MANILA, Philippines - The only way to dismantle private armies is to replace them with regular soldiers and cops, according to administration presidential candidate Gilbert 'Gibo' Teodoro.

"What do you have to do to ensure that these paramilitary forces would be dismantled? There should be deterrents against crime, against poll violence and against violence. The state should have the monopoly of armed forces. You cannot have a panoply of armed forces everywhere, [with] non-state armed forces roaming around," the former defense chief said at a presidential forum held Thursday at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM).

The forum was sponsored by the Carlos P. Romulo Foundation and aired live over the ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC).

Teodoro said many of the private armies were originally organized to help the government fight insurgency. But they were eventually controlled by local politicians, as shown by the Maguindanao massacre.

"The problem with force multipliers has been there for quite some time. The only way you can solve it is to guarantee a replacement mechanism. The ideal solution is to fill the gap with regular soldiers and regular policemen, where our ratios fall below acceptable levels in other countries," Teodoro said.

Teodoro said private armies are only good as a "temporary stop-gap" solution. "The principle that we have to agree on is that this temporary stop-gap [solution] should be replaced, and they should be replaced with regular troops."

The 3 presidential candidates at the forum--Teodoro, Senators Manuel Villar and Richard Gordon--were asked how they would dismantle private armies. On this question, the former defense chief showed he knew more than the two senators with his concrete proposals.

Funding is key

Funding is key in Teodoro's proposal. He lamented that government troops are not allocated sufficient funds to deter crimes. For instance, a big chunk of the military budget--P30 billion out of the total P80 billion--goes to [soldiers'] pensions alone. The balance goes to the various operations of the military.

"Without adequate government investments...in police visibility and alternative means for adequate deterrents, you will have a recurring situation once again. We have to bite the bullet. We have to put our resources in it so that sustainable development can happen. If not, we will find the recurrence of the same event [political killings] going over and over again, given the disparateness of the individual conflicts on the whole island of Mindanao," Teodoro said.

Debate, not guns

The people in Mindanao should also be willing to give up their arms, he stressed.

"In Mindanao, I know that we cannot have a peace without the basic [requirement] that nobody should be allowed to carry out his will, whether he thinks rightly or wrongly about his own position with his own gun, with his own firearm, or a group of people bonding together with guns to fight for a cause. There is no state that can accept that," Teodoro said.

"The solution to Mindanao should come from the Mindanaoans themselves. You have to be forced to live with each other alongside each other. None of us has a single prescription of what the solution to Mindanao will be. It should come from themselves. We should steward a condition whereby that solution comes out through political discourse and debate, and not neighbors disagreeing with each other and picking up a gun to settle disputes," he added.

Increased presence of government troops will also prevent human rights violations, Teodoro said.

"All of these are crimes. The solution is crime solution and crime prevention--police visibility, enhanced awareness, rules of order--so that these crimes cannot be committed by people who think they can go scot-free because they will not be detected, they will not be found out, and will not be prosecuted," he said.