not true, and it will never happen at all with this kind
of a document, not to mention the explanations, which
have been thrown in its wake.
This
document is not simply a matter of expanding the
existing Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao area with
the inclusion of 700 barangays with sizeable Christian
populations in various provinces in Mindanao. It is a
devious revival of the long-discarded (for legal,
constitutional, economic, political and even
philosophical reasons) notions on how best to achieve
lasting peace and progress in that part of the country.
Those notions or theories were not acceptable before;
they cannot be acceptable now.
What are
those notions? To achieve peace, the negotiators said,
we must carve out a separate enclave for Muslims
expanding the “ancestral domain” theory of “land and
resource ownership” to the inhabitants of a designated
area to its most detestable point—an apartheid-like
arrangement in reverse—to create a “Moro homeland” with
a separate set of laws, culture, police and security
forces, foreign relations and economic practices, among
others.
This
notion is not only anathema to modern nation-building.
It is a dated practice which has since been discarded
even by the most vigorous advocates not only of
apartheid but of liberation in South Africa. I am sure
the revered former South African president and prisoner
of apartheid Nelson Mandela would not even discuss this
arrangement if he was invited to share his views on how
best to still the troubled waters in Southern
Philippines.
Instead
of promoting this “homeland” initiative outside of what
we already have in place under the Tripoli and 1996
agreements, which is likely to increase rather than
decrease disputes at all levels and in almost all
aspects of life in the affected areas, why don’t the
negotiators try to learn from the experiences of such
essentially peaceful and progressive multiethnic,
multireligious communities like Zamboanga and Iligan
cities, or even the Cotabatos (North and South), the two
Lanaos and the Zamboanga provinces, where Filipinos of
various backgrounds have learned to live in peace and
harmony as citizens of the Republic? Why promote
divisions and mythical arrangements where there is none,
or no need for one at all?
In the
end, this document not only erodes the country’s
oneness, but encourages even more the separatist
tendencies of militants in the South and their brethren
in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Brunei, whose dream
of a pan-Islamic state comprising those living in the
said states continues to flicker as outside forces,
terrorist or otherwise, intrude in the internal affairs
of these countries. Tama na ’yan (Enough)! |
