Our great hopes for the new year 2018

THE year 2017 ended sadly for the Philippines, President Duterte said Wednesday. “There were too many deaths in 2017,” he said in a meeting with the National Risk Reduction and Management Council in Tubod, Lanao del Norte.

The country went from one sorrow to another and it ended with so many deaths, he said – from the twin onslaughts of typhoons Urduja and Vinta and a mall fire in Davao City. There were floods and landslides, a ship sinking, and road accidents.

During the year, the government’s anti-drugs campaign dealt a massive blow to the narcotics trade and its highly placed protectors but it was also marked by the death of thousands in many places all over the country in the police operations to stop it.

On May 23, Islamic extremists, supported by the international Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seeking to establish a regional caliphate in the Philippines, seized Marawi City, triggering a war that killed thousands before Marawi was recovered last October. Peace talks with the other rebel group, the New People’s Army of the Communist Party of the Philippines, broke down and fighting has been resumed.

If it is any consolation to the Philippines, it has also been a bloody year for many other countries of the world in 2017. The US and many countries in Europe were attacked by ISIS gunmen or ISIS-inspired loners. Fighting continued in Syria, Yemen, and other parts of the Middle East.

In East Asia, our part of the world, there is today a great fear of nuclear war, with North Korea claiming it now has nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach any city in the US mainland. One of its test missiles landed near our Batanes island, signalling that in any war, we could very well find ourselves in the middle of the deadly fighting. The US has sent bombers flying over the Korean Peninsula while three carrier-led attack forces have converged in the sea east of Korea. And all the while, each side has threatened total war and annihilation.

All these made 2017 a sad and dark year for the Philippines and much of the rest of the world.

President Duterte said he hoped 2018 will turn out much better for the country. “I just hope that next year, Allah will be kind enough to bring normalcy to the lives of Filipinos with the fresh year ahead.” He used the Muslim word for God, as he spoke for all Filipinos – Christians, Muslims, and Lumads – in voicing his hopes for the new year.

We share in this hope and we see the reason for his confidence. Despite all the natural calamities, the accidents, and the fighting with both criminal and rebel forces, the Filipino nation has stood firm behind its institutions of government and society, There is such great hope in the future with the government’s plans to build, build, build in all parts of the country. And there is great support for the national leadership so seldom seen in the past.

And so we welcome the new year 2018. We share the President’s hopes and we have all the confidence that this will be a great year of reconstruction, of recovery from all the disasters, natural and man-made, and a renaissance of the Filipino nation in all its aspects.