No Better Idea by Antonio Abaya

No Better Idea

By Antonio C. Abaya

Written on Dec. 17, 2008

For the Standard Today,

December 18 issue

This should be titled Anachronistic III as it is a sequel to the previous articles of the same title, and it seeks to answer the question of Can the Arroyo Government defeat the Communist insurgency by the year 2010, as it pompously claims it will.

My answer to that question is No.

The successful countries around us defeated their Communist insurgencies, in the 60s and 70s, by a combination of a) draconian measures that hounded their Communists without let-up, and b) a broad-based prosperity, brought about by correct economic strategies that made Communist ideology irrelevant and uninteresting to most of their people..

Such draconian measures, exemplified by the Internal Security Act (ISA) that the Malaysian and Singaporean governments inherited from the British colonial government aimed at destroying the above-ground front organizations of the Communist movement, even ahead of the armed guerillas.

In pursuit of that strategy, the ISA empowered the Malaysian and Singaporean governments to legally and constitutionally arrest and detain, indefinitely and without trial, anyone merely suspected of being a Communist or Communist sympathizer.

But that was in the 60s and 70s, at the height of the Cold War, when Communism was considered a global threat and the Soviet Union and Maoist China actually lived up to that reputation by sponsoring and arming "wars of national liberation" in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

At the same time that they marginalized their Communist malcontents with draconian measures, Malaysia and Singapore laid the groundwork for broad-based prosperity in the 70s and 80s by gearing their economies towards the export manufactured goods and by riding the tourism boom in the 90s. (The Philippines did neither one.)

So for the average Malaysian and Singaporean citizen, there was a trade-off. In exchange for diminished civil and political rights – much of which continue to the present – they enjoyed general prosperity that reached all levels of their multi-racial societies.

Such was not the case in the Philippines, where the authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos employed only half-baked measures against the local Communist movement and at the same time did very little to upgrade the Philippine economy from archaic import substitution to the more wealth-creating export of manufactured goods.

For example, at the same time that he allowed his military to assassinate selected Communist leaders, he also permitted the Communist-led labor unions of the KMU to organize openly and to stage strike after strike against our few export-oriented industries (e.g. garments factories) until their owners got fed up and moved their factories to other countries.

This would never have been allowed at all by the constitutional authoritarians of Malaysia and Singapore, much less by the military governments that ruled South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand in the 70s and 80s.

In the first decade of the 21^st century, Communism has faded as a global threat, having collapsed from the accumulated weight of its failures in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-91 and the calibrated transformation of China (since 1979) and Vietnam (since 1986) into capitalist economies.

Any attempt now to revive the draconian anti-Communist measures that were standard in the region in the 60s, 70s and 80s would be universally condemned and would make the Philippines an international pariah. It would dry up the flow of foreign direct investments and official development aid for this country.

At the same time, having missed the exports bus in the 70s and 80s and the tourism bus in the 90s, the Philippines does not enjoy the broad-based prosperity that is self-evident in South Korea, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and even in Indonesia and Vietnam.

Given this absence of broad-based prosperity and the now political incorrectness of draconian measures against the Communist movement, it is hard to envision how President Arroyo can live up to her promise of defeating the Communist insurgency by 2010.

A credible, visionary president, armed with a Better Idea, could conceivably overcome these handicaps and convince the remaining 5,000 Communist insurgents to abandon the armed struggle and return to the mainstream. It is safe to assume that most of them are no longer ideologically driven but are merely reacting to conditions of social injustice, poor governance and hopeless poverty.

But President Arroyo is neither a visionary nor is she credible. Her concept of a Better Idea is limited to looking for creative ways to remain in power beyond 2010. Unless she steps down or is removed by force, there is no future for this country. *****

Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in www.tapatt.org and in acabaya.blogspot.com.