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Chinese Filipinos: Hostages to
fear
By Marco Garrido
MANILA
- Wrapped in a white shroud and stuffed in a garbage
bag, the body of Betty Sy was unceremoniously dumped on
a boulevard named after Philippine President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo's late father. It would appear that Sy,
a 32-year-old finance executive of Coca Cola Export
Corp, had resisted her captors - she had refused to
unlock her car doors and allow herself to be kidnapped -
so instead, her kidnappers shot her through the windows.
Sy's kidnap and slaying last month marked the
156th kidnap-for-ransom (KFR) case against
Chinese-Filipinos in the Philippines this year alone.
Barely two weeks later, the number - already marking a
10-year high - mounted two notches with the kidnapping
of 10-year-old Jenina Dy and two-year-old Jethro Chua in
separate incidents. Both children were abducted outside
their schools.
The Chinese-Filipino, or Tsinoy,
community is scared and angry. Some Tsinoys are leaving
the country; some are sending their children abroad to
study; many are beefing up their security measures,
adding another bodyguard, or, if they can afford it,
enlisting the help of professional agencies (the kinds
that retain ex-military types from Israel and South
Africa). Most Tsinoys have confined their children to
prescribed routines. All are demanding that something be
done.
Hundreds of Tsinoys turned out for Betty
Sy's funeral procession in an expression as much of
collective anger as of collective grief. Carrying
placards that read "Death to Kidnappers", they demanded
that Arroyo enact tougher anti-crime measures, including
lifting the moratorium on the death penalty. With
elections only five months away, the president obliged,
bucking an avowed personal principle and the
disapprobation of the Roman Catholic Church. She later
clarified: only kidnappers will die. Then clarified
again: kidnappers and drug lords.
Arroyo also
empowered the National Anti-Kidnapping Task Force
(NAKTF) to implement a system of checkpoints across
Greater Manila. So far NAKTF has been effective, every
few days marking the mugshot of yet another of the 10
most notorious kidnappers with a red X, meaning killed
or captured. Only six of the 10 mugshots remain
unmarked.
But these advances have done little to
mollify the Tsinoy community's sense of unease, or add
to its sense of safety.
Accustomed to
fear
The Tsinoy community is used to being
scared. Kidnapping, of Tsinoys in particular, qualifies
as a lamentable tradition in the Philippines. According
to Kidnap Watch, the number of KFR incidents rarely dips
below three figures each year.
KFR activities
are usually undertaken by organized criminal syndicates.
The kidnappers are often ex-police and ex-military
officers or sometimes even current officers sidelining
as criminals. One reason KFR gangs have operated with
relative abandon is the protection police and the
military - and even political connections - afford them.
KFR is a brisk business, costing victims' families
millions of dollars a year and padding the pockets, no
doubt, of a few police captains and military generals.
That KFR incidents of Tsinoy businessmen spiked during
the administration of former president Joseph Estrada,
despite his anti-crime platform, would only seem to
corroborate the link between KFR activities and
corruption. NAKTF head and former defense chief Angelo
Reyes admits as much: "Sad to say [there is] involvement
[of several] police officers, military officers, retired
police, retired military."
There is a link too
between KFR activities and politics. Kidnappings, along
with bank robberies, have traditionally been used as a
way to finance local electoral campaigns. In fact, the
frequency of both activities tends to increase during
elections and Christmas season. Kidnappings have also
been used to make a political point - to strike fear in
the heart of a political enemy. The abduction of former
Department of Agrarian Reform secretary Horacio Morales'
daughter was, for instance, one landowner's way of
flouting the secretary's land-reform schemes. One can
only speculate whether the dumping of Betty Sy's body on
Macapagal Highway was intended to slight President
Macapagal-Arroyo directly. For the moment, it did
succeed both in belying her conceit of a strong republic
and buttressing the campaign of a rival candidate with a
reputation for ruthless law enforcement.
