Aaaargh

Much has been said about the hostage-taking situation last Monday. And this is another attempt to find reason in a senseless horrendous turn of events.


I don’t know what needs to be done exactly on situations like that but watching the proceedings on TV leaves much to be desired. There must be a better way than that.

There are probably hundreds of botched rescues in hostage-taking situations around the world. Nothing came so close to home as this one. Watching it happening with visitors as the hapless victims is heart-breaking. Seeing how the “assault team” struggle in breaking down the windows and door of the bus, was so frustrating. I read one comment from a Hong Kong citizen “Is there only one axe in the Philippines?”

Is there only one axe to grind? A BBC analyst enumerated the 10 things Philippine Bus Siege Police got wrong. So who’s to blame? The hostage-taker? The police? The media?

(There’s an interesting article written by Nelson Poynters entitled Guidelines for Covering Hostage-Taking Crises, Prison Uprisings, Terrorist Actions http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=4640 )

After that Monday night fiasco, the finger-pointing has begun, heads will definitely roll. Our already damaged but recently rejuvenated image in the international community tarnished again. But that is not my major axe to grind.

A citizen’s action is a by-product of his values, his experiences and society. A twisted citizen’s action to do harm should be contained by a set of contingency measures, to be executed and implemented by specially-trained individuals. Even the most perfect systems are still at the mercy of a twisted man’s actions. But at least our system should have been able to mitigate the collateral damage.

Do we even have a specialized team trained to handle situations like this? I know that real life is different than TV. But maybe we can learn a thing or two from one show which I loved, Stand-Off. The main characters are negotiators who know how to neutralize a distressed hostage-taker (on TV anyway). Fancy gadgets are not a requirement but they could help. Heck, maybe even one axe will do. What's critical is….. knowing whose axe is that distressed man is attempting to grind. And what will make him tick or not. And they make sure they don't make him tick.

As we all watch helplessly for grueling minutes after the first shots were fired (What the “assault team” were waiting for at that time, were beyond me but I knew I was praying for help to arrive, mutants, superheroes, anyone), I cannot imagine the horror the hostages felt during that time. It took almost an hour before the team got in the bus. I heard one BBC commentator commenting, “This is a bit strange, no one’s making a move yet.”

10 hours. 8 dead.

The outcome shouldn’t have been like that.

“Manila’s Finest” failed us in the worst of times with the whole world watching.