Filipinos on Twitter and Facebook are outraged over the hostage situation now going on at the Quirino Grandstand in Manila, when a dismissed police officer took hostage this morning a bus full of people, mostly tourists from Hongkong.
The usual comment I’ve been reading and hearing are about how badly the hostage-taking would hit the Philippines and that incidents like these are the last thing this country needs.
While I understand where this sentiment is coming from – if you derive your livelihood from tourism, this is definitely not cool – I can’t help but be outraged myself at the lack of sense of proportion by those who make these comments.
For one thing, this is the Philippines, a country of mostly poor people, where the poverty, injustice and all sorts of troubles can push people over the edge.
For another, this hostage taking is mild compared to the atrocities Filipinos been confronted with. I can’t recall any similar reaction to the airing of that video of a police officer torturing a person. I don’t recall coming across any comment that said such a barbaric act would affect Philippine tourism. I don’t recall the tourism secretary issuing a statement to the press saying that the torture case should be resolved ASAP so the industry won’t be affected.
Could it be because the guy being tortured was a suspected criminal, who probably lived in the slums of Manila – and not some rich “Hong Kong national” who came here with his mighty Hong Kong dollar?
And while we are on the subject of atrocities that depict the country as a nation of barbarians, I never heard anybody from the tourism industry denouncing the killings of activists, peasants, farmers, human-rights defenders – never heard them say these killings are a blot to our national record. No, I don’t think I ever heard the tourism secretary or his subaltern make such a comment.
Neither have I heard anybody from the travel agencies complaining about what these atrocities can do to the image of the country and how foreigners might not visit us anymore because we have the habit of murdering dissenters. No, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a story of anybody in the tourism industry making such sentiment public.
The reason, of course, is that these activists, these peasants, these farmers are not the type who would plunk in their hard-earned money for a weekend in Boracay.
So, my question is, where’s the sense of proportion?
If people in the tourism industry can cry to the heavens about the impact of an incident involving 25 Chinese tourists – who, by the looks of it, might be released safely, and I pray to God that they’d be — but don’t have the moral sense to decry the brutal murders of more than 1,200 people in the last 10 years and, worse, do not even see how such an atrocity can affect not just them but the country itself, then that’s just sad.
