I stand with Alunan

INTO THE national consciousness he was thrust when he walked tall amid the tension-gripped desolation of Ayala Avenue to deliver out of Hotel Intercon foreign tourists trapped in the worst of the seven coup attempts against the Cory Aquino government.

Rafael M. Alunan III has since made the very definition of walking tall. I should know.

I walked with him…okay, less bravely behind him, when he marched warring political and clan leaders, stripped of their arms and armies, through the streets of Jolo to show a disbelieving populace that sworn enemies could still walk the path of peace. This, as highlight of his SALT initiative, that was the Sulu Arms Limitation Talks.   

I looked for the nearest possible escape route when, after the old venerable warrior Ali Dimaporo’s rambling panegyric to his people’s quest for peace and their renunciation of violence he made manifest in surrendering hundreds of guns, Alunan riposted: “Naglolokohan ba tayo?” hurling a token broken Garand rifle at the pile of assorted, antiquated unserviceable firearms.

The succeeding harvests of Oplan Paglalansag in Moroland yielded more weapons of the lethal kind. No doubt the result of Alunan’s standing tall in that Dimaporo episode in Lanao.

A most sentimental note: Tawi-Tawi Gov. Hadjiril Matba, tears welling in his eyes, handing over to Alunan the M40 recoilless rifle he used as Kumander Adzhar of the famed MNLF Batch 300 in the secessionist cause, with the words: “We are brothers. We are one. We are at peace.”

Launched during his watch at the DILG, Oplan Paglalansag was implemented to break up private armies kept by political warlords and private bigwigs by limiting security detail to less than three bodyguards approved and provided by the PNP.

It came to be called the “Alunan Doctrine” by no less than Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte which he credited for helping in cleaning up his city of criminals, as well as terrorists.

Yes, I was there too, when into the night he danced at a cañao high in the mountains up north in one peace mission with Catholic priest-turned rebel Conrado Balweg’s Cordillera People’s Liberation Army. A moment frozen in time: Alunan – in the words of a journalist with us – channeling Kevin Costner’s Dancing with Wolves.

So was I as he rushed, at zero-dark-30, on board a Philippine Navy vessel through the Sulu Straits from Zamboanga to Basilan to oversee the rescue of a doctor and his young son kidnapped – if fading memory still serves right – by the then-Janjalani Group that morphed into the Abu Sayyaf.

No, I was not with him in the various international fora on crime prevention and anti-terrorism but I knew how he stood tall in all of them from reading the conference reports, if only in their executive summaries.

At the height of the Pinatubo devastation, in the worst of the lahar rampages, Alunan made a constant commanding presence in the devastated areas, mobilizing the police and local government units in disaster coordinating councils.

One decisive moment: Alunan at Camp Olivas designating on-the-spot Bacolor Vice Mayor Ananias Canlas Jr. as Acting Mayor, when the sitting mayor could not be immediately found to address an impending crisis in the town, and then took Junior with him on a chopper ride right to the core of the crisis.      

Oplan Pagbabago conceived and implemented when he was Interior Secretary effected the cleansing of the PNP from misfits and miscreants, that in four years totaled to some 3,000 with no less than 60 senior officers with the ranks of general and colonel among those who packed up and out.

Equally, the LGUs were unspared in his drive toward good governance – famously posterized in rapist-murderer Calauan Mayor Antonio Sanchez caged at the Camp Crame detention facility.

That Rafael M. Alunan III has what it takes to lead – the breadth and depth of leadership experience, capability, character – has been proven beyond any iota of doubt.        

The Senate is a Roman invention. The men who composed it made the very personification of the Roman ideals, of virtus as dignitas, gravitas, pietas, auctoritas, veritas, firmitas, honestas – needing no translation here as they form the root words of the very universal values, which most evidently not only obtained in Rafael M. Alunan III but verily lived by him.

Values which, tragically, the Senate of the Philippines has for so long been wanting of.

Yes, Senator Rafael M. Alunan is the man to fill that void.  

(The columnist served as special assistant to the DILG Secretary from 1992 to 1995.)