Two Saturdays ago, my wife Beng and I sat enthralled as we watched a brilliant performance of the play “Anak Datu” at the CCP’s Black Box Theater.
It was a play that, among other objectives, sought to trace the roots of the armed conflict in Mindanao to a series of massacres perpetrated by the military against Muslims just before and after the declaration of martial law. It began with the well-documented killings of young Tausug recruits being trained in Corregidor for an abortive invasion of Sabah in 1968 and went on to the less-known Malisbong massacre in Sultan Kudarat on Sept. 24, 1974, in which 1,500 men were reportedly killed.
I know that some were not so generous as to seek or see a moral balance, and immediately identified with Israel, invoking the Bible, Washington and common sense, especially with the reports and pictures of brave Filipino nurses standing their ground and being murdered by Hamas. Nothing, not even quoted Scripture, will convince me that the slaughter of innocents in the name of God or justice is morally justified. It has happened, it happens and will always happen because of our brutish nature, but that will be an explanation, not an excuse.
I have no easy and firm conclusions to draw from this most recent conflagration, and I feel that we have to look beyond the intricacies of history and politics for answers. Diplomats, scholars and zealots have tried almost all the formulas at their disposal, to no avail – with the notable exception of the two-state policy, an elusive political solution that will come with its own challenges.
Never in the recent history of the world have we seen so much devastation taking place in the past five years alone. It’s as if we all woke up one morning to the reality of a nightmare – catastrophes,...
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