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President Arroyo can justifiably boast that she has
managed the financial and economic departments of the Republic very
satisfactorily. And for this she has earned plaudits from
authoritative foreign and local observers.
Hardly anyone—barring the
partisan purveyors of doomsday-scenarios—is criticizing Mrs.
Arroyo and her Cabinet-level economic managers about the financial
and economic reform policies they have set and the way they are
carrying out these policies.
The World Bank, the Asian
Development, the International Monetary Fund, a number of credit and
investment-ratings agencies, as well as Philippine-based foreign
chambers of commerce and policy gurus have praised President Arroyo
and her economic managers for having reduced the government’s
budget deficit and achieved six years of uninterrupted economic
growth.
The words of the World’s
Bank’s chief economist, Francois Bourgignon, are typical of the
laudatory well-wishing assessments made by foreigners: “Now that
the [Philippine fiscal] situation has been corrected, it is time to
adopt the Asian type of very fast growth. There’s enough dynamism
in the country for that.”
And the President is accepting
the challenge.
Because of all the government’s
financial and economic successes there is now enough money to invest
in massive job creation, in improving the educational system to make
the young Filipinos even more skillful, competitive and abler
producers of economic results, in health care and in
poverty-reduction.
“There is no turning back. We
will balance the budget, create new jobs and lift this nation up.
For once, we have traveled the path of 24 quarters of uninterrupted
growth. We have demonstrated to ourselves and to the world that we
can sustain our economic growth and not be derailed by political
sideshows,” she told the media at a briefing the other day. “We
aim to stay on this course and continue to prove to ourselves and to
the world that the Philippines has arrived at a new place where
issues, policies and ideas trump personalities and politics.”
Yes, the old Filipino penchant
for reducing everything to partisan and personality-based political
wars must be trumped by wise policies and programs based on thorough
scientific study of accurate and factual details. The coming May
elections must be fought on issues.
Undermining President
Arroyo’s achievement
The extrajudicial killings—of
leftist militants, crusading judges and journalists—by
government soldiers and officers and the unsatisfactory military and
police response to them make a proper and legitimate issue. It
undermines President Arroyo’s fiscal and economic triumphs.
These murders now occur daily.
They spread worldwide an image of President Arroyo’s
administration as something incompetent in fighting
criminality—and arouses the suspicion that it may actually be
complicit in these extrajudicial killings.
Globally-televised and reported
in the world press, the behavior of the republic’s justice
secretary and the military command toward UN rapporteur Philip
Alston, their responses to Alston’s devastating report, have
created an image of the Philippines as a country as monstrous as the
evil Latin-American dictatorships that were eventually punished by
US and European governments and investors. Their regimes collapsed
and their economies crumbled.
The Canadian ambassador, who was
a roundtable guest of The Times early this week, described the
economic impact of the passage of the antiterrorism bill and the
extrajudicial killings.
The antiterrorism bill,
Ambassador Peter Sutherland said, signals to governments and
investors that the Philippines is taking security against terrorists
seriously, making this country a safer place for investors. The
extrajudicial killings, however, create a sense of fear among people
abroad—including investors—that the civilian law enforcement
officers are not able to safeguard the safety of Filipinos and their
investor-guests from criminals, some of whom are government military
and police officers, the people who commit extrajudicial executions
with impunity.
These same fears were
expressed—with warnings—in 2005 and again in 2006 by
Manila-based foreign chambers of commerce.
There is a myth—spread by
people who want to establish undemocratic juntas and martial-law
regimes—that businessmen and investors care only for money. That
they have no time to worry about human rights and injustice. Study
what happened during the dictatorship here and in Latin America. You
will discover that only crooks and shady investors gravitated to
Marcos’ cronies and to Latin American countries notorious for
military men and police who abused their citizens and murdered
militants, antigraft judges and journalists.
President Arroyo must not allow
people in the law-enforcement agencies, in the military and the
police who have perpetrated extrajudicial killings—or “are in
denial” about these—to continue undermining her fiscal and
economic achievements. They are the ones who, if unchecked, will
stop the Philippine surge to First World socio-economic status.
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