A portion of the country’s highest mountain is on fire, there is a blackout at the airport, and the President is conspicuously silent about human rights atrocities by policemen who fired on hapless farmers in North Cotabato. These just about sum up, not the last few weeks of the administration, but the entire past six years under President Benigno Aquino III.
The fire on the Davao del Sur side of Mt. Apo has engulfed more than 300 hectares of forest and grassland starting March 26. The Palace said national agencies and local governments are working in tandem to put out the fire, but it rages, still.
Over the weekend, at least 78 flights were canceled after a power outage at Terminal 3 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Saturday night to Sunday morning, causing thousands to be stranded. If we go by Mr. Aquino’s record in protecting and even defending his criminally incompetent Transportation secretary and his equally bumbling relative, the airport manager, it would be safe to assume nobody will be made to account for the losses and other inconveniences suffered by the public as a result of these cancellations.
And now we learn that the police had used inordinate violence in dispersing a legitimate protest—farmers, ironically, asking that they be given rice because their families had been starving as a result of the drought. No less than the regional human rights commission official said that the farmers had been on their knees, begging for their life, and yet the cops shot anyway. Three died; many were injured.
The following day, the cops earned commendation for what they had done. The Palace and the provincial and city executives insist the farmers have been organized by leftists out to sow unrest and that they had to be dispersed because they were hindering business traffic.
Human rights groups demand an investigation as footage of the standoff clearly show violation of the farmers’ rights.
But President Aquino himself has not yet said anything about what happened in Kidapawan City, giving the impression that he is calibrating his statements so he could turn the issue around to his, and his administration’s, advantage.
We also can almost hear the Aquino-Abaya-Honrado trio saying this about the airport outage: It was not fatal, anyway. So let’s all just move on.
Alas, the ongoing mountain fire may as well serve as a metaphor for all the fires Mr. Aquino has to put out now, most if not all of his own doing. In the end, he will be remembered for all these crises and his mishandling of them. These belie his claims to righteousness and expose him for the kind of leader that he is.