An
easy target
Whether the kidnappings are motivated
by profit or politics, the Tsinoy community makes an
attractive target. Apart from being considered affluent
by virtue of their ethnic identity, Tsinoys generally
pay the ransom and avoid involving police. On a more
basic level, however, the strain of anti-Tsinoy
resentment in Filipino culture diminishes the stigma of
their victimization.
Tsinoys are resented for
their disproportionate economic power and exclusivity.
While constituting little more than 1 percent of the
population, Chinese-Filipinos control 60 percent of the
private economy. They own the country's four airlines
and most of its banks, malls and conglomerates. Many
foreign investors do business exclusively with Tsinoys.
"They are the capitalists," explains Teresita Ang-See,
spokesperson for the Tsinoy organization Citizens Action
Against Crime. "They are the wheels that run the
development of this country."
Moreover, Tsinoys
are easy to single out because they stand out, not so
much in terms of distinct physical features as in their
self-consciousness as a group. Most Tsinoys retain
varying levels of their cultural tradition, they can
usually speak Chinese, and they regularly patronize a
loose infrastructure of "Chinese" institutions such as
schools, business networks and community organizations.
Some Filipinos perceive in these efforts the pretense of
superiority. "There is still a tense distancing" between
Tsinoys and mainstream Filipinos, observes Michael Tan,
a columnist from the Philippine Daily Inquirer, "a sense
of [us] and [them] on both sides, sometimes sharpened by
the visible Chinatowns, Chinese schools, Chinese
newspapers [and] Chinese temples".
Their ethnic
distinctiveness fuels a perception of Tsinoys as foreign
interlopers whose fabulous wealth has been made at the
expense of Filipino society. This perception of injury,
dissipate as it might be, allows kidnapping to be
rationalized as a form of revenge, or as one caller
suggested on a television talk show, a means of
redistributing wealth. In her book World on Fire,
Professor Amy Chua of Yale University recalls how the
police report filed over the murder of her Aunt Leona
listed "revenge" as the motive for murder, despite the
fact that her aunt had primarily been robbed of money
and jewelry.
Revenge
Chua makes a
broader case for revenge. She argues that, in societies
with a market-dominant ethnic minority, the
free-market-democracy gospel of globalization will fan
the flames of ethnic hatred and violence. While markets
concentrate wealth in the hands of the market-dominant
minority, democracy increases the political power of the
indigenous majority. "In these circumstances, the
pursuit of free-market democracy becomes an engine of
potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism, pitting a
frustrated indigenous majority, easily aroused by
opportunistic politicians, against a resented, wealthy
ethnic minority," she writes.
Chua points to a
number of countries with market-dominant minorities: if
not the Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, then whites
in South Africa and Zimbabwe and much of Latin America;
the Lebanese in West Africa; the Croats in the former
Yugoslavia; the Ibo in Nigeria; and the Jews in
post-communist Russia. In all these places, the backlash
against the market-dominant minority takes the form of a
backlash against free markets by indigenous majorities
(ie President Robert Mugabe's seizure of white-owned
commercial farmland in Zimbabwe), a backlash against
democracy by the market-dominant minority (ie autocrats
such as the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos
and Kenya's former president Daniel arap Moi sheltered
and were, in return, sustained by market-dominant
Chinese and Indian minorities, respectively), or
outright violence against the market-dominant minority
(ie the ethnic cleansing of Croats in the former
Yugoslavia, attacks against the Chinese in Indonesia and
the wholesale massacre of the Tutsi in Rwanda).
The sentiment behind the violence is at least
familiar to Filipinos. Slobodan Milosevic's exhortation
to the Serbs to fight - "because if we don't know how to
work well or do business, at least we know how to fight
well" - echoes feelings of degradation relative to a
market-dominant minority. These feelings whisper the
suggestion that, with the kidnappings, Tsinoys are
getting what they deserve, that an imbalance between
economic and demographic power is somehow being righted.
This whisper grows increasingly audible with each new
kidnapping and keeps Tsinoys feeling guarded, hostages
to fear in their own country.
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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