Abp Quevedo to GRP, MILF: “End your war… enough is enough!”

COTABATO CITY (MindaNews/23 July) – Declaring “enough is enough!,” the Catholic Archbishop here has appealed to government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to “end your war.”

“For the sake of our evacuees and in the name of our one God of Peace, end your war! Go back to the negotiating table. Let the thousands of evacuees return safely to their home. Collaborate with one another towards this objective. Together, rehabilitate their destroyed properties. Give them another chance for a truly human life,” Cotabato Archbishop Orlando Quevedo, OMI, said in a nine-paragraph letter dated July 23, read at the State of the Bakwit Address (SOBA) at the gymnasium of the Notre Dame University this morning.

“From the depths of my soul I can only cry out to all warring parties, ‘Enough is enough!’ End your so called search and punish operations. End your terrorist bombings. End your bombardments, end your raids, all you warring parties! Enough is enough!” Quevedo said in the message read by Sister Rose Susan Montejo, superior of the Oblates of Notre Dame.

Quevedo issued the “open appeal for peace and for our evacuees” in the letter addressed “to all warring parties.”

“As a Religious leader I respect your causes, although I may not agree with your methods. But precisely because I am a Religious leader I strongly condemn every violent act perpetrated that has no concern for the innocent,” Quevedo wrote.

“I condemn in the strongest terms as serious moral evil such crimes as terrorist bombings that by their very nature target the innocent, punitive raids on villages, bombardments that fall on civilian populations, landmines that can kill any passerby. For me ‘collateral damage’ simply means murder and deliberate unjustifiable destruction of property,” he said.

“War,” the archbishop wrote, “inflicts more destruction on civilians than on combatants. For every combatant killed, scores of civilians suffer or die. In the past twelve months I have seen thousands of civilians languishing in evacuation camps, first in the Pikit and PALMA (Pigcawayan, Aleosan, Libungan, Midsayap, Alamada in North Cotabato) areas and now in Datu Piang and various other places of Maguindanao. They give birth to babies under dismal conditions, they beg for food and water, they struggle for life in the most miserable situation. They die as statistics. Such human tragedy, it is said, has spawned brutal retaliatory terrorism elsewhere in our region.”

“Due punishment for raids has long been meted out in an attrition of casualties and damagd properties. And now what most sadly remains is the senseless logic of war, of action and reaction. And the suffering of thousands of civilian evacuees. Enough is enough!”

Quevedo noted that “with the grace of the Most Merciful, Most Beneficent, Most Compassionate God, the one unique God we all believe in, there is no human conflict that cannot be solved through a genuine honest dialogue of the heart.”

Quevedo was president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines from 1999 to 2003, during which he also appealed to the warring parties to end the war in 2000 and 2003 for the sake of the internally displaced persons (IDPs also known hereabouts as evacuees or bakwits).

In 2000, nearly a million persons were displaced by then President Joseph Estrada’s “all-out war” while a little over 400,000 were displaced by the Arroyo administration’s war against the MILF in 2003.

The renewed hostilities in August 2008, following the aborted signing of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD), displaced a total of 157,584 families or a total of 756,544 IDPs from August 10, 2000 to July 7, 2009, according to the latest situation report of the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) dated July 14.

The same report states that as of July 7, 2009, 51,326 families or 254,119 persons are still in the evacuation centers or “home-based” or staying with relatives. (Carolyn O. Arguillas/MindaNews)