Terrorism is not the answer

When you're slipping into irrelevance, you are hard-pressed to make dramatic moves to remind the public of your existence. This is the main reason for those attacks on the depots of two oil companies and the main office of the Department of Energy. The communist urban hit squad Alex Boncayao Brigade, whose expertise is kidnapping for ransom and other extortion activities, has claimed responsibility for the grenade attack on the DOE building in Taguig early yesterday. On Wednesday night, suspected communist rebels also fired grenades at the oil depots of Petron Corp. and Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp. in Negros Oriental.

The attacks were supposed to express the rebels' disgust over the continuing increase in fuel prices. Now this is a popular sentiment not only in this country, where fuel prices have risen nearly 50 percent since last year, but throughout the world, which is reeling from the oil-producing countries' efforts to control their output and push prices up to $35 per barrel. Yesterday, crude prices hit $31.80 per barrel in the New York mercantile exchange -- the highest since the Gulf War in 1991. Will the communists' violent expression of disgust bring down local pump prices? Unlikely. But market forces are beyond the understanding of this group that continues to profess belief in a widely discredited ideology.

The ABB's recent agreement to pursue peace talks with the government was applauded by many sectors except, of course, the original communist group led by Jose Ma. Sison. The ABB should avoid squandering this public good will with cheap publicity stunts and cowardly terrorist acts. This nation has enough problems without some moribund group trying to spread anarchy.

Oil producers Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Venezuela cooked up a scheme last year to curtail world crude output to push up prices. Since then world prices have trebled. Venezuela fueled market jitters by indicating unwillingness to go along with a tentative plan to increase output slightly by next month.

The ABB is not alone in wanting to inflict harm on all those responsible for public misery. But wanting is different from doing. There are no quick fixes to this complex international problem. Terrorism is not the answer to rising fuel prices.