What is the peace situation in the country? I was asked to discuss this question at the fifth congress of YOUTHINK, organized by the Mass Communications Department and students of St. Paul University in Quezon City.

I used most of my 15 minutes telling the students about the thesis of an “East Asian Peace”. Posited by scholars Timo Kivimaki, SteinTonnesson and Isak Svensson, the thesis argues that the East Asian region has experienced relatively stable peace since 1979. “East Asia” here includes the Northeast Asian countries of Korea, China, Japan and the ten countries of Southeast Asia.

East Asia was a major battleground of World War 2 which ended in 1945. Then the vicious wars that divided Korea and Vietnam followed, and the hostile ideological divide that marked the Cold War made its full impact on the region. During this time, from 1950-1979, some 4.2 million people reportedly died in battle.

In contrast, there were only 125,000 battle-related deaths in the region from 1980-2005. As such, the region has been much more peaceful than the war-torn Middle East and Africa in the last 25 years.

The “Vietnam war” (which the Vietnamese rightly refer to as the “American War”) ended in 1975, paving the way for reunification of the North and South. In 1979, Chinese troops moved out of Vietnam. Afterwards, Vietnamese troops withdrew from Cambodia, closing the last major chapter of the Cold War in the region. Since then, no major inter-state war has erupted in the region. In 1999, East Timor was liberated from Indonesia to finally join the ranks of the newest nations in 2002.

True, there is still tension between North and South Korea. The status of Taiwan (and Tibet) remains unsettled. Some five countries are contesting ownership of the Spratlys. But so far, these tensions have been kept at bay. Evidently, most of the battle-related deaths accounted for post-1979 resulted from domestic armed conflict.

The Philippines gets into the picture not because it manifests the relative peace found in the region. Together with Burma/Myanmar, it is an exception to the rule. It is a sore thumb sticking out in the thesis called East Asian Peace.

Of all the East Asian countries, it has remained the most conflictive state, with battle-related deaths at more than 25 a year, making it a permanent entry in the Uppsala University list of countries embroiled in armed conflicts. Uppsala defines a traditional armed conflict as one where at least 25 deaths, military and civilian, result from hostilities between a government and an armed group.

For the general thesis on East Asian peace to hold, the exception has to be explained. That was why I was invited to join the research team of European and Asian scholars. My task is to explain why the Philippines continues to be beset by armed violence.

While I am glad to take part in a team of distinguished scholars, I am aghast that I am getting the privilege because my country reeks with the smell of gunfire and premature deaths.

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The focus so far in answering the question posed to me has been on the armed violence that occurs in the course of our domestic insurgencies and the state’s counter-insurgency operations. But it is only one aspect of the high degree of political violence that has possessed this land.

Electoral violence, a specialty in this part of the region, is one other type. In every Philippine election, over a hundred candidates and campaigners are killed in election-related violence, before, during and after election day. “Ballots, not bullets” is a slogan from way back, highlighting the problem of electoral scores being settled with a gun.

Another form of political violence are the extra-judicial killings, notably, the politically motivated assassinations not only of journalists and political activists, but also of bureaucrats and politicians.

Another type of unpeace is criminal violence. From road rage to killers-for-hire, guns have become major accessories in this high-level state of violence in the country. Many land conflicts and family feuds also end up being squared off on our streets in broad daylight. Many protagonists prefer to settle claims through violent means because they have the weapons, the money and the needed protection to do so, or do not think the courts will bring them justice.

We haven’t mentioned yet the kind of violence on the person due to poverty, unemployment, and discrimination due to gender, class, race and religion. Johan Galtung calls these forms structural violence because they are rooted in social inequities. They may not involve beating or shooting, but they even more insidiously destroy the dignity of the person.

But the most appalling fact is that we no longer shudder as one report after another of violence is heaped on us. Desensitized by what literally is an overkill, we have lost our ability to be shocked and shamed.

Salman Rushdie, in his novel Shame, talked about the preponderance of shamelessness in the very-real society of his fictional work. For Rushdie, shame, sprang from many sources, has become so abundant that nobody feels it anymore. This is the case with the violence in our midst.

To tweak Rushdie’s exposition on shamelessness into a sardonic indictment of violence, let me parenthetically change the wording in this paragraph from his gripping novel:

“Wherever I turn, there is something of which to be ashamed. But [violence] is like everything else; live it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture. In [this country] you can find [violence] in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it anymore. And everyone is civilized.”

Do get your copy of this 2002 novel and learn to blush once more, shamed by the beast of violence that is feasting on our land.

E-mail: mcf178@yahoo.com