Unity in Zamboanga

Our Muslim brothers and sisters are truly brave, I understand their heart - their commitment to their Faith is without question to me.

But I still fail to fully comprehend the logic behind the incident at Zamboanga City. 

All the sons and daughters of our one Republic, most especially those who serve as first responders to her sovereign defense, civil as well as military - who are rightful stewards of the arms that preserve our peace, internal as well as external, are also just as courageous - who would dare waste them?
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I have initially thought, very early on, that the individual persons who chose to involve themselves with the MNLF contingent inspired by Nur Misuari and led by his lieutenants into Zamboanga were somehow duped by forces larger than themselves - into committing an obviously destabilizing act, in the midst of a decisive moment, against our national community in that City. Until now, I am reserving reasonable doubt that Nur himself is a victim.

I respect their Islam that much, and much more, I respect their commitment to the process that shall regain for all of us together the blessings of Providence in a Nation that is one and at-peace with itself before God - for the LORD is not served by our division - I respect our citizenship.
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Our citizenship together is a quality that no Man inspired in our hearts as truth in our souls.

For the LORD is not served by division in the heart of Man - there is a purpose and order to our Nations, and it is not to destroy the purpose and order to our Nations. For without it, the Commandment to build up the (Inhabited) Earth can not be duly fulfilled.

War is not a choice we as citizens can make - ever. It shall always be a choice - as ancient as our roots - imposed upon our Nations - and we shall again and again break ourselves against this reality until "we" are no more.

Or learn from the lessons of this war that have among us wrought so much death and grief - and place greater and greater value on peace - a peace that we, as a people, have never known for generations and a peace therefore, that we have to work together to re-discover in and among ourselves; this peace whose vision we must painstakingly discern from the blanketing Night like it is to collect many a delicate ray of starlight (and become cognizant again of the fragility and smallness of our noblest human hopes).

A peace that, if allowed in love to grow as truth from each our hearts, shall restore true sanity in the Soul of our nationhood (citizenship), true strength to our national communities (sovereignty), and true vision to our Republic undertaking of Country (victory).

A peace whose fruits we so desperately need - now, today.
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This is why no victory can be declared in Zamboanga City. The word "victory" is an inappropriate word to use to describe conclusively the unfolding aftermath of what had recently occurred in Zamboanga City.

It was an outbreak of violence, unhappy and unwanted, that came in the night like a thief against the peace of a household.

It is a struggle must be framed in the context a much larger contest - in a scale that must always exceed the encapsulating darkness of the Night that makes it difficult for some of us to perceive and understand the spirit of the Beast against which we all must - as citizens alike - strive to overcome.

For we can not defeat "the enemy" in this particular fight, but we can win back ourselves by a restoration of a vision of the Peace which have always - always - belonged to our Nation.

In a sense, our victory here - taken in an absolute sense - as all victories must - is not against the reality of "an enemy" - though indeed, there really does exists, enemies who arise as evil in men.

Where the fight is within ourselves - the real battle that must be forever won is against ignorance of the reality of ourselves as ourselves - for the one peace our nationhood is the timeless rock against which the temporal tides of the wiles of war shall utterly break and exhaust itself against - until the Day of the LORD banish War forever.

Not the other way around.
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Zamboanga will be restored into full health and helped back along the way of our Republic Vision by her sister Cities in the Republic - for our Cities take care of their own!

In their Provinces embraced and in their Regions sheltered, the labor of City building never ends...

"You do not just build a City - you envision it!

Therefore, a city is never built, never!

You do not manage its problems, you manage its wealth...
and the problems that must come later... are managed by it.

Else, you will find yourself overrun by the minutiae of daily things
and become too earth-bound to continue on freely dreaming
the unfolding vision of your most beautiful City!"

Led and directed by our servant leaders in the Responsible State and embraced by the unfailing love and support of all Filipinos - our Nation too is a becoming in time.

Because this Building up of the (Unknown) Earth - the taming, the channeling, the conservation, the preservation, and the ultimate transformation of our exile darkness back into our original heritage of Life and of Light, is the highest calling to which our particular belonging together - as a people of the Peace - was commissioned by God (at the East Gate of faded Eden).

