The Mamasapano Tragedy and Racism

Since Monday, as soon as national TV news agencies started updating the nation about the tragically doomed PNP-SAF operation in an MILF territory in Mamasapano, Maguindanao, without exception, the national news agencies have shared the following common news traits.

1 They have heralded the lost lives of PNP-SAF personnel as heroes, which means they are the protagonists in this event while the MILF & BIFF are the antagonists (i.e., enemy).
2 They have represented solely the perspective of the relatives of the PNP-SAF personnel who lost their lives in the encounter.
3 They have called the PNP-SAF personnel who lost their lives in the operation as victims.

Even when I scan regional TV newscast, I still have to catch one single segment where a Magindanon Muslim is interviewed and where the individual is allowed to tell his/her story of the encounter. And this is not because these news agencies could not access these individuals. Nor is it because there are no Magindanon Muslim willing to share their story-version of this event.

There is, however, something worse for me. Three days after this ill-fated event, the evidences continue to grow that the decisions leading to this operation was an internal PNP tragedy-in-the-making state of affairs. Still, the nation’s TV news agencies continue to propagate a narrative that the victims were victimized by the MILF and BIFF.

I still have to watch a news segment where the relatives of the dead PNP-SAF personnel were asked for their thoughts about this developing part of this awful event. Not one of the TV news agencies has had the courage to ask or even entertain the public about the possibility that the dead PNP-SAF cops were placed in that violent position of facing death by both the current head and a suspended previous head of their agency; which if they did, would’ve shifted the “victimizer” label over to the dead PNP-SAF personnel’s agency leaders. This missing piece has yet to be investigated by any of the national TV news agencies as a form of self-critique.

This lack of evidence-based critical reporting has victimized those whose narrative is ever so silent in this state of affairs. This is the narrative of the Muslim peoples. These people include:

1 the internally displaced families and individuals in the five or so barangays affected by the operation in Mamasapano,
2 the MILF story,
3 the BIFF story and
4 the story of BBL, where anyone admitting to belong to the Bangsamoro hinges their hope for peace after decades and decades of armed conflict in their own ancestral land.

We don’t talk much about racism in this country. Suffice it to say, the manner that Philippines TV news media has reported on this tragic event does not only border on racism but it demonstrates the systemic negative, prejudiced, biased and discriminatory attitude inherent in the Filipino culture against Muslims. In sociological studies, this describes racism itself. And the key word here is “systemic.”

If anything else that Filipinos, as a whole, can learn from this tragic event, I hope it is that the Filipino culture has an inherent problem of racism.