The eve of November 1, especially if it is a holiday, triggers reflections about death. But also about life, since today is also the official birth of the 7 billionth person on earth.
Pancho Lara’s reflections on war and peace in Mindanao which he asked me to post in my blog, has also appeared in today’s Inquirer.
He steered my attention to another piece worth sharing. It is by Ed Quitoriano, and I am posting it here for you to appreciate.
Ed Q, as he is known to friends, brings a perspective and authority to the discussion that is rooted in decades of his direct experience and observations about war and peace, in the Philippines and in other countries, notably Indonesia and Aceh.
Killing and Dying for Peace
Ed Quitoriano
War making is an extension of politics by any means and war machines are the instruments by which political aims are achieved. Warriors may be trained to professionalize war making but they are not thrilled to kill or be killed for the sake of war. As Sun Tzu would say, “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting” adding that, ”what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.”
The GPH and MILF have already laid out their strategic frameworks – the primacy of the Philippine Constitution and integrity of the Republic, on the one hand, and, the creation of a Bangsa Moro sub-state, on the other. Since its emergence in 1978, the MILF has reframed its strategic agenda from secession and full Islamic independence to the creation of a self-determining, Shariah-based, cluster of autonomous areas within a sub-state. Meanwhile, the GPH has not reframed its strategic agenda in dealing with the MILF and other armed challengers – be it the MNLF, NDFP or MILF: it is the primacy of the Constitution and the integrity of the republic.
Politico-military leaders who remain impervious to change produce a protracted and costly process. However, these costs are bearable compared to the economic and human costs of war. No country will ever benefit from protracted armed struggle except in hindsight – by producing the knowledge and literature that tell readers how to better deal with violent conflict in the future. Whether that knowledge is actually used is an entirely different matter.
In Aceh, the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM) and the Government of Indonesia fought a three-decade long war for roughly the same intentions expressed by the MILF and the GPH: one seeking independence, the other seeking the integrity of the Indonesian Republic. Both had earlier histories of war making against colonialism, independently deriving their own strategic frameworks from the map drawn by the Dutch colonizer.
When strategies become vulnerable to public attack, both politicians and military commanders scramble for the best discourse to frame their strategies – often forgetting the costs already incurred. In thirty years of war prior to the 2005 Helsinki MOU, both sides paid lip service to peaceful negotiations as a strategy. Instead, they communicated through bullets and bombs and allowed military tactics to take command of strategies.
The Indonesian government launched at least three major military offensives in Aceh: first in 1989 when it declared the province as “Daerah Operasi Militer (DOM)” or area of special military operations, announcing the death of GAM in 1996 and withdrawing military forces in 1998; second, in 2001-2002; and, third, in 2003-2004, through the onslaught of the Tsunami in December 2004. All military offensives have been bloody and dislocated civilian populations. The death toll reached 15,000 lives. In the first offensive, Amnesty International estimated 7,000 human rights violations.
Intense and bloody warfare always provokes the leaders of competing politico-military forces to pause and confront the grim realities on the ground. As the body count increases and the sheer scale of destruction becomes a living nightmare, warriors begin to question their own humanity. Like their forebears in other conflicts, their concern over the fate of their buddies, rather the objectives of the conflict, becomes more pronounced. They begin to swear allegiance to each other, rather than the State. To be sure, some may actually lose their grip on humanity and unleash more death and destruction, but others begin to question the seeming madness of it all.
No matter how professional a war machine becomes, there is a sense of humanity among warriors. Generals far removed from the frontline often see this as only an erosion of the command and control structure. During the DOM, the Indonesian military command noted some cracks – some officers not only getting reluctant to fight an all out war but also transferring weapons to the GAM, either out of guilt or sympathy for the enemy cause. During the second offensive in 2001, the Indonesian military commander, Gen. Bambang, had to motivate his troops. At one point, he was caught on TV camera telling his troops that the GAM guerrillas were “monopolizing bird’s nests and selling them to the Chinese for medicine.” He also bragged that he had punished hundreds of Indonesian soldiers for human rights violations – “for shooting chickens owned by civilians.”
Aceh is more than 90 percent Acehnese but even the GAM had to worry about public support for the cause without which its military machine would have problems of recruitment, intelligence and supplies. If Bambang had invented the stealing of “birds’ nests” as a way to motivate the troops, the GAM had its own bogey – “the Javanese enemy.” Equating the Indonesian government to a Javanese government is not too distant from Nur Misuari’s portrayal of Filipinos as “Philipinos” and “colonos”, the heirs of King Philip II of Spain and the government as the heir-colonizer.
In contemporary civil wars, politicians and military commanders could easily motivate the troops by portraying rebels as terrorists, lawless elements or bandits. Rebels would return the favor by portraying government soldiers as mercenaries, fascists and human rights violators. The general public and the media had to decipher communications exchanged via bullets and bravado rather than intelligent discourse on political aims. In the war machines, military tactics then override political strategies if only to inspire warriors to fight to the death.
Two AFP military commanders have been sacked in the aftermath of the Al Barka clash where 25 lives have been lost (19 members of Special Forces of the AFP and 6 MILF fighters). It is not known what the MILF intends to do with its own commanders in the field. But certainly the mode of dying in such a battle is a classic example of how tactics in the hands of military commanders could undermine the value of strategic discourse. One could ask the political aim behind the sending of Special Forces troops, who were on training for scuba diving, to a deadly mission in Al Barka. Similarly, one could ask why the MILF warriors decided to inflict a brutal response despite their knowledge that their leaders were negotiating for peace.
There is even a bigger question for any observer of the peace talks. Are the GPH and MILF panels actually talking to their own followers when they negotiate with each other? Are strategic aims shaped by a winner-take-all framework and attitude?
The Indonesian government and the GAM carried the same strategic aims in three decades of war. Yet two failed attempts at a negotiated settlement in 2000 and 2002 compelled them to go back to talking rather than fighting. This commitment led to the Helsinki MOU in August 2005. One conclusion stood out at the end – peaceful negotiations are difficult but their outcomes do deliver mutually beneficial solutions. People often think it was the tsunami that did it. Tsunami or not, conflict actors made the final determination that it makes better sense to negotiate rather than wage an endless war. At the end Gen. Bambang abandoned his “birds’ nest” discourse and found himself sitting in the negotiating panel of the Indonesian government.
Recent Comments