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FOR several hours on Thursday last week the
Philippines unwittingly held center stage on the global
village—but it was publicity that the nation could have done well
without.
Anyone who strongly adheres to
that tired cliché that there is no such thing as bad publicity
needs to have his head examined. The cynically planned
hostage-taking of a bus full of school kids by a despicable
publicity-seeking character and his scheming sidekick was worldwide
rolling media attention of the worst possible kind that must have
had Malacañang—very rightly—incandescent with rage.
For at least two hours of the
Anderson Cooper 360 primetime show on CNN, the hostage crisis in
Manila was the sole breaking story taking precedence over every
other happening on earth—including even a politically explosive
hostage crisis involving British marines under way concurrently in
Iran.
We surfed the major global news
channels—CNN, BBC World and al-Jazeera—and they were at one
stage all on air with the breaking Manila hostage crisis news story.
And dig this. Even Fox News,
arguably America’s most popular news channel (where the editorial
line often seems to suggest that the world begins and ends on US
borders) broke into its top-rated Hannity and Holmes news show
broadcast from New York to report the Manila hostage crisis.
In fact, it was while watching
Fox News that this columnist first had intimation of the drama
unfolding just a mile to two down the road from The Manila Times
office. So there’s globalization for you!
As the world watched and waited,
Filipinos tuned into CNN would have reason to grimace knowingly when
a hostage-negotiating expert hastily wheeled into its Atlanta studio
by CNN curiously compared Manila’s Finest, who appeared to be
fumbling at the scene in vintage Keystone Cops style, “as having
the same expertise as the FBI.” An opinion that—judging by this
display—Interior and Local Government Secretary Ricardo Puno would
beg to disagree with.
Incidentally, from his Atlanta
perch, the US hostage crisis expert was also suggesting that the
media hordes should be cleared from the scene. His reckoning being
that cut off from the oxygen of publicity the
hostage-taker—deprived of playing to the media gallery—would see
the means to his cause suffocate and be more inclined to give
himself up.
All that having been said, the
full weight of the law must come down on Armando Ducat and Cesar
Carbonell for, apart from committing a heinous crime, putting the
Philippines in such poor light in the eyes of the world.
The wretched duo have, of course,
pulled this “gimmick”—as Sen. Fred Lim choose to label
it—before. And Lim knows what he is talking about having been the
guy who, in his then role as the director of the National Bureau of
Investigation in the 1980s, disarmed Ducat in another hostage crisis
involving two innocent priests.
And as a visibly exasperated Lim
further pointed out to us: “Like this time, that time also the two
grenades were duds.”
How Ducat and Carbonell were able
to get seemingly scot-free the first time around to repeat their
heinous criminal caper again is a glaring indictment of the
Philippine justice system.
And just maybe this televised
repeat performance was based on the notion that the Philippine
justice system will treat them with velvet gloves yet again and set
them free—probably to perform a unique hat-trick of hostage-taking
acts at some future date to satisfy their apparent insatiable hunger
for publicity.
But the overtures coming from
Malacañang seem to indicate that Dame Justice will not be set
wobbling on her pedestal again with regard to this now infamous duo
of hostage-takers.
rjottings@yahoo.com
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