While the Nation exists, there is always hope for Zamboanga, for Mindanao, and for all our Lands and Seas and all the living life contained herein - received in common trust by our generations (as well as any prevailing region of local but definitely transient systems that belong to the greater, more dynamic realms of Air, and of Space - that is the common trust of all Nations) - in each our individualities, families, and tribes - as citizens to each other.

(Our ASEAN has an automatic commonality in Air and Space - a prepared place for regional unity from which we, as sovereign Nations, can learn to grow in greater trust and human cooperation; a special space in our spirit that we can as a regional belonging of Nations utilize not to erase our boundaries of Earth and Sea but to transcend them when we meet to prevail in our will as a sovereign Region in our Asia. This is also why the concept of a regional Air Superiority Squadron - the SEA Tigers - in my own opinion, is a feasible idea - Europe has the Eurofighter project, why not we?)

ALL of these, and more is being prevented by those who wish to see us mired forever in the weakness of war and the poverty of this exile darkness!

The guilty must answer to our Justice for what happened in fair Zamboanga City - but the nature of the fight must never be lost to us - for as evil flee where none pursueth -

war is banished where peace is cherished.
---<--@


via con Dios, to our brave policemen - this war was imposed upon our peace, now that we are engaged in a constructive process to restore our peace over war, it is being imposed again over our hopes... shall we let it? I don't think so.

Across the Land

We can not hold ground that we do not hold first in our hearts. 

Thank you, Army Boots. 

To all who through our most recent crisis in Mindanao gave to our Nation, their best, their bravest, and their finest to defend the life of the national community in Zamboanga City and preserve the hope of the dawning of better days in our Mindanao, salamat po. 

May God bless all those who saw us through the crisis - civilians, police, and armed forces personnel - citizens not unlike each of us, who honor us by the shining example of their citizenship, along with those who now live in our eternal remembrance. 

May the sacrifices that they made together never be in vain.

Salaam. Shalom. Peace.

---<--@

Personal Reflection -

20130920, Friday - I look again toward Zamboanga, contemplating whether I was too overzealous in believing the crisis to be over in that besieged City of our beloved Republic, and observe that - yes, it had already peaked. It's tide is turned.

Conflicts, especially armed conflict, when they are fought from within a nation is never a contest that is fought on ground, air, or sea, but in the spirit; their battles won and lost from inside the soul of the people.

We are not a nation at war with another. As such, we can not apply ourselves to the task of overcoming with military force, "the enemy" - in the conventional sense of the word.

To do so would only create and re-create the conditions that propagate the divisions that plague the soul of our nationhood and afflict our spirit like a lingering, festering, sickening malaise.

We can not use the arms of our own nation to annihilate itself - our nationhood would soon also act to afflict us with the pain of burdens (debt of remembrance) meant to pierce the darkness that hold us back from the memory of ourselves as ourselves.

We are a nation involved in a struggle to overthrow the bondage of a war within ourselves. We do not aim to overcome, nor can we, our own nationhood against each other - our aim must be to allow a space for it and establish an equilibrium whereby our spirit as a human people can compose and settle itself in our minds and in our hearts - that we may stir no more with the stirring of war - this is why a meaningful peace to all of us is important. 

Because relief to our Muslim brothers and sisters does not mean to feed them, clothe them, shelter them, and offer them opportunities in places far from their hearts.

Relief to our Muslim brothers and sisters means to obtain for them, and with their help, relief from hunger, the safety of law, protection from war in a place near to their hearts wherein their community can prosper and grow, thriving in peace alongside all the communities within our nation.

This is how we shall give them relief. We will help them establish themselves in community at peace within the peace of our Republic.

I think this is the aspiration behind the Bangsamoro - and this is why we must help them - because there is no them and us - only a "we". And to ignore this is to call down upon ourselves a dark and deepening madness of a night without a twilight.

But are we not the Land of the Morning?

Therefore, as regards to the particular situation we find ourselves now in Zamboanga -

The less strong the enemy will - only in this particular - the less strenuous should be our exertion to do battle with them in the field. They fight on our terms now. For this is the time, at the waning away of each of their greatest advantages in warfare, that we are able to expose the strategy that brought their cause into conflict with our military and the politics behind it, that needs unmasking, that it may revert once again into mere opinion and thus, be permanently undone.

