The rights of the dead

On Sept. 9, 2013, about 200 rebels belonging to the Moro National Liberation Front of Nur Misuari arrived in Zamboanga City in boats, where they seized several coastal communities. On Sept. 13, former President Benigno S. Aquino III went to Zamboanga to assume personal command of military operations; he ended up staying for 10 days as around 4,500 troops sought to neutralize the rebels and free the hostages they had taken.

I remember his briefing us about his intention to go and the reason why. He’d been taken aback by the military briefing he’d been given. In particular, he felt the armed forces were too comfortable with the expectation of heavy “collateral damage,” and with the military’s willingness to simply level wide swathes of the city to flush out the rebels. In particular, he recalled accounts of the battles of Stalingrad and Manila and the colossal cost of those urban battles, in lives and infrastructure. He would go, he said, to ensure greater discipline and less promiscuity in the use of ordnance without heed for those on the ground.

When it was all over, 218 people had died, and about a hundred thousand people had been displaced. But if the cost of liberation for Zamboanga was high, the fate of Marawi merely four years later, with the military enjoying a virtually free hand to conduct operations according to its own instincts, showed the wisdom of Aquino’s taking things in hand.

The deaths of 19 individuals, including children, during an operation of the armed forces immediately reminded us of a basic truth: it is in the nature of our armed forces and the military doctrines drilled into their leadership, to use overwhelming force to minimize their own casualties. This means a very high tolerance for what is euphemistically called “collateral damage.”

In Negros, the sugar industry is for all intents and purposes dead, the rebellion it stoked in its heyday continues, however diminished it may be. A passionate argument has erupted with three main threads. On one hand, that, whatever one thinks of the ideology of rebels or those who are engaged in activities that somehow bring them to conflict areas, nothing justifies taking the lives of people, armed or not, whose hearts are in the right place; on the other, that repeated instances of young people engaged in civic action ending up casualties in military operations against communist rebels, require serious reflection and action on the part of institutions and organizations that keep sending youths into harm’s way; and third, that the burden of proof is not for the dead, or those grieving for the dead, to somehow justify why those who died ended up killed, but rather, for those who did the killing in the name of the republic to submit to a strict accounting for each life they claimed it was necessary to take.

One approach to the killings has been to focus on the almost-unimaginable disparity between communist rebels with their Maoist tactics from the mid-20th century, and the increasingly sophisticated techniques available to the military. The rebels, this argument goes, are criminally wasting the lives of their active fighters and sympathizers by turning them into cannon fodder, which creates martyrs but little else. This comes close to the criticism that the rebels and their sympathizers are being dishonest since they practice their own means to ensure survival of the fittest: only those who quickly learn in the field can make it from recruitment in school, to the field and back again; everyone else becomes a martyr to help recruitment.

Even if the military in its field operations has technology at its beck and call to quickly and expertly track down and hunt down rebels committed to the liquidation of entire swathes of a society it condemns and wants to recreate according to its own orthodoxy, the question that even the most bloodthirsty should be made to answer is why it requires doing the rebellion a favor by creating more martyrs? If the military is convinced there is an artificial distinction between armed rebels and the infrastructure of not merely sympathetic or ideologically aligned, but actually supportive and tactically involved civilians, then the same technology ought to make possible convincing and conclusive proof to confront the organizations that claim to be perpetually but coincidentally in the line of fire whenever operations happen.

There are parents who deserve, from their government, an answer as to why their children are dead. All the more so because, to the soldier, it is clear what they are fighting for—the self-defense of the republic—but it must be asked if it was even clear to those whose lives were taken, and even if so, whether a death sentence was commensurate with their being left to their own devices against professional warriors.