To Win Back the City Six months after the MNLF Siege of Zamboanga, the city remains engulfed in a black cloud of insecurity, anger, anxiety, distrust if not hatred, suspicions, or even hopelessness for some or many. This stressed mood or atmosphere is daily reinforced in the consciousness of city residents by the sight of Badjao evacuees camped along blighted Cawa-Cawa boulevard, more IDPs barely surviving in dirt and congestion in the Joaquin Enriquez Memorial Sports Stadium, intensified military and police measures especially checkpoints, a shortage in the delivery of utilities, rising criminality, uncertainties about the Mindanao peace process. This makes for a Zamboanga that is a broken city. The MNLF attack did not only destroy the lives and properties of the residents who resided in the seven coastal barangays where the gunbattles took place. Worse than all that, the unthinkable violence intensified and forced out into open innate social disunity, discriminations, injustices, and political weakness in the whole of local society. Left unhealed, as seems to be the case until now, these wounds will fester and poison the city and kill its future. If the coffee shop talks are true, people are selling their properties and businesses are moving out to emigrate to safer places. Something like this happened to Jolo after it was burned down by the same MNLF in 1979. Today Jolo is a dead town. Social and capital flight is a vicious cycle that constricts a community to death. Reversing this downward spiral of the city requires more than the physical and economic rehabilitation or resettlement of the IDPs. Rather, it is a complex task involving psycho-social healing of all sectors and groups to come to grips with the realities, to implement security measures strong enough to assure residents of their safety, to deliver better social services and justice to the poor, to strengthen the economy to discourage brain drain, and to calmly and wisely define and pursue the city’s role and responsibility in the Mindanao peace process to eventually reduce if not eliminate security threats throughout the region, because to paraphrase the old saying “no city is an island”. Some of these things seem impossible to do, but by starting with the doables, the impossible soon becomes doable, too, especially when all concerned will join hands to rise to this great challenge. (Peace Advocates Zamboanga)
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 07:47:43 +0000
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