Our mercy should fall only on those deceived by the art of their warfare - for indeed, they have fallen short of it's craft and it's intended truth. They fight for the benefit of fighting, while our soldiery defend against their violence. For they hate the love unto which we all must return to when the call to the greater building of the national community is issued once again, particularly in the City of Zamboanga, as it must, for all the days of war are numbered, but numberless are the ages of peace - and we do not stand as a nation to add to the life of the spirit of war but to hasten it's eventual extinction.

We should always leave an avenue of surrender - a way of return to the Nation - and break them by their bones by stripping their command structure bare who needs breaking - that their violence against the peace of our people cease - that they who with all their hostage taking, their murdering, their abusing, their will of death - reap the consequences of the freedom they embraced.

To a man with no sense of remembrance, one hundred people murdered in war and one million people murdered in war makes no difference.

But to those who know of sacred remembrance - to save one life, is to save all of mankind.
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20130928 Saturday - At the conclusion of military operations in Zamboanga City -



Within that 20 day siege we lost more than 200 people - all of them human beings, all of them citizens of this Nation - 23 of whom are from the ranks of our soldiers and police with more than 100,000 - Muslim and Christian alike - displaced by the fighting with some Muslims reportedly prevented by the outbreak of hostilities from doing their Hajj.

This is not to mention the physical, emotional and psychological wounds of those civilians who were taken hostage agaisnt their by the rogue MNLF contingent along with the deep spiritual wounding that the whole community of Zamboanga must  now be suffering from.

The material cost of this episode may be something that experts can qualitatively surmise but of our deeper immaterial losses here, we can only maintain a vigilance, because while it's easy to tell when the blood stops bleeding, the guns stop firing, and the building stop burning, the end of tears are harder to tell - for there are tears that flow invisibly - shed from the soul long after the eyes have stopped weeping.

It will take the whole Nation to hope to contain all that hurt - a hurt that I am sure shall linger on - and linger on long after the event has quietly slipped away from the attention of the press, the politics, and the majority of the public. Therefore, their community shall require - for their longer term healing - the focus of pertinent national institutions and related civic and religious organizations concerned about the relief of human suffering and the quality of life of human community.

All Cities in our Republic share an equality of function and this is the most important equality that dictates the strength of the freedom they possess to continually realize, in the lives of their citizens, the hopes they are by this Republic our entrusted with - an equality of being - for their most certain endowment is their simply existing and to affirm and to continually recognize this equality is to strengthen - collectively - our sovereignty.

Zamboanga needs the help of her sister Cities in the Republic - here, at the conclusion of the fight - our military, police, firemen, emergency personnel and various other first responders showed - in exemplary fashion - how they honor our Nation by their citizenship through faithfulness and excellence, each in their respective calling to serve. What must now flow in - is the rest of us - who with willing hands and helping hearts shall deliver another decisive blow - this time against that spirit of division that has no place in our communities and help Zamboanga to eventually heal.

Zamboanga Burning

Every city conceived

within our Republic undertaking, 

my brothers and sisters of the Promise, 

is a city built upon a hill - meant to shine forth!

The Strategy paper I am working to complete for the "Defense of the Republic of the Philippines", draw its main lessons from the Battle of Manila. This is a national strategy of the conventional defense that includes a theater-level doctrine of joint (or inter-service) and coalition operations (Integrated Defense Battle or IDB) intended to accomplish one thing - to fight the common defense of our cities in wartime (as well as during times of extraordinary duress) and in the conduct of the defense, effectively possess the means to shelter and preserve their collective life (preparation of the defense).

For the life of our cities 

is the well-spring of our sovereignty.

(They are places in time

busy with the actual labor of the Dream -

where each our dreams become embraced 

by the greater dreaming of Country.)

Indeed, times have changed, the earth and the heavens have shifted - but after seeing Manila burn in my remembrance, after seeing the stream of terrified refugees, after all that war - I do not think it right anymore to willingly (strategically) abandon our cities in the press of the fight and leave our population naked and shivering against enemy aggression and the random brutality of war.

Every one of our cities, in this Republic, were never meant to burn.
---<--@

And so - 

I hope and I pray that this stand-off in Zamboanga is swiftly and decisively resolved.

Please - (1) do not harm the hostages, (2) do not harm innocents and those on the ground who are working for the common good - the press, emergency workers, first responders, (3) do not harm the structures of the City, (4) do not prolong the battle, (5) do not recklessly exhaust all avenues of political resolution and diplomatic mediation.

There is no such thing in our vocabulary as collateral damage: All will be accounted for.