Op/Ed: Know your enemy in time of crises

Op/Ed piece in the Sun Star (Dec 28): Know your enemy in time of crises (By Menardo Wenceslao)

IT is utterly incomprehensible, if not disgusting, why the New People’s Army has to issue a unilateral ceasefire purportedly to give way to rescue and retrieval operation in the aftermath of Typhoon Pablo only to lift it by January 3, 2013. If they think that their declaration is of any humanitarian value, then they have indeed a very little disregard for the masses which they claim to fight for. They too have very little sense of how long it will take to restore normalcy and sanity in the ravaged area and the number of years to rehabilitate farms and infrastructures that were destroyed by Pablo.

There is a lot of hot air in this declaration. For one, the large swath of land where the NPAs were operating with impunity has been totally wrecked. There is no place to hide and no place to set up an ambush. The mass base is gone. If they have survived, they certainly cannot support another month to feed or listen to the opiate of communist ideology. Presently, the huge number of hungry populace depends solely on the help extended by the government, domestic and international donors.

We believe that aid will continue to come for months and the last thing we expect to happen is for this assistance to be put on hold or all together stopped because communist armed partisans ambushed military trucks that are bringing food aids to isolated barangays. If assistance ceases, there is nobody to blame but the insensible enemy of the government.

How can government trust a rebel force like the NPA that demand power sharing when it is numbed to the people’s plight? It has unmasked its insensitivity at the height of perdition. If you have a movement that purports to fight for the people’s plight you cannot find one in time of crisis. You cannot trust them to share the privilege of governance.

http://www.sunstar.com.ph/cagayan-de-oro/opinion/2012/12/28/wenceslao-know-your-enemy-time-crises-260379