The nationally televised bus hijack and hostage drama in Manila ended on the same day it began on Monday (23rd August) with the death of eight Chinese tourists from Hong Kong and the hostage-taker, a dismissed police officer. What could you expect? Not only is the police force blighted by corruption and ineptitude. In Asia’s only Christian country, there is an incredibly low regard for human life as underscored by the string of local sea accidents, not least the 1987 Doña Paz ferry tragedy.
The world’s worst peacetime maritime disaster claimed, by official accounts, 4,341 lives. The absence of any memorial for the victims is pardonable; Filipinos seem to think memorials are only for national heroes. What is not is the continued lax enforcement of maritime safety rules, the bribe-taking by State ship inspectors and the public’s apathy toward sea mishaps no matter the scale of death involved. This is no tribute to the Doña Paz victims and scores of others who have perished at sea; it is a slap on them.
Shortly after the hostage incident, President Benigno Aquino III expressed his condolences to the victims’ families in a statement that also indiscreetly defended the police action. This isn’t good enough. He should make an official apology to the people of Hong Kong and China and order State reparations for the victims and their kin. This won’t bring back the dead but it would at least show that Filipinos still retain some respect for human life. ~Barista Uno
What happen to the Bus Hostage is the laxity of leadership and guidance all over the situation especially on the part of the President of the Republic.The President himself is very timid and enjoying life like a teenager.The failure to comprehend all this things and naiveness may pose danger in our country.Tell me how many more inaction and cold shoulders on the President in the future to come.Imagine a situation like this he is washing his hands as Commander in Chief and the most powerful person in the country relies the advise of a Local Leader and cannot make a decision of his own what kind of a leader is this? when he have an ample resources at his disposal and he has every opportunity and power to exert, to utilize and change the situation on the ground.I am personally dismayed on him.
Barista: I’m reminded about a visit to the APM show around six or seven years ago. My company had a “man overboard” device that was cheap and effective, plotting the wearer’s location on the ECDIS when someone fell overboard. We had a stand, hired a girl to stand there, wearing a skimpy bikini, in a kiddie pool. We dumped a bucket of water over her head, and the pendant alarmed. One of the executives from a SE Asian oil company was standing there watching and muttering, “That won’t work!” I said, “Of course it works, here’s her location and see the alarm?” His response, in total seriousness was, “You don’t understand… If one of our crew fall overboard, it is cheaper to keep going and pay the widow!”
Thus, the value of human life in some places.