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UP community
calls for an end to US aggression
by Alicor
Panao
Teachers,
students, and representatives from various sectors of the University
of the Philippines joined the call for peace Monday as the impending
war in the Middle East gains momentum.
In a press conference held at the Quezon Hall lobby, members of
the UP community presented a united stand against US military action
against Iraq and denounced Pres. Arroyo’s support for the campaign.
According to Sarah Raymundo, Secretary General of the Congress of
Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy, a militant organization
of UP Diliman faculty members, the imminent war is nothing more
than a tactical maneuver to delay the ever-worsening crisis of globalization.
In a press statement, CONTEND asserted that “historically and in
accordance to its imperialist interests, the United States wages
war to boost its investments, to absorb the unemployed in the army,
to pump up the war industry and to sell accumulated stocks as a
consequence of demand brought about by destruction.” War in this
case, said Raymundo, must be taken in the context of a globalized
economy that equates aggression as a big business opportunity.
Former Student
Regent JPaul Manzanilla, meanwhile, questioned the logic of US military
action when allegations of the US government on Iraq do not have
solid basis. “Charges that Iraq harbors weapons of mass destruction,
maintains links with the Al Queda and poses a security threat to
the US remain to be proven,” he said.
A United Nations
arms inspection team sent to Baghdad recently has yet to conclusively
prove charges hurled by the US government that Iraq is keeping chemical
and biological weapons in its arsenal. A flurry of diplomatic initiatives
from various countries, in the meantime, is being initiated in an
effort to stave off the flow of US and British troops and fighting
machines to the Gulf region.
Recounting
how the 1991 US-led attacks on Iraq and years of economic embargo
wrought so much devastation, University Student Council Councilor
Maria Kristina Conti believed that it is very difficult to establish
how Iraq is a threat to world peace and security. The war, she said,
will not only affect the international community but will set “a
bad precedent of US unilateralist actions in the world.”
University
Student Council Chair Rommel Romato, meanwhile, feared that a war
will increase the price of oil and other petroleum products internationally.
“The mere threat of war is already doing this,” he added. A war
on Iraq, he said, will endanger the more than 1.7 million overseas
Filipino workers (OFWs) in Central Asia whose dollar remittances
keep the economy afloat.
“Government
officials themselves have warned about the grave economic crisis
which Philippine involvement in the war would entail,” said Asian
Center Dean Armando Malay, chair of the UP Diliman University Council
Committee on National Policies and Programs. For one, Malay said,
the massive repatriation of OFWs from the Middle East as an immediate
consequence would put an enormous strain on our resources and result
in loss of livelihood and income. The rise in oil prices, he added
further, will trigger inflation and pull down the peso’s value even
lower. And when the aggression is seen as another form of Islamic
persecution, Malay feared that the war will only fan the flames
of extremism, which already aggravates the conflict in Mindanao.
“The logic
of the bellicose policy of officials in Washington and Manila is
rushing us all headlong to a crisis whose long-term effects we can
only begin to speculate upon,” said Malay. All UP Workers Union
President Clodualdo Cabrera, on the other hand, found utterly frustrating,
President Arroyo’s expressed support of the US war campaign. For
him, there is simply no logic in the Arroyo administration’s readiness
to involve the country in an unjust and costly war when it continues
to neglect the public sector employees demand for higher salaries
and the payment of the Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) backwages.
UP President
Francisco Nemenzo himself added his voice in the chorus of protest
saying that the current US military action infringes on Iraq’s sovereignty.
“The issue is not Saddam Hussein,” Nemenzo pointed out in a statement.
“He may be cruel and oppressive , but it is for the Iraqi people,
not the US, to decide his fate.” The issue, according to Nemenzo,
“is whether the US, ignoring the United Nations, has the moral authority
to apply overwhelming force to change a regime in another sovereign
state.”
Nemenzo also
underscored that the US maintains the biggest stockpile of weapons
of mass destruction and the foremost in terms of terrorist acts.
“Saddam Hussein himself was once a protégé of the US,” he noted.
“The US helped build his war machine as a counterforce to Iran’s.”
“The US also armed, trained and financed the Talibans to fight the
Soviets in Afghanistan,” he added.
Quezon Hall
lobby, meanwhile, literally became a giant canvass of sorts as the
peace advocates unfurled a mural that summarized their firm resolve.
“This symbolizes our call to President Arroyo and the government
not to support the US in this impending war,” they exclaimed. “With
this and other actions, we join our voices to the growing community
of people in the world who oppose this baseless and disastrous war,”
they added.
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