Stragglers in Marawi? Reminds us of Onoda

While the fighting in Marawi City is for all intents and purposes over, the other day a 23-year-old foreign terrorist named Muhammad IIham Syahputra who came from Indonesia to join the Maute terror group in occupying Marawi City was arrested while swimming in Lake Lanao trying to escape from Marawi City. His arrest was significant in the sense that the Armed Forces of the Philippines was able to gather valuable intelligence when it confirmed that there are still 39 terrorists or stragglers in the ruins of Marawi City. Indeed if you only saw the ruined city of Marawi, it is easy for stragglers to hide.

If you recall, even with the surrender of the Japanese at the end of World War II in August 1945, there were still a few Japanese stragglers holding on to their ground years after the war was over. The longest found in the Philippines was 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda who surrendered to his commanding officer in Lubang Island in March 1974, 30 years after the end of the war.

This is why even after the declaration of Pres. Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte that the fighting in Marawi was over, the AFP would still not allow Marawi City residents to return to their homes or businesses until the AFP clears many of those areas where stragglers could still hide or worse, capture new hostages and create future problems. All these reports were confirmed by Col. Romeo Brawner, Deputy Commander of the Joint Task Force Ranao. Let’s hope that this report will be the last we hear from Marawi.

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Last November 1, The FREEMAN came up with an editorial entitled, “Surprising LRT study needs vigilance.” That was really a commentary on the fact that the Cebu City Council gave Mayor Tomas Osmeña the authority to sign a memorandum of understanding with a Manila-based group for the pre-investment study of a possible Light Rail System in Cebu City. I’m glad that our editors were quick to recognize the problems that could come with the signing of that MOU. For clarity, let me reprint excerpts of that editorial.

“The memorandum of understanding only involves a pre-investment study, which is no different from a feasibility study or a due diligence study. In other words, it is just the opening of an eye. Whether the eye likes what it sees remains, well, to be seen. And that is still a long way off from any reality. One has also to remember that the mayor himself is completely sold to a completely different mass transport idea – the Bus Rapid Transport system he has seen work in the Brazilian city of Curitiba, where the circumstances on the ground are totally opposite those in Cebu City.

“In fact the mayor has been against the LRT idea from the very beginning, although the opposition may be due in part because the idea came from political enemies of his, past and present. To this very day, the mayor has not budged from his insistence on the BRT.

“For him to suddenly be authorized to sign anything that would remotely suggest the possible introduction of an LRT is, to say the least, eyebrow-raising. And it does not help that the resolution granting the mayor such authority should come from his very own wife.”

Again, while we’re in the midst of implementing the Bus Rapid Transit where so many words from both sides of the political fence have been exchanged, once more the Cebu City Council gives its nod for the mayor to sign a MOA for a pre-investment study for a Light Rail Transit system for whatever it is worth.

Mind you, we already wrote our commentary on a report last May 2017 that Mayor Osmeña signed a MOU with Philtram Transportation Consortium, Inc. for a monorail system, despite the fact that we could not Google the name of this company. It just makes me wonder whether this company has already started conducting its studies for a monorail here in Cebu City. Of course it is easy enough to sign MOUs with spurious companies, but the problem that would arise is when these companies “sell” their MOUs to other “interested” parties then some legal complications would certainly surface.

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