Apology in order

By Alfredo C. Garvida, Jr.

Contributor

To a nation, national pride means that the dignity—and pride—of its citizenry had to be upheld at all cost. This is the rationale of President Benigno S. Aquino III’s steadfast refusal to give in to Hong Kong's demand for the Philippine government to apologize for the senseless murders of unsuspecting tourists from Hong Kong on August of 2010 by a former police officer who claimed to have been victimized by an oppressive system in the police organization.  

Aquino's government mouthpieces are interposing varying reasons in defense of the President's adamant stand—from the proverbial saying that Juan's sin cannot be Pedro's, to their weightless assertion that a presidential apology could trigger a string of civil suits against the government. What a laugh, this is, and what a compromised national pride this reasoning has become, given the notion it imparts that we are a nation afraid to face the consequence of our act at peril of losing money? 

In essence, what Aquino's guys are saying is that they don't want to run the risk of compensating the innocent victims of the carnage—because it was not the government's fault that this happened—while this government is ever on the go to spend millions to save  criminally convicted Philippine citizens from death in foreign lands? So, you kill or push drugs in a foreign country and if you are sentenced to death the Philippine government will send the Vice President or a senior government official to apologize in your behalf and beg for your life and to financially assist you, but when you kill a foreigner senselessly in the Philippines, the government will not apologize as a matter of national pride, and as a matter of not wanting to run the risk of paying the victims for something that the citizens were not remiss but of which our police were, on account of their incompetence? And we call this national pride? 

What is at stake here is not money but, yes, national pride. And pride is defined in principled ways; and responsibility is part of them. The police team handling the situation was both comical, morbid and irresponsible, exacerbated, sadly, by the "non-compliance to media relations procedures" of the press. 

The whole world saw how the police were trying to throw a tear gas canister into that 12-inch open main door of the bus, which they did four times until it got inside the bus. The whole world saw how one policeman tried to pry the door open with a sledge hammer, which slipped from his hands at one point," like a little league baseball player." And Senior Inspector Rolando Mendoza, the hostage-taker/murderer, was watching all the comical police operation unfolding on a television set inside the bus, including the arrest of his brother, which, as former senator Richard Gordon had opined—and logically too—triggered the gunmen to open fire on the helpless victims, resulting to the instant death of eight of them. 

Mendoza, some officials in the scene had observed, was rational during the first 10 hours of the siege. In fact, his releasing children, elderly and sick hostages at the early stages of the negotiation was indicating his compassion, which therefore supports the opinion of some that he only wanted to be heard about his gripes against the system in government that he felt mistreated him badly. 

We don't want to second-guess the police operation but in other countries, unless the hostage-taker shows signs of present danger, the police would wait all year until the hostage-taker is psychologically subdued before they'd force themselves in. But they did not do this, instead, they sent in his sympathizing, bone-headed brother, who was also a policeman, and who, instead of talking him out of the crisis peacefully, inspired and agitated him more to go on with his personal advocacy, which resulted to his arrest and which the gunman openly saw on national television too. 

The gunman's rage was furthered, his sanity crumbled as in his mind another victim of the faulty system, his own brother, was about to taste the kind of injustice he claimed he had experienced. The next episode was deadly—and very sad—but above all humiliating as it displayed before the eyes of the world the kind of police competence our country had. 

And we are invoking national pride for which the government refuses to apologize? What a joke, and what a travesty of justice this thing could be.       In fact, Mr. Aquino, as the head of government, should apologize to the whole world for that glaring incompetence of his policemen which the global public had witnessed live on television. The Hong Kong government is not asking the Filipino people to apologize. They are asking the government to apologize, and obviously what they are saying is that their citizens would have not died senselessly if our police, which is an instrumentality of the government, were better trained and equipped to address hostage situations such as what that Luneta siege had shown? 

In fact, as a citizen of the Philippines, I would like to apologize to the people of Hong Kong, for that police incompetence displayed on global television, which of course emanated from the government's incompetence itself in upgrading the police organization. As CNN had reported—and correctly so—the botched rescue operation resulted from "poor handling of the hostage situation; inadequate capability, skills, equipment and planning; inadequate training and competence of the assault leader," etc. 

And all these were seen by and known to the whole world, and we refuse to apologize because it would compromise our national pride?

Apologizing means you are sorry. When you are sorry it means you wished things were not done the way they were; and the word, sorry, is the anchor of what our high level delegations have to say to the condemning country when we send them to save the lives of death-sentenced Filipino citizens abroad. And we cannot say sorry to a country whose citizens were needlessly murdered because of our own government's ineptitude to train our police properly? (Does anyone wonder anymore why the surge in crime in our country is "getting out of control?) 

Mr. Aquino's refusal to say sorry to Hong Kong for that gruesome incident in Luneta more than three years back smacks of false pride at our end. Presidential reconsideration on this matter is in order. An apology will not demean our country, instead, this act will transcend our humility as a nation, and reinforces our national pride as well.