With the latest WikiLeaks releases grabbing headlines, it must be remembered that the cables contained therein are pieces of communication between US government offices reflecting opinions as seen by foreigners on our soil. As such, the reality they see is not necessarily what we Filipinos experience, and nowhere is this more obvious than in what then-US Charge d’Affaires Joseph Mussomeli told his government on April 7, 2005. In his cable, Mussomeli compared the situation in Mindanao to that in Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s. He said the threat of terrorism was “arguably more dangerous in the long term” in the Philippines than in any other country in East Asia.

“Terrorism is a disturbingly ordinary, ongoing reality here,” he continued. “The southern Philippines lies along a strategic fault line in the global campaign against terrorism, with its porous borders, weak rule of law, long-standing and unaddressed grievances of Muslim minorities, and high levels of poverty and corruption offering a fertile field for nurturing terrorist groups… Only Afghanistan in the 1990s had a mix of elements more conducive to the spread of radical Islamic movements and the safeguarding of terrorists.”

Now anyone living in Mindanao can see that this is simply not the case here. Not in 2005, not in 2011, and really, not during the entire modern age has Mindanao ever been anything near what Mussomeli described. True, there are areas of violence, but these are in pockets that consist of a small percentage of the island. For the most part, Mindanao is a peaceful place, not unlike most of the country. To be sure there is discontent because of the lack of attention from the national leadership, but discontent does not automatically turn one into a terrorist. To say that terrorism is “a disturbingly ordinary, ongoing reality here” is to be disturbingly out of touch with reality.

The problem, however, is that US policy is built around such misinformation, and we lament the fact that Mindanao continues to be neglected because it is seen as a bastion of terrorism. President Aquino is right: the US needs to get better intelligence.

Bias

If you spend any time at all on the internet, even if it’s just on Facebook, you no doubt would have read about James Soriano, the Ateneo de Manila senior whose essay published in a Manila daily caught much flak because of its rather condescending attitude on the Filipino language. To summarize, Soriano had said English was the language of the learned while Filipino was the language of the tinderas and those who washed his family’s dishes. Almost immediately, the social networking sites filled up with negative reactions, all of them saying that Soriano was an elitist who was out of touch with reality and his own Filipinoness. The tirades were so great in number that the newspaper was compelled to pull it off its website, although several netizens with foresight were able to save the article for posterity.

The arguments against Soriano are laudable, but let us not forget that we are in a country where people routinely look down upon people who talk differently. Foreigners, except for the English-speaking ones, are derided for their language. And even fellow Filipinos are laughed at for speaking in Visayan, which is often seen by those in the north as the language of the helpers, of the maids, and the Indays. It is hard to believe that, in the age of the Internet and cheap travel, people could still harbour bias against others based on their intonation, but this is still seen on TV and in the movies where comedic relief is provided by characters with funny accents.

In other words, the very people who have lashed out at Soriano for his attitude over the Filipino language are probably guilty of the same offense. We still have a long way to go before we can achieve unity if we still regard those who talk, look, and act differently are inferior to us.

Jon Joaquin is the managing editor of the largest circulation newspaper in Mindanao, the Mindanao Daily Mirror in Davao City.

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