MORE than 40 pol ice Action Forces walked into an ambush from which none emerged but as corpses.
Made complacent by all the blather in media fawning over peace talks, police special forces—the best of the best—went out looking for a US-listed Malaysian terrorist by the name of Zulkifli bin Hir. Now critics of the dead observe that the police did not notify the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which is hiding Zulkifli. If they had notified the MILF, the MILF would have said, “Zulkifli’s been here, but he’s gone now,” laughing behind their hands. So it’s partly the fault of the dead for walking into an ambush, prepared well ahead, by a part of the 11,000- strong MILF army.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel; but some of our fish fired back and took out four of them.
The government reaction has been limited to a disclaimer that it broke the truce by sending in the regular army. Nope, these were just police, the government stressed; never mind that they were all dead. This was to save a one-sided agreement hammered out by the weaker side on the backside of the stronger.
The peace agreement aims to give an 11,000-man army a baby state of its own with a barely noticeable link to the Republic.
Two female negotiators call it “layered sovereignty,” which is to say you can peel off one or two or three layers of sovereignty without the cake ceasing to be a cake, and the repeatedly skinned sovereignty ceasing to be sovereign—though to a much slimmer extent. (This is a notion that occurs only to the uneducated.)
Well, if this is still the same cake, then this notion of sovereignty is exactly the pastry the Chinese will have. To put it piquantly, the agreement gives terrorism a homeland in the south from which to strike at the north.
The peace agreement also memorializes as law the rebel version of the 40-year Muslim insurgency by declaring that the Republic has always been in the wrong, and that its soldiers are the aggressors. That means that, row upon row, for miles all around, here and in the provinces, the gardens of stone irrigated by the tears of widows and orphans only commemorate the uniformed scoundrels buried there: they who died to keep our country whole. And that, my friends, tears our hearts to pieces.
The Muslim homeland idea has been warmly endorsed by Western governments, which have denied Palestinians the homeland taken from them, so that the West can tell oil-rich Arabs that another homeland has been prepared for Muslims on the other side of the world. In our country.
Meanwhile, to save time, let me tell you already how the MILF will explain this massacre. “Oh, those? They are not our people. They are renegades out to derail the government’s formal surrender by act of Congress.” Then, maybe, we should be talking to those people since they have real fire power, instead of wasting our time with that part of the MILF that has none and seeks to obtain any kind of power by an act of legislation rather than, as is right, by elections or by war.
Ours is a poor country; badly governed since independence; misled by allies time and again; traduced by lackeys in media; robbed by the worse of the worst that we yet repeatedly elect; but we are rich in the courage of our soldiers; our land is fertile with the blood they shed; our spirits are humbled by their ill-rewarded sacrifices; yet, our spirits soar with pride at our soldiers’ unfailing sense of duty: Duty to one nation indivisible, holding fast to the unfulfilled dream of a peace won by arms and protected by arms, with liberty and justice for all regardless of creed.
Sleep well, our soldiers, take a well-deserved rest—and awaken at the sound of the marching tread of your brothers in arms come to avenge your betrayal
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Men of steel grit but humans to a touch. They are our soldiers.