A Philippine history of violence

Commentary by Victor Mallet in Financial Times on recent violence in Philippines: 

If it were not for decades of violence, Mindanao’s climate and scenery could make it as popular a tourist destination as Thailand, Bali or Malaysia (or the Philippine island of Boracay).

I once attended a family wedding on an idyllic island off Davao and later climbed with my wife through tropical forest to the frosty summit of Mount Apo, the dormant Mindanao volcano that is country’s highest peak. We were the only visitors at the time to this extraordinarily beautiful place. Perhaps the fact that our guide stumbled into a New People’s Army (communist) guerrilla on the path ahead of us explained the lack of fellow-tourists.

The problems facing Mindanao are reasonably well known – corruption, overpopulation, bad government and separatism fuelled by religious extremism – but the solutions are far from obvious.

On Tuesday, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo responded to this week’s atrocity by declaring a state of emergency in parts of the island, but since neither national nor regional governments have proved capable of enforcing the law, it was probably no more than a necessary political gesture. The politics of Mindanao remain as challenging for Philippine leaders today as those of Cebu and Mactan were for Magellan nearly half a millennium ago.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols