Under siege by DDT
By Noralyn Mustafa
Inquirer News Service

TO SAY that we are now a garrison state is stating the obvious. But it is well for us to remember this phrase from Ninoy Aquino. Metro Manila is under siege.

Hardly a week passes that we don't have a high-ranking police officer guesting on TV, telling us that a red alert status has been raised or lowered, for whatever reason. There is always a bomb discovered or a bomb scare, at the least, somewhere. "Intelligence reports" about this and that "destabilization plot" are too frequent for comfort. Any gathering of a large number of people, and we see footage of battle-ready PNP and AFP troops-reportedly thousands of them-ready for deployment, looking so dead serious you'd think there is an impending foreign invasion.

Who could forget that fortress of shipping containers in front of Malacañang even as over a thousand policemen were deployed during the funeral procession of Fernando Poe Jr.?

Even the annual procession of the Nazareno was not spared from this deployment overkill, complete with sniffing dogs!

Then, a day after FPJ's widow filed a petition to replace her late husband in pursuing his electoral protest, an ABS-CBN OB van was attacked and burned with a molotov bomb, purportedly by a group of FPJ's supporters.

While the incident was obviously meant to discredit Susan Roces (who, in a TV interview during FPJ's wake, had angrily complained about what she described as ABS-CBN's unfair coverage of his campaign), there was this raid on the Islamic library and praying center, which was conducted during Friday prayers. At the very least, the raid was diabolically malicious in its timing and justification.

Which prompted a friend from those years of living very dangerously to send a text message: "Don't all these remind you of the DDT? Has it been resurrected already?"

We belong to a generation that was forced by circumstances to develop very good memories. We lived through a time when you had to keep most things to yourself, or you could publish and perish. At a time when even a handwritten note gone astray could be your warrant of arrest, the safest place to keep a diary or journal was your mind.

And so we had to remember, as much as we could. Names, dates, places, faces, reasons. When, where, how, why, who was picked up, "salvaged," found buried in a shallow grave, or simply disappeared; how many have been massacred. It was weird how "Try To Remember" from the Broadway musical "The Fantastiks" became our theme song.

But most of all, we had to remember how the "department of dirty tricks" or DDT went about its business. To piece together the pronouncements and the developments as they came, to be able, at least, to make sense of the "scenario" that was being played out and anticipate the conclusion, which was usually deadly.

Nonetheless, through much repetition and probably because of the dwindling creativity of its functionaries -- whom we imagined to belong to a highly specialized elite but shadowy group within the Marcos propaganda machinery -- the DDT pattern soon became familiar. That was probably why Aquino was able to predict, with startling accuracy, that "it may be all over in a few minutes."

Earlier I had replied to my friend's text message: "Since the elections. Remember that 'assassination attempt' on FPJ by the NPA daw?"

A replay of the Friday edition of the ABS-CBN news on ANC showed the pattern again: intelligence reports of an assassination attempt on ousted President Estrada on his return from Hong Kong. But when the PNP chief gallantly promised that he himself would bring Estrada home on a helicopter ride and that he was willing to risk being assassinated along with the former president -- while down below thousands of his men would be deployed to keep the welcoming crowd from marching to Malacañang -- I knew for certain that the DDT was alive and very unwell.

Even as our daily struggle to survive is becoming too difficult to bear with every additional burden that the government of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo imposes on us almost on a daily basis, we are trapped in this insidious culture of fear, under siege by the DDT.

The only seemingly bright thing in this desolate landscape is the ongoing "Forum for the Future of the Filipino." I say "seemingly" because while the integrity of the organizers and the participants, and the sincerity of their intentions are unassailable, the crucial question was asked by ANC's Ces Drilon: how do we translate all these to the general populace?

Still, given the tremendous resources in terms of knowledge, expertise and creativity available to the organizers, the problem of communication can be resolved with a willingness to traverse from the realm of the ideal to the pragmatic; from a distant vision of the "future" to the here and now, with the urgency of a rescue team.

But more crucial than that is receptivity. Will the policies, plans and programs that may result from this forum provide the inspiration and the impetus for collective endeavor?

Tragically for us, this is an administration whose credibility has sunk to rock bottom. Even if on the clearest day of the year Ms Arroyo declares that the sky is blue, we would still be convinced that we are suffering from an optical illusion.
It is an administration totally dissipated of energy, after the entire three and a half years of its first term was expended to ensure Ms Arroyo would get elected; and during the first six months of its second term, it is an administration that has been immobilized by fear of being found out as to how she got elected.

Under the old Constitution, the number of years that she's been in Malacañang sums up to a full term for a president. Enough